Word: slaving
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Huck himself (Jeff East) has been changed into a sort of homespun civil rights worker who comes easily to his vision of the brotherhood of man. "Why, Jim!" he exclaims, looking at the slave's wounded neck. "Your blood's red same as mine!" Twain's Huck, it will be recalled, was a good deal troubled by matters of conscience, and it took him most of the book to wrestle down the acquired prejudices of Southern boyhood. Hardly a doubt stirs this Huck, of course. He is a real nice boy from the very start -maybe just...
...wing of historians known as cliometricians because their methods marry Clio, the muse of history, to the practice of quantifying the past with the help of computers. They are armed with bar graphs, data banks and masses of statistics from all sorts of sources (some, like the New Orleans slave market records from 1804 to 1862, previously unexplored). They also have more or less proved that traditional "impressionistic" historians persistently wrote about American slavery in delusive and polemical stereotypes...
Among the most widely accepted and notable errors, the authors suggest, was the belief that slavery was economically dying in 1860, that slave labor was inefficient and slovenly, and-most important-that slavery produced hideously hard conditions of life for the average slave. Not so, say Fogel and Engerman, offering statistics on per capita income and return on capital to prove it. Slavery was booming in 1860, and plantations were 40% more efficient than Northern agriculture...
Simon Legrees existed, the authors are quick to admit. But, the book suggests, the moonlight and molasses nostalgia of a Stephen Foster may somewhat more accurately describe the average relationship between slave and master than any serious historian has been willing to admit for years. The authors blend statistics on everything from the percentage of blacks in skilled plantation trades to the average age of black mothers at the time of their first-born child. The result is a vision of plantations as businesses administered in ways that suggest both a Victorian family and a paternalistic corporation eager to encourage...
Such views, especially regarding economics and slave inefficiency, lasted into the 20th century, when they were adapted by Historian U.B. Phillips, a Southern racist whose aim was to rehabilitate the cruel plantation owners. Though he successfully showed that many slaves were well fed and cared for, he accepted the notion that plantations were not run for a profit. Instead, he argued, plantations, "were the best schools yet invented for the mass training of that sort of inert and backward people...