Word: fogel
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...always used--speaks creditably for the strength, if not the depth, of most historians' antislavery feelings. Like other history books, Time on the Cross is open to serious question, both on its facts, which it would presumably take further research to judge conclusively, and on their interpretation. For example, Fogel and Engerman put some stress on the 1850 census's finding that after 230 years of slavery only 7.7 per cent of slaves were mulatto. Such a finding doesn't appear to justify Abolitionist claims that the pre-war South was one big brothel. But neither does it attempt...
Time on the Cross addresses itself to these questions anyway, in one of its most important chapters, on the slave family. Fogel and Engerman maintain that slave families were strong, nuclear patriarchal families--just the reverse of the stereotype popularized by Daniel Patrick Moynihan, or the picture of uprooted slaves forced to recognize only their masters as father figures that Stanley M. Elkins '49 paints in his eloquent Slavery...
APART FROM showing that slave women generally had no children till they married (at an average age of 22.5), Fogel and Engerman present little positive statistical evidence for their position. Instead, they just ask some reasonable questions: wouldn't business motives and moral scruples combined be a strong enough combination to keep planters from tearing apart families when they didn't have to? Why wouldn't the rich owner of a large plantation just keep a mistress in town, where she wouldn't trouble his wife or his labor supply? Or, if masters were so sexually attracted by their slaves...
...Fogel and Engerman blame it on the racism of most Americans, an often unconscious racism that makes them take black people's weakness for granted and restrict themselves to trying to explain it as an inborn quality or, for the more liberal, as a consequence of oppression. In their epilogue, Fogel and Engerman say they wrote Time on the Cross to attack this view and to show that even under slavery, black people were among the most accomplished and admirable people in the United States, "to strike down the view that black Americans were without culture, without achievement, and without...
Both the narrator and his character Fogel are isolated shards laboring under the illusion that they are wholly formed vessels. But what could well have been an academic exercise is redeemed by compassion and craft. It makes for a pathetic but telling tale...