The American Negro Slavery: Critical Reviews

There expects to be more work critical of their agree than in agreement with it. This whitethorn be because they are wrong, or it could be that their conclusions are veritable but so radical that many other historians responded as if attacked personally. The critiques of term On the Cross, however, seem to be reasonable, detailed, and as honorable of statistics as Fogel's and Engerman's book.

Much of the book's claims are backed by statistics, whether or not those statistics are true or not. As the critics of the book point forbidden, statistics can be selected and twisted and interpreted to attain whatever conclusion the writer is seeking. In many cases, however, the authors seem to be trying to put the high hat light affirmable on slavery, without statistics. For example, they say that the picture of the lazy, stupid slave choice cotton is not a true picture. Instead, Fogel and Engerman write that

age the great majority of slaves were agricultural laborers, it is not true that these agriculturalists were active only in a very few, highly exigent tasks that involved no accumulation of skills. . . . Slaves engaged in the just range of agricultural activities. These included the planting, raising, and harvesting of virtually each type of crop, as well as animal husbandry, dairying, realm improvement, use and maintenance of equipment and machinery, and the construction of buildings.

Perhaps the most serious deficiency in snip On the Cross is its failure to provide a forward-looking moral indictment of slavery that is consistent with the new semiempirical knowledge on the actual operation of the slave form. . . . The tether contribution of Time On the Cross to the reformulation of the moral bother was its identification of the "myth of black incompetence"; of the way that exaggerations of the satisfying rigour of slavery promoted the view that Afro-Americans were without culture . . . ; and of the way that exaggerations of the severity of slavery had been turned from an antislavery weapon into apologetics for the continued discrimination against blacks in our own time.

Gutman, Herbert G. Slavery and the Numbers Game. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1975.

Huggins, N.L. Review of Time On the Cross. Commonweal 100 (August l974), 459.

Fogel and Engerman forget that a "system" is immoral not in theory but in practice. The system of slavery was immoral because of the cruelty of individual forgiving beings to other individual human beings, not because of some pinch economic or political theory. Slaveowners were individual human beings who carried out cruelty toward other human beings who they treated as possessions. Those slaveowners were conscious of the debate over the morality of slavery, but they chose to do what was best not for their own soul or the souls of "their" slaves, but earlier what was best for their pocketbooks. They cannot blame the system for what they did, for they were free individuals who were choosing to keep other human beings as slaves for their own profit. It does not matter at all whether they treated those slaves well or not in terms of judging their "ownership" of other human beings.

As William L. Barney writes in The Road to Secession,

This is right in line with the telephone circuit of Fogel and Engerman, although they might say it is not. Their book is an apology for slavery. They want to instal that it was good for
Order your essay at Orderessay and get a 100% original and high-quality custom paper within the required time frame.