In their book Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery, Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engermen analyzed various elements of the slave economy including the role of slave traders from New England in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the profitability of slave labor, and material conditions on Southern plantations including the health, diet, and general lifestyle of slaves. For embarking on this study of economic history—first published in 1974—they were accused by progressive academics of being “amoral” and “trying to sell slavery.”
Although they rejected the accusation that their work was “amoral,” Fogel and Engerman later conceded that their critics were right that they had “failed to deal with moral issues” arising from their study and therefore “seemed to be diminishing the moral horror of slavery and providing (no matter how innocent the intention) an apologia for centuries of exploitation.” They admitted that, being economists, they had not “immersed ourselves in the history of the religious movements that spawned the antislavery ethic or in the history of the political struggle against slavery.” They acknowledged that “understanding the economics and demography of slavery, or even slave culture, did not by itself provide an adequate basis for coming to grips with the moral problem of slavery.” They accepted that one would need to conduct a religious study to understand “the role of religious inspiration in the shaping of the antislavery ethic.”
Although this “afterword” to their book written in 1989 was by no means offered as an apology, and did not retract the study but merely addressed the moral concerns, the tone of their comments vaguely echoes the apology of the President of the American Historical Association after his abortive attempt to reject “presentism” in historical analysis. When he was denounced for being amoral and “harmful” he said:
My September Perspectives on History column has generated anger and dismay among many of our colleagues and members. I take full responsibility that it did not convey what I intended and for the harm that it has caused. I had hoped to open a conversation on how we “do” history in our current politically charged environment. Instead, I foreclosed this conversation for many members, causing harm to colleagues, the discipline, and the Association.…
I sincerely regret the way I have alienated some of my Black colleagues and friends. I am deeply sorry. In my clumsy efforts to draw attention to methodological flaws in teleological presentism, I left the impression that questions posed from absence, grief, memory, and resilience somehow matter less than those posed from positions of power. This absolutely is not true. It wasn’t my intention to leave that impression, but my provocation completely missed the mark.
What lies behind these mea culpa statements by academics who fail to meet the moral standards set by the history police? The notion that slavery discourse must be exclusively concerned with brutality may appear to be morally sound, which may explain why Fogel and Engerman decided that their critics had a good point about the importance of overcoming their “obtuse secularism” before commenting on the economics of cotton production in the nineteenth century. But progressive critics are themselves no paragons of moral virtue. They are entirely self-serving and hypocritical. Their fulminations on the brutality of slavery—in common with many such moralistic narratives—are rooted in political debate and their own political ambitions. Therefore, it is to politics, and not to moral philosophy, that we must look for an explanation as to why the findings of Fogel and Engerman are denounced as “amoral.”
Time on the Cross was infuriating to those who insist that the only thing that ever needs to be said about slavery is that it was brutal. To ensure that the historical discourse focuses exclusively on brutality, they seek to quash all evidence that may point towards an alternative depiction of life in the Old South. They were particularly enraged that Fogel and Engerman studied food, shelter, clothing, and medical care and found no evidence of systematic brutality, findings that undermined progressive narratives of systematic rape, murder, and torture. To enhance their fictitious tales of woe—many of which they learned from watching Hollywood films—they skip right over the abolition of slavery and argue that the systematic violence against black people only got worse after abolition. For example, the Equal Justice Initiative says that after emancipation “thousands of Black people were forced into a brutal [penal servitude] system that historians have called ‘worse than slavery.’”
Northern politicians have long emphasized the brutal character of slavery in debate with their political opponents in the South, while conveniently avoiding all mention of brutality when reminded of their own history as slave states. Speaking in 1856, Charles Sumner—a senator from Massachusetts who was famous for what William Dunning calls his “exalted moral fervor”—railed against the South using the language of rape and depravity. He argued that allowing Southern slaveowners to settle in Kansas would be “the rape of a virgin Territory, compelling [Kansas] to the hateful embrace of Slavery; and it may be clearly traced to a depraved longing for a new slave State, the hideous offspring of such a crime.” Yet, as Jefferson Davis observed in a senate speech in 1848, Northern politicians did not seem to regard slavery as the greatest moral crime when they themselves were slave states: “They have sold their slaves when they ceased to be profitable, and slavery became to them a sin of horrid enormity when the property was transferred from themselves to their brother.” The benign view of slavery that New England politicians adopted in relation to their own history transformed into moral outrage in debate with South Carolina. To denounce Andrew Pickens Butler—the senator from South Carolina who co-authored the Kansas-Nebraska Act—Charles Sumner fulminated for five hours on the subject of slavery as “harlotry”:
The senator from South Carolina has read many books of chivalry, and believes himself a chivalrous knight, with sentiments of honor and courage. Of course he has chosen a mistress to whom he has made his vows, and who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight; — I mean the harlot Slavery. For her his tongue is always profuse with words. Let her be impeached in character, or any proposition made to shut her out from the extension of her wantonness, and no extravagance of manner or hardihood of assertion is then too great for this senator. The frenzy of Don Quixote in behalf of his wench Dulcinea del Toboso is all surpassed.
If Northern politicians genuinely regarded slavery with the extreme horror that they expressed in relation to the South, why did they not view their own history in the same light? Curiously, they only managed to summon this horror in debate with their political opponents. Hence Jefferson Davis remarked in the Senate in 1848: “This opposition to slavery is political, and rapid are the strides it is making in aggression.” To congressmen from Massachusetts, slavery in Massachusetts was not horrifying at all, but slavery in South Carolina was the greatest horror show on earth. Such double standards are the hallmark of the hypocrite.
In their article “Hypocrisy and Moral Authority,” Jessica Isserow and Colin Klein define hypocrites as “persons who have undermined their claim to moral authority.” They emphasize that this does not mean that the point made by hypocrites is necessarily false. It is true that slavery is immoral. However, the goal of hypocrites today in pontificating on the immorality of slavery is not merely to inform people that slavery is immoral (which everyone knows), nor is it to persuade people to adopt the view that slavery is immoral (as everyone already views it as immoral). Instead, the goal is to achieve a particular political outcome by means of moral authority that the moralizers lack. While their hypocrisy will not cause us to doubt the inherent truth of their stated moral position (namely, the moral truth that slavery is wrong), it nevertheless justifies us in rejecting their self-serving political arguments. As Isserow and Klein explain in their analysis of the nature of hypocrisy, “Since [hypocrites] do not seem to take the cause sufficiently seriously, they may lose a certain measure of trust; perhaps they cannot be fully relied on.” They see this as the essence of hypocrisy:
…hypocrites are persons who have, by mismatch between judgments and actions, undermined their claim to moral authority, where (very roughly), a person’s moral authority is understood as a kind of standing that they occupy within a particular moral community—a status that is intimately tied up with their capacity to (1) warrant esteem, and (2) bestow (dis)esteem on others.
Fogel and Engermen were therefore right to reject the charge that their study of the slave economy was “amoral.” That would make no more sense than accusing a botanist of offering an “amoral” taxonomy of plant species, or a physicist of giving an “amoral” explanation of the laws of motion. Their answer to the claim that they were trying to “sell slavery” was “No. And even if we were, you wouldn’t buy it. No one would buy it.” The same critics conveniently abandon their concerns about “amorality” when the focus shifts to the North African slave trade. Then the same progressives at once forget their concerns with brutality and commence fulminating on theories of capitalistic exploitation blaming Europe for the fact that Africans sold other Africans into slavery:
Advancement in industrial and production methods, for instance, helped Europe’s population to boom. As economic growth reached its peak during the first quarter of the nineteenth century, so did improvements in various industrial sectors, which forced Europeans to look beyond Europe for colonies. By 1815, many European states were searching, if not for colonies, then at least for outlets for trade. North Africa was one of the favorite destinations.
What happened to their claim that the only thing that matters is brutality? Like all self-serving claims, brutality is only called into service when it suits the political argument. One could still ask why this hypocrisy matters—why not ignore the hypocrisy and focus on the merits of the progressive claim that studying the economics of slavery in America amounts to “sanitizing” it? The first answer is that the tale of non-stop systematic brutality in the Old South is simply not true. Further, as Fogel and Engerman argue, erasing this history diminishes our understanding of the world and of American history. It diminishes black people into nothing but victims. By studying the economics of slavery, Fogel and Engerman succeeded in achieving their main aim: “to correct the perversion of the history of blacks—in order to strike down the view that black Americans were without culture, without achievement, and without development for their first two hundred and fifty years on American soil.”
