I’m writing this because Nikole
Hannah Jones said on Twitter that she was trying to understand the argument
that economic historians have against the work of Edward Baptist but had a problem
with some of the terminology used by economists. I usually try to avoid
economic jargon, but today I have tried even harder. If there are terms that
are unclear please let me know. I'm also writing this because Ben Schneider suggested I give it a try.
I can write this without reference
to economic terminology because, although I could point to problems related to economics,
the fundamental flaws in the book arise from Baptist’s historical methods, not
his economics. In The Half Has Never Been Told, Baptist misrepresents previous
scholarship on slavery, misrepresents the content of primary sources, and fabricates
evidence to support his claims. Ultimately, economic historians object to the
inclusion of Baptist as a source for the 1619 Project because doing so lends credence
to his position as an expert on slavery and economic development that is not
warranted by his book.
These fundamental flaws can be illustrated in key elements
of the book:
Baptist claims that most economists and historians accepted
the view that slavery was inefficient and, in some sense, pre-capitalist. Consequently,
he claims to overturn this traditional view.
Baptist does not just claim that slavery was an important
part of American economic development, he makes specific claims about economic
impact of slave produced cotton and its spillover effects.
Baptist claims that the increases in productivity were
driven by continuing increases in violence, what he claims enslaved people
called the pushing system, and what he sometimes calls “the whipping machine.”
Claims about the history of slavery in the United States
Baptist misrepresents the work of
earlier economists and historians. On
page 129 Baptist writes that “during the late antebellum years, northern
travelers insisted that slave labor was less efficient than free labor, a point
of dogma that most historians and economists have accepted.” The footnote for
this statement does not provide any evidence to support it, which is not
surprising since you would be hard pressed to find an economic historian who
does accept it. It has been more than a half century since In 1958, Conrad and
Meyer argued that investment in slaves had a return comparable to other
potential investments Conrad, Alfred H., and John R. Meyer. "The
economics of slavery in the ante bellum South." Journal of
Political Economy 66, no. 2 (1958): 95-130). In the 1970s, Fogel and Engerman argued that
slave agriculture was as dynamic a version of capitalism as existed anywhere in
the United States. In awarding the Nobel Prize to Fogel in 1993, the
Nobel committee stated that “Fogel showed that the established opinion that
slavery was an ineffective, unprofitable and pre-capitalist organization was
incorrect. The institution did not fall to pieces due to its economic weakness
but collapsed because of political decisions. He showed that the system, in
spite of its inhumanity, had been economically efficient.” In other words, Fogel
won the Nobel Prize, in part, for overturning the view that Baptist claims he
is overturning.
Research on the economics of
slavery was one of the core elements in the development of economic history during
the 1960s and 1970s, illustrating how economic theory and statistics could be
used to address historical questions. Consequently, it is not surprising that
when Robert Whaples surveyed a sample of both economists and historians who
worked on economic history about slavery the answers were nearly unanimous. He
asked them whether they generally agreed, agreed with provisos, or generally
disagreed with a series of statements. For the statement “Slavery was a
system irrationally kept in existence by plantation owners who failed to
perceive or were indifferent to their best economic interests,” ninety-three
percent of economists and ninety percent of historians disagreed with the
statement. For the statement “The slave system was economically moribund on
the eve of the Civil War,” ninety-eight percent of economists and
ninety-five percent of historians disagreed. (Whaples, Robert. "Where
is there consensus among American economic historians? The results of a
survey on forty propositions." The Journal of Economic History 55,
no. 1 (1995): 139-154.) Economists do not disagree with the argument that slavery
in the United States was dynamic, innovative and profit focused because
economists have been collecting evidence to support those claims for more than
a half century. It is difficult to imagine the circumstances under which
someone studying the research on slavery could have come to the conclusion that
economic historians believed that slavery was inefficient.
Similarly, Peter James Hudson and H.
Reuben Neptune both argue that Baptist and other historians of capitalism and
slavery neglect the work on slavery and capitalism by Black scholars (Hudson, Peter James. "The racist dawn of
capitalism." Boston Review 14 (2016), and Neptune, H. Reuben. "Throwin'Scholarly Shade: Eric Williams
in the New Histories of Capitalism and Slavery." Journal
of the Early Republic 39.2 (2019): 299-326.)
Claims about the importance of slavery to economic
development
Economists and economic historians
generally agree that slavery was a very important part of American economic
development. Some of the best economic historians have devoted much of their
lives to understanding slavery. Baptist, however, makes specific claims about
the importance of slavery that are not supported by the available evidence. Baptist
provides a back of the envelope accounting of the impact of slave produced
cotton
Consider Baptist’s claim that
nearly half of all economic activity derived from slavery derived from production
of cotton by enslaved people. He writes in The Half has Never Been Told (page
321-2)
“But here’s a back- of- the –envelope accounting of
cotton’s role in the US economy in the era of slavery expansion. In 1836, the
total amount of economic activity―the value of all the goods and services
produced―in the United States was about $1.5 billion. Of this, the value of the
cotton crop itself, total pounds multiplied by average price per pound―$77
million―was about 5 percent of that entire gross domestic product. This
percentage might seem small, but after subsistence agriculture, cotton sales
were the largest single source of value in the American economy. Even this
number, however, barely begins to measure the goods and services directly
generated by cotton production. The freight of cotton to Liverpool by sea,
insurance and interest paid on commercial credit―all would bring the total to
more than $100 million (see Table 4.1).
Next
come the second- order effects that comprised the goods and services necessary
to produce cotton. There was the purchase of slaves―perhaps $40 million in 1836
alone, a year that made many memories of long marches forced on stolen people.
Then there was the purchase of land, the cost of credit for such purchases, the
pork and the corn bought at the river landings, the axes that the slaves used
to clear land and the cloth they wore, even the luxury goods and other spending
by the slaveholding families. All of that probably added up to about $100
million more.
Third
order effects, the hardest to calculate, included the money spent by
millworkers and Illinois hog farmers, the wages paid to steamboat workers, and
the revenues yielded by investments made with the profits of the merchants,
manufacturers, and slave traders who derived some or all of their income either
directly or indirectly from the southwestern fields. These third order effects
would also include the dollars spent and spent again in communities where
cotton related trades made a significant impact another category of these
effects is the value of foreign goods imported on credit sustained the
opposite flow of cotton. All these goods and services might have added up to
$200 million. Given the short term of most commercial credit in 1836, each
dollar “imported” for cotton would be turned over about twice a year: $400
million. All told more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic
activity in the United States in 1836, derived directly or indirectly from
cotton produced by the million odd slaves― 6 percent of the total US
population―who in that year toiled in labor camps on slavery’s frontier.”
There are problems here in terms of a misunderstanding of
economic concepts. Not all purchases are counted as part of GDP. Only the final
value of newly produced goods and services are counted in
GDP. Comparing his calculation of economic activity related to
cotton to GDP is meaningless. There is, however, an even deeper
problem with the historical scholarship. There are no sources for the numbers that he puts into his calculation and even the language he uses conveys the sense that he is just making them up:
“perhaps $40 million”
“probably added up to about $100 million”
“might have added up to $200 million”
The only reference provided is to Table 4.1. Table 4.1 does
not provide, as one might assume, information about shipping and insurance. It
does not even have any information at all for the year 1836. Even if Baptist
had understood how GDP is calculated his efforts would have been meaningless if
he just made up the numbers that he plugged in. He can claim that it is just an
estimate, but estimates need to be grounded in some evidence or else they are just
guesstimates.
Baptist makes other dramatic claims about the role of slavery in economic
development but does not provide evidence. In this case, where he does appear
to present evidence, there is in fact nothing there.
Claims about productivity growth
Again Baptist suggests that he has
discovered something new: an increase in productivity (the amount of cotton
produced by each enslaved person) that has largely been overlooked. Yet the
increasing productivity in cotton production had long been known to economic
historians. In Time on the Cross, Fogel and Engerman noted that the “The
basic cause of this long run decline [in cotton prices] was the steady increase
in productivity” (page 93). In 1978, Gavin Wright stated that “It is certainly
true that cotton output per capita or per slave rose markedly over the last
forty to sixty years before the Civil War, as several writers have noted in
connection with the profitability of slavery issue.” (Wright, Gavin. The
political economy of the cotton South: households, markets, and wealth in the
nineteenth century. New York: Norton, 1978. Page 102) Olmstead and Rhode
undertook the monumental task of collecting data from as many picking books as
they could obtain in order to study the increase in productivity. For Rhode and
Olmstead productivity is a function of several things: the quality of the soil,
the quality of the plants, weather, and the ability to use violence to force
maximum effort from the slaves picking the cotton. Baptist argues that the
increases in productivity were driven by innovation in torture, leading to
innovations in picking. Enslaved people were tortured to produce as much as
they could but meeting one quota was just followed by a higher quota, as
overseers continuously ratcheted up demands.
Baptist has suggested that Olmstead
and Rhode failed to consider the possibility that slaves were picking faster
and that “uncritically” used the claims of people interested in selling new
seeds to support their claim. But the first claim makes no sense increase
productivity means that at least in some sense they were picking faster. As for
the second claim, they used a variety of sources, including planter’s diaries
that recorded experiments with seeds. None of them uncritically. Their papers
make clear that they considered the use of violence an essential aspect of slavery.
Consider the following excerpt from their 2008 paper in the Journal of
Economic History (Olmstead, Alan L., and Paul W. Rhode. "Biological
innovation and productivity growth in the antebellum cotton
economy." The Journal of Economic History 68, no. 4
(2008): 1123-1171.):
“Failing to meet picking standards had severe consequences.
In 1834 S. A. Townes of Marion, Alabama threatened to "make those bitches
go at least 100 [pounds] or whip them like the devil.” In the 1830s Dr. J. W.
Monett of Mississippi asserted that after weighing an individual's daily picking,
masters would whip slaves for light or trashy picking. On several occasions,
Louisiana planter Bennet Barrow ordered a whipping for all hands because the
output was too low. As yet another example, John Edwin Fripp of South Carolina
recorded "popping" and "switching" his slaves for light
picking. On the Mississippi plantation of John Quitman and Henry Turner, a
number of slaves ran away rather than face punishment for light or trashy
picking.”
Clearly, Olmstead and Rhode knew that picking rates and brutality
were essential parts of the overseer’s recipe for productivity. Their argument
is that overseers pushed enslaved people to obtain their maximum effort, and
that the introduction of new breeds of cotton plants made it possible for maximum
level of effort to produce more cotton.
Baptist’s argument, on the other
hand, requires that overseers in the early 19th century were not pushing
slaves to their maximum, but that over time they came up with innovations that
enabled them to make enslaved people work harder. Baptist, however, fails to
provide the necessary evidence to support of his own claim, and, most troubling, resorts to misrepresenting the content of slave narratives to support his claim.
He provides plenty of evidence that
slaves were whipped, as well as tortured in other ways, for not meeting
production quotas. Baptist does not present the evidence of continuous of
innovation in torture and in picking. He speculates that this innovation must
have taken place but does not provide evidence of it. He presents the evidence
developed by Olmstead and Rhode that slaveowners kept records of daily picking
and whipped slaves for failing to meet quotas, and he suggests that the
bullwhip was an innovation in torture. But neither of these things provides
evidence of continuous innovation over decades. Picking books existed from at
least the first decade of the nineteenth century. That is how it possible to
document an increase in productivity. Moreover, Olmstead and Rhode argue that
the evidence in picking books is not consistent with Baptist’s argument of
constantly ratcheting up quotas (Olmstead, Alan L., and Paul W. Rhode.
"Cotton, slavery, and the new history of capitalism." Explorations
in Economic History 67 (2018): 1-17). Whipping was common well before
cotton became the primary crop in the South and while earlier slaveholders may
not have had bullwhips, they were perfectly capable of doing plenty of damage with
what they did have. Ads for escaped slaves in eighteenth century Virginia have
descriptions of “well scarred” or with “many whelks” or “used to the
whip.”
The second type of innovation that
Baptist needs to demonstrate is a continuing process of innovation in picking
techniques. Again, keep in mind that we are not talking about one person
increasing their productivity as they become more experienced, we are talking
about increases in productivity that take place decade after decade. Baptist’s
argument is not about particular people increasing their picking rates with
practice. His argument requires improvements in technique that can be passed on
from one generation to another. He does not provide any evidence of this
passing on of techniques.
Ironically, his argument for the
importance of slave narratives as a source conflicts with his claim that
innovation in coercion produced innovation in picking. Not only does he not
provide examples of narratives describing these innovations in picking
technique, many of the most well-known accounts, such as Charles Ball and
Solomon Northrup, suggest that picking productivity was largely a matter of
practice and innate dexterity.
And here is where the most
troubling problem emerges. Baptist claims that enslaved people used the phrase
“pushing system.” There is, however, no evidence that this is true. Olmstead
and Rhode searched digitized slave narratives that they used and found no
instance of it. I ran a search on the Library of Congress digitized slave
narratives and got no results. Baptist
misrepresents what formerly enslaved people said about their lives in order to
support his argument. He cites extensively from Charles Ball to support his
claims about a “pushing system” of “whipping machine.” At one point he notes
that after much effort Ball was able to meet his quota, “And it brought him nothing
but an unwhipped back for one more day.” But what did Charles Ball say? Ball
explained that “On Monday morning of the second week, the overseer told us that
he fixed a day’s work at fifty pounds; and that all who picked more would be paid
a cent a pound for the surplus.” Women and children were assigned separate
quotas. Ball goes on to note that “At
the end of the month I was able to return every evening a few pounds over the
daily rate, for which I received my pay.” But that would not have provided
support for Baptist’s thesis.
Here is a link to a blogpost that I wrote
earlier describing what Baptist did to Henry
Clay’s story about the whipping machine. Other examples of this sort of
re-writing of slave narratives can be found in Olmstead and Rhode.
There
are other problems in the book, but, in my opinion, none are as fundamental as
the inability to rely upon the author to accurately represent either the
primary or secondary sources.
The claims that these problems in
Baptist’s work are about economic versus historical methodology or that they
are driven by ideology are also not supported by the available evidence. In
addition to economists, the book has been criticized by historians and at least
one sociologist, several of whom are, I believe, comfortable being referred to
as Marxist or radical
Burnard, Trevor. "‘The Righteous Will Shine Like the
Sun’: Writing an Evocative History of Antebellum American Slavery." Slavery
& Abolition 36, no. 1 (2015): 180-185.
Coclanis, Peter A. "Slavery, Capitalism, and the
Problem of Misprision." Journal of American Studies 52,
no. 3 (2018).
Hudson, Peter James. "The
racist dawn of capitalism." Boston Review 14 (2016).
Neptune, H. Reuben. "Throwin'Scholarly
Shade: Eric Williams in the New Histories of Capitalism and
Slavery." Journal of the Early Republic 39.2 (2019):
299-326.
Oakes, James. "Capitalism and slavery and the civil
war." International Labor and Working-Class History 89
(2016): 195-220.
and
Clegg, John J. "Capitalism and slavery." Critical
Historical Studies 2, no. 2 (2015): 281-304.
That many people on Amazon find it
a fine book only illustrates the problem. People assume that historians are telling
them the truth. Non-historians see all the references to historical sources and
think that it is a carefully researched and compelling piece of scholarship. More
historians must be willing step forward and tell people when this is not the
case.
