Fogel and Engerman Page 2

Fogel and Engerman Page 2

Michael T. Griffith

2006

@All Rights Reserved

All Southern states had laws that imposed penalties for mistreating slaves. Whites who killed slaves could be convicted of first- or second-degree murder or of manslaughter, depending on the circumstances, and could be put to death for the crime. A few whites were actually executed for murdering slaves, and in a few other cases, Southern courts refused to convict slaves who had killed brutal overseers because they had acted in self-defense to resist a potentially deadly assault (Stampp, The Peculiar Institution, pp. 220-221).

Southern legislatures sought to provide other legal protections for slaves. Some legislatures passed laws that limited the number of hours a slave could be worked in a day. All legislatures enacted laws that set aside Sunday as a day of rest for slaves. Some states provided for trials by black juries for slaves accused of misdemeanor offenses. In most states, slaves who were accused of a capital crime were given jury trials in the regular courts. Certain states, like Texas, stipulated that slaves accused of any felony were to receive an impartial trial by jury.

Northern abolitionists charged that most slaves were poorly fed.  The evidence indicates otherwise.  Indeed, the energy value of the average daily diet of slaves “exceeded that of free men in 1879 by more than 10 percent” (Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, p. 113).  Furthermore, the slave diet actually surpassed the levels of primary nutrients that were recommended in the U.S. as late as 1964.  “On average,” note Fogel and Engerman, “slaves exceeded the daily recommended level of proteins by 110 percent, calcium by 20 percent, and iron by 230 percent” (Time on the Cross, p. 115).  Many masters spent extra money on expensive food like pork in order to cater to the dietary wishes of their slaves, even though they could have fed them much cheaper foods like fish or beef instead.  When one planter was asked why he bought pork for his slaves instead of feeding them with his own beef, he replied that he did so because his slaves would be “miserable” if they were deprived of pork (Fogel, Without Consent or Contract, p. 195).  Fogel acknowledges that “most southern planters considered the extra cost of conceding to their slaves’ dietary preferences was worth the price. . . .” (Without Consent or Contract, p. 196).  Perhaps these facts explain why slaves had an average life expectancy that was longer than that of whites in Italy and Austria and equal to that of whites in Holland and France (Fogel and Engerman, Time on the Cross, p. 125).

Textbooks and documentaries often repeat the Northern abolitionist claim that slaveholders engaged in widespread slave-breeding and regularly had sexual relations with their female slaves, with or without their consent.  Fogel and Engerman point out that the evidence for these charges is meager and doubtful:

The evidence put forward to support the contention of breeding for the market is meager indeed.  Aside from the differential in profit rates produced by Conrad and Meyer, the evidence consists largely of unverified charges made by abolitionists, and of certain demographic data.  However, subsequent corrections of the work of Conrad and Meyer have shown that rates of return on men and women were approximately the same.  And the many thousands of hours of research by professional historians into plantation records have failed to produce a single authenticated case of the “stud” plantations alleged in abolitionist literature. . . .

Proponents of the breeding thesis have been misled by their failure to recognize the difference between human beings and animals.  That eugenic manipulation increases the fertility of animals does not mean it would have the same effect on human beings.  Not only does promiscuity increase venereal disease (an issue which does not plague animal husbandry) and thereby reduce fertility, but emotional factors are of considerable significance in successful human conception.  These emotional factors, of course, also carry over into the work routine.  Distraught and disgruntled slaves did not make good field hands.

Consequently, most planters shunned direct interference in the sexual practices of slaves, and attempted to influence fertility patterns through a system of positive economic incentives, incentives that are akin to those practiced by various governments today.  The United States, for example, provides tax benefits for marriage and children; France has direct subsidies for childbearing. . . .  So too on the plantation.

First and foremost, planters promoted family formation both through exhortation and through economic inducements.  “Marriage is to be encouraged,” wrote James Hammond to his overseer, “as it adds to the comfort, happiness and health of those entering upon it, besides ensuring a greater increase.”  The economic inducements for marriage generally included a house, a private plot of land which the family could work on its own and, frequently, a bounty either in cash or in household goods.  The primary inducements for childbearing were the lighter work load and the special care given to expectant and new mothers.  The field-work requirement of women after the fifth month of pregnancy was generally reduced by 40 or 50 percent.  In the last month they were frequently taken off fieldwork altogether and assigned such light tasks as sewing or spinning.  Nursing mothers were permitted to leave for work at a later hour than others and were also allowed three to four hours during the day for the feeding of their infants. . . .

While there were circumstances under which the economics of slavery encouraged widespread promiscuity and concubinage . . . the main thrust of the economic incentives generated by the American slave system operated against eugenic manipulation and against sexual abuse.  Those who engaged in such acts did so, not because of their economic interests, but despite them.  Instructions from slaveowners to their overseers frequently gave recognition to this conflict.  They contain explicit caveats against “undue familiarity” which might undermine slave morale and discipline.  “Having connection with any of my female servants,” wrote a leading Louisiana planter, “will most certainly be visited with a dismissal from my employment, and no excuse can or will be taken.”  No set of instructions to overseers has been uncovered which explicitly or implicitly encouraged selective breeding or promiscuity. . . .

Antebellum critics of slavery . . . accused slaveowners and overseers of turning plantations into personal harems.  They assumed that because the law permitted slaveowners to ravish black women, the practice must have been extremely common.  They also assumed that black women were, if not more licentious, at least more promiscuous than white women, and hence less likely to resist sexual advances by men, whether black or white.  Moreover, the ravishing of black women by white men was not the only aspect of sexual exploitation which devastated the slave family.  There was also the policy of deliberate slave-breeding, under which planters encouraged promiscuous relationships among blacks. . . .

The evidence on which these assumptions and conclusions were based was extremely limited.  While none of the various travelers through the South had seen deliberate slave-breeding practiced, they had all heard reports of it.  Some travelers published conversations with men who admitted to fathering a large number of the slaves on their plantations.  Others wrote of the special solicitude shown by one or another master to mulatto offspring, a solicitude which in their minds strongly implied parenthood.  There were also the descriptions of the treatment of especially pretty slave women on the auction block and of the high prices at which such women sold, prices too high to be warranted by field labor and which could be explained only by their value as concubines or as prostitutes.

Even if all these reports were true, they constituted at most a few hundred cases.  By themselves, such a small number of observations out of a population of millions, could just as easily be used as proof of the infrequency of the sexual exploitation of black women as of its frequency. . . .  The prevalence of mulattoes convinced not only the northern public of the antebellum era, but historians of today, that for each case of exploitation identified, there were thousands which had escaped discovery.  For travelers to the South reported that a large proportion of the slaves were not the deep black of Africans from the Guinea coast but tawny, golden, and white or nearly white.  Here was proof beyond denial of either the ubiquity [widespread occurrence] of the exploitation of black women by white men, or of the promiscuity of black women, or both.

But this seemingly irrefutable evidence is far from conclusive.  It is not the eyesight of these travelers to the South which is questionable, but their statistical sense.  For mulattoes were not distributed evenly through the Negro population.  They were concentrated in the cities and especially among freedmen.  According to the 1860 census, 39 percent of freedmen in southern cities were mulattoes.  Among urban slaves the proportion of mulattoes was 20 percent.  In other words, one out of every four Negroes living in a southern city was a mulatto.  But among rural slaves, who constituted 95 percent of the slave population, only 9.9 percent were mulatto in 1860.  For the slave population as a whole, therefore, the proportion of mulattoes was just 10.4 percent in 1860 and 7.7 percent in 1850.  Thus it appears that travelers to the South greatly exaggerated the extent of miscegenation because they came into contact with unrepresentative samples of the Negro population. . . .  Far from proving that the exploitation of black women was ubiquitous [widespread], the available data on mulattoes strongly militate against that contention.

The fact that during the twenty-three decades of contact between slaves and whites which elapsed between 1620 and 1850 only 7.7 percent of the slaves were mulattoes suggests that on average only a very small percentage of the slaves were fathered by white men.  This inference is not contradicted by the fact that the percentage of mulattoes increased by one third during the last decade of the antebellum era, rising from 7.7 to 10.4 percent.  For it must be remembered that mulattoes were the progeny not just of unions between whites and pure blacks but also of unions between mulattoes and blacks.  Under common definition, a person with one-eighth ancestry of another race was a mulatto.  Consequently, the offspring of two slaves who were each one-eighth white was to be classified as a mulatto, as was the offspring of any slave, regardless of the ancestry of his or her mate, whose grandfather was a white.