Fogel and Engerman Page 3

Fogel and Engerman Page 3

A demographic model of the slave population . . . shows that the census data alone cannot be used to sustain the contention that a large proportion of slave children must have been fathered by white men.  And other available bodies of evidence, such as the W.P.A. survey of former slaves, throw such claims into doubt.  Of those in the survey who identified parentage, only 4.5 percent indicated that one of their parents had been white.  But the work of geneticists on gene pools has revealed that even the last figure may be too high.  Measurements of the admixture of “Caucasian” and “Negro” genes among southern rural blacks today indicate that the share of Negro children fathered by whites on slave plantations probably averaged between 1 and 2 percent.

That these findings seem startling is due in large measure to the widespread assumption that because the law permitted masters to ravage their slave women, they must have exercised that right.  As one scholar recently put it, “Almost every white mother and wife connected with the institution [of slavery] either actually or potentially shared the males in her family with slave women.”  The trouble with this view is that it recognizes no forces operating on human behavior other than the force of statute law.  Yet many rights permitted by legal statues and judicial decisions are not widely exercised, because economic and social forces militate against them.

To put the issue somewhat differently, it has been presumed that masters and overseers must have ravished black women frequently because their demand for such sexual pleasures was high and because the cost of satisfying that demand was low.  Such arguments overlook the real and potentially large costs that confronted masters and overseers who sought sexual pleasures in the slave quarters.  The seduction of the daughter or wife of a slave could undermine the discipline that planters so assiduously strove to attain.  Not only would it stir anger and discontent in the families affected, but it would undermine the air of mystery and distinction on which so much of the authority of large planters rested.  Nor was it just a planter’s reputation in the slave quarter of his plantation that would be at stake.  While he might be able to prevent news of his nocturnal adventure from being broadcast in his own house, it would be more difficult to prevent his slaves from gossiping to slaves on other plantations. . . .

For the overseer, the cost of sexual episodes in the slave quarter, once discovered, was often his job.  Nor would he find it easy to obtain employment elsewhere as an overseer, since not many masters would be willing to employ as their manager a man who was known to lack self-control on so vital an issue.  “Never employ an overseer who will equalize himself with the negro women,” wrote Charles Tait to his children.  “Besides the morality of it, there are evils too numerous to be now mentioned.”

Nor should one underestimate the effect of racism on the demand of white males for black sexual partners.  While some white men might have been tempted by the myth of black sexuality, a myth that may be stronger today than it was in the antebellum South, it is likely that far larger numbers were put off by racist aversions.  Data on prostitutes support this conjecture. . . .  The substantial underrepresentation of Negroes, as well as the complete absence of dark-skinned Negroes, indicates that white men who desired illicit sex had a strong preference for white women. . . .

The contention that the slave family was undermined by the widespread promiscuity of blacks is as poorly founded as the thesis that masters were uninhibited in their sexual exploitation of slave women.  Indeed, virtually no evidence, other than the allegations of white observers, has ever been presented which sustains the charge that promiscuity among slaves was greater than that found among whites. . . .

Unfortunately, abolitionists and other antislavery critics were not free of racism merely because they carried the banner or a moral struggle.  With their greater physical separation from blacks, these writers were often more gullible and more quick in their acceptance of certain racial stereotypes than slaveholders. . . .

The available demographic evidence on slaves suggests a picture of their sexual lives and family behavior that has little in common with that conveyed by the allegations.  (Time on the Cross, pp. 78-79, 84-86, 130-136)

For well over one hundred years, virtually all books on slavery repeated the Northern abolitionist claim that slaves were unproductive workers and that slave plantations were less productive than free farms.  Northern abolitionists argued that slaves supposedly worked so poorly because they were trying to sabotage their masters’ financial interests.  But the abolitionist assertion that slaves were less productive than free workers has long since been refuted.  Fogel:

Slave plantations and laborers were not less efficient than free farms and free farmers.  Slaves on small plantations who, like ordinary field hands, worked in the fields alongside their masters were just as productive as free farmers.  But those who toiled in the gangs of the intermediate and large plantations were on average over 70 percent more productive than either free farmers or slaves on small plantations.  These gang laborers, who in 1860 constituted about half of the adult slave population, worked so intensely that they produced as much output in roughly 35 minutes as did free farmers in a full hour. (Without Consent or Contract, p. 159)