Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery
Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (1974) is a book by the economists Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. Asserting that slavery was an economically viable institution that had some benefits for African Americans, the book was reprinted in 1995 at its twentieth anniversary. First published a decade after the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, the book contradicted contemporary assessments of the effects of slavery on African Americans in the American South before the Civil War. It attracted widespread attention in the media and generated heated controversy and criticism for its methodology and conclusions.
The scholar Thomas Haskell wrote in 1975 that Time on the Cross had two main themes: to revise the history of slavery and to support the use of the scientific method in history.
The book directly challenged the long-held conclusions that American slavery was unprofitable, a moribund institution, inefficient, and extremely harsh for the typical slave. The authors proposed that slavery before the Civil War was economically efficient, especially in the case of the South, which grew commodity crops such as cotton, sugar, and coffee. These types of crops were usually grown on plantations that employed a gang system of labor, which was closely monitored and considered more efficient than task-based work by smaller groups.
Fogel wrote that small farms were just as productive as free farms. He said that the large plantation-style slave farms (16+ slaves) were the most efficient, having a Total Factor Productivity ratio (Ai/Aj) to be around 1.33. Fogel also wrote that if slaves had a day of rest, they tended to be more efficient because of the extra day of rest. They would be able to regain their energy and thus have more energy to produce more. "In their revised view slaves were hard working; slave labor was of superior quality. Indeed, this helps explain why large slave plantations were much more efficient than free southern farms." In addition, since different crops were grown in the South and the North, he noted that although slavery was efficient in the South, it would not have been so in the North due to different weather and other conditions.
The authors predicted that if slavery had not been abolished, the price of slaves would have continued to rise rapidly in the late 19th century as more land was put into production for cotton. The book compares conditions and economics in the "Old South" (Atlantic Coastal states) with the "New South" (areas further west, commonly called the Deep South). It evaluates available statistics to shed light on slave life. The authors point out that following emancipation and the end of the Civil War, the life expectancy of freedmen declined by ten percent, and their illnesses increased by twenty percent, over slavery times. (At the same time, there was considerable social dislocation across the South following the widespread destruction of the war and loss of life among a generation of men. White militias directly attacked and intimidated freedmen, and the agricultural economy was in the doldrums, causing widespread problems and suffering among the entire population.
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