Humanity Held Captive: Slavery and the Numbers Game by Stanley Gutman (1975)

As an economist, my discipline routinely asks that I quantify human decisions. Often that takes the form of buying and selling "goods," but what of buying and selling "bads?" There's a host of data driven media that examines "black market" activities. Weighing the benefits and costs of buying and selling drugs, guns or women is debated in absolute or relative figures, graphed, converted into rates and logarithms, imputed, and very often stratified by demographic such as gender, race, age and education level. By convention, economists do not personify this data as a historian would; the numbers tell the story. It goes without saying that these are sensitive subjects, as many people have been affected by street, drug or sexual violence, but the economic analysis of these modern taboo markets is designed to make assumptions to homogenize the persons demanding and supplying these goods. This makes data more tractable for econometric methods to state conclusions about the value of legalization or, of a life.

An economist who examines the past with such quantitative methods has a different set of challenges, however. In America, black markets in the antebellum period were likely black people. And while black Americans are no longer enslaved, there persists a communal memory of the years of acute social struggle as evidenced through public commemorations of Black History Month and Juneteenth, and private conversations between the generations. There also exists a desire to quantify the cost of slavery so as to hold the federal government accountable to allocate reparations in the form of cash or in-kind services to descendants of slaves, such as education or asset building opportunities. Today, the agency and humanity of a black American is uncontested by the definition, evidence and interpretation of the "black experience," the three levels proposed by Micheal Trotti with which to confront challenging trends in racial literature (375). But the agency and humanity of a slave is in the past, and modern writers might struggle with analyses on the lived experience of a human commodity.

In the 1960s, a group of American economic historians began generating research called cliometrics, a sub-discipline of economics meant to (re?)integrate history and the quantitative side of economics. For about 15 years, cliometrics was popular, and then it wasn't; a scholarly fad in the cycle of academic inquiry, subject to reinvention in the future. The marriage of mathematical statistics to other disciplines has happened before: anthropology, psychology, and ecology among others. Cliometrics was near its peak with the 1974 publication of Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman's Time On the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. The release of the book was heavily critiqued, both for its analytic errors and perceived historic insensitivity. One such response was Herbert Gutman's Slavery and the Numbers Game (1975).

Gutman's main arguments focus on Fogel and Engerman's treatment of the slave work ethic, family life and sexual proclivities. Time on the Cross boldly states it aims to "strike down the view that Black Americans were without culture, without achievement and without development for their first two hundred and fifty years on American soil (258)."  In the authors' view slaves were hard-working, moralistic, and well-adapted to their station, centered solidly around the nucleus of the black family unit.  On the whole, the conclusion was that slaves were more efficient than their free laboring counterparts. Gutman allows that the authors describe a "transformation" of the slave to his new home, but fail in that they only fully describe the transformation and not the slave.

Other errors are repeatedly attacked in Gutman's text. Scant evidence and isolated examples are overused to make broad statements on slave mentality and lifestyle; ubiquitous and imprecise language pepper technical paragraphs; assumptions are presented as evidence; "slaves" and "blacks" are synonymous categories; the Sambo archetype is morphed into a black Horatio Alger to fit the explicit goal of the book (Gutman 16).  Gutman spends a large amount of space contesting Fogel and Engerman's "whipping" calculation as being too low an estimate and based on faulty methods. It is true that the math was not robust, but the (in)humanity of the event - however common it was - was completely ignored. What was the frequency of slave whippings? Where this a negative labor incentive? What was the effect of slave whippings on productivity and efficiency? These questions are attempted and answered by Fogel and Engerman. If a correct answer is found, is it the best answer to such a question?

Critiques on writing about lynching have similar demands. Historians such as Micheal Pfeifer urge researchers to keep the victim experience present when presenting metadata on mob violence, as there are lingering effects of that painful era still in the minds of many Americans. Those who sought "ritualized and racialized retribution" (The State of the Field of Lynching Scholarship, Pfeifer 835) incurred the cost of slavery as well, in terms of spiraling moral turpitude masked as "rough justice," and the descendants of the lynch mob just as the descendants of the slave therefore have a right to the counter-narrative.

The voice of the slave is still coming to light. Also in the 1960s, the scholarship of abuse literature took shape and since, we have been able to use that discipline as a lens to inspect past abuses. Nell Irvin Painter writes in Soul Murder & Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting (2002) that violence and "soul murder" are inseparable from slavery, where soul murder is defined as physical, sexual and/or mental abuse. To Painter, the social costs of slavery were absorbed by all races and parties (32) and evidence of this is abundant.

Slave agency in the face of racist capitalism will continue to be a poignant topic for economics, history and other subjects. One hopes that the scholarship will become increasingly more rigorous and representative as it gains validity and provides new insights to a the next generation of researchers further removed from a topic of significance to all Americans.


dls

The Changing Face of Race : The Blood of Government by Paul Kramer (2006)

In a February 2003 publication of The American Historical Review, Martha Hodes delves into what she describes as a "capricious exercise of racial categorization in everyday life" (Hodes 85).  Using correspondence, interviews with living descendants, and government- as well as privately-owned documents, she traces the lives of Mr and Mrs William Smiley Connolly in the 1870s. Hodes chooses this couple because they are two different races and together, lived in two different racially stratified economies: American and the Cayman Islands. The outcome was not entirely expected.

Hodes' thesis is the title of her work: "The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race." While racial distinctions were present in both nations, the marriage of a white New England woman to an African Caribbean man takes on different meanings based on where you are, what the class structure is, and the relative level of socioeconomic improvement gains from relocating. Hodes asserts that "the power lies within the ability of legal, economic and social authorities to assign and reassign racial categories to oppressive ends" (85). In the case of the Connollys, Eunice was a widowed mother who worked alongside Irish and possibly, black women during a time when white women in New Hampshire were typically married and tucked away at home. This protected status of white womanhood was a very different reality of Eunice's life and she suffered social slights for her impoverished, unmarried state. "Smiley" Connolly was a well-off sea captain from privilege on an island that recognized not just dual races, but a spectrum of color too, and mysteriously, where race and color intersected with class. Smiley was of a complexion and an economic status that enabled having a white American wife be a benefit to both Connollys in the Caymans while a burden in New Hampshire.

Stuart Hall, cultural theorist

How is it that two contemporary societies, can respond to race so differently? In both, white is superior to black. Both are former slave societies. Both are capitalist in nature. But there is a historical component that blurs the lines in the Caymans. The way that race evolved there was structurally different in that economic status could transcend color and a hierarchy of colors were recognized and intertwined with wealth. Famed cultural theorist Stuart Hall similarly loquaciously refers to the "laws of motion" of capitalism in his paper "Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance" (331, 1980) to describe how derivations of Marxist capitalism forms in different places. In his effort to delineate the different types of capitalism we see, he urges that we recognize what he terms a 'historical premise" and a 'materialist premise" with which to examine race in post-slave societies. The former provides the range of lived racial experiences, while the latter is a pedantic analysis of the ideological structures that create race in a particular place. Hall stresses that 'articulation' of race by the dominant class is dissipated to the dominated class(es), conveying the ideology of the oppressor to the oppressed (335). It is through the arguments that Hodes and Hall propose that allow for a discussion on the changing face of race.

Such discussion can arise from reading The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (2006) by Paul Kramer. The book traces the racial birth of the "Filipino" as a result of U.S. colonial intervention in the Philippines following Spanish rule. The result was an exporting of American racist ideologies through businessmen, military and policymakers. They would represent the "dominant" class in the Philippines, while the people of the nation were divided "racially" into those who were Catholic versus those who were non-Christian ("savages"); the elite versus rural populations; those who had been "Hispanicized" by the Spaniards versus those who had not. This spectrum is the historical premise that Hall wrote of and indicates that the Filipino race evolved in a vacuum that while similar to other race creations, is by no means identical. Many pages of Kramer's book is devoted to the idea that at the beginning of the twentieth century, "Filipino became the new black." The name and concept of a  "Filipino" was imagined by the dominant class who indiscriminately hurled slurs pedestrian ("nigger!") and novel ("gu gu!). Another theme is that of the 'White Man's Burden' from the title of an 1899 ode to Anglo imperialism by Rudyard Kipling. American colonists considered it a self-sacrifice to supervise populations like blacks and Filipinos and guide them to self-sufficiency, if ever; a situation Kramer calls "calibrated colonialism." This mentality coupled with the behavior and expectations of Americans in the Philippians served to further articulate U.S. sovereignty among the colonized.

Or at least that was the idea. In the course of the book, we learn that in this time and place, Filipino nation-building efforts frustrate those of the Americans', further making this a deviant case of race evolution. Could the result have been predicted? Should it be viewed solely under a historical premise? While 'Filipinization' grew among the dominated classes, American efforts to protect their borders from cheap Filipino goods and labor without naturalizing the population could not be sustained. The Filipino had transcended nation, much like the Connollys, and with limited immigration status, could position herself for a different racial experience in the United States. Over less than one hundred years, the world saw the birth, classification and reclassification of the "Filipino," the fluid face of race.

To underscore the fluidity of race, consider that both Hall and Hodes understood it's properties and wrote their papers 23 years apart over events that are more than 100 years and many tens of thousands of miles apart. That race cannot be contained or defined but is constantly being redefined is both its strength and its weakness.


dls

What's in a Word? - The Many Panics of 1837 by Jessica Lepler (2013)

In this week's read, the author of The Many Panics of 1837 exposes the interconnected financial system of the TransAtlantic world. Focusing on the political economies of New Orleans, New York City and London, Lepler examines a range of primary sources to determine if people today experience the economy differently than people in the past? If so, is this measurable, or even comparable? Her argument that "the Panic of 1837" was actually the aggregation of "the many panics of 1837" becomes manifest in her evidence of acute financial uncertainty on both sides of the Atlantic.

Lepler pulls from a range of sources for her text. Much of her research is made up of archival data, such as that of national banks or private collections run by an institution or the state. Other information from the time period comes from personal correspondence, art, sermons, music, satire (the rise of the dichotomous melodrama makes its first cameo during this age) and of course, that ubiquitous spreader of (interesting) information: rumors.

The main vehicle the author identifies as responsible for these panics is information. During the early 19th-century, financial information between metropolitan areas arrived by letter on ships. So there was a value put on paper and verbal confirmations and contracts, arguably more so than present day. The book returns again and again to a concept of "confidence" which takes its importance directly from trusting another party in a credit market arrangement (9). When "confidence" is lacking, there is less hope in the credit markets and thus a reaction by all stakeholders: the southern planter class, financiers, and antebellum market makers called 'cotton factors.' Strangely absent is a reaction by the real underlying asset: the slave. More on that later.

Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, but Words...?
Other terms and phrases display the lexicon and theories of an age past. 19th-century contemporary newspapers and textbooks relate the word 'panic' to a physical condition, according to the scientists and "the times" according to preachers and moralists alike. Phrenologists attributed a panic to "over stimulated Acquisitiveness;" a type of "cerebral disease of a mercantile country," (9) a reference from George Combe's Principles of Physiology (1845). There's also repeated use of the "Anglo-American economy" to describe the geographical credit markets that are the book's subject. Credit markets which do not exist without slave labor.

Lepler is strangely silent on this aspect of Jacksonian credit. Much attention is given to the creation and structure of high-yield securities, those (still) infamous paper promises of cash-poor Americans sought by Europe. Strangely, because historian Seth Rockman notes in "What Makes Capitalism Newsworthy?" (Journal of the Early Republic, Fall 2014) that the "financing of slavery" is that "which scholars attribute such macroeconomic crises at the South Sea Bubble and the Panic of 1837" (452). Rockman proves this with evidence of 1828 networks of finance featuring American brokerage houses marketing state-chartered bonds to European investors. The money these houses raised was used to make loans to local slaveholders (456). The bonds were simultaneously backed by taxpayers, many of whom were paying taxes on the slaves they owned as private property. Lepler's historiography chooses to focus on a Swiss-born financier in America who takes his own life as the panics of 1837 begin to close in on him: plummeting cotton prices, tightening credit markets, failing businesses, lost fortunes. Her monograph might be described as a case of disassociation of the commodity (black people) from its inherent role in an economy, a classic characteristic of capitalism studies. An interesting question might then be how slave agency encouraged or exacerbated the decline in cotton prices and thus the panics of 1837, if at all?

Capitalism for $1000, Alex...
This leads to a discussion on capitalism, infinite in its multivalence. Capitalism is perhaps best inspected inductively, taking an interdisciplinary approach to its meaning across time and space. When examining what capitalism is to America, slavery must be included, as it has provided the collateral for subsequent securitization. That the shifting chronological boundaries of capitalism be considered is paramount. One interesting take away are the partisan Free Labor ideologies of this era which were wholly incompatible with slave regimes. That is, the idea of working for wage (proletarianism) was seen as an offense during this era, akin to that of being a slave (see Eric Foner's Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republic Party Before the Civil War, 1970). In the same vein, what is an economy? Substantial work has been done on the origins of an economy (see Margaret Shabas, Timothy Marshall, David Grewal and Tim Shenk for more on this) and how this definition is rubbery too. So "what capitalism is" is gray and fuzzy, definitely not black and white, and by nature, dynamic.

Homo Economicus
Economic thought in Lepler's book was perhaps then, neoclassical, but in hindsight, nowhere close. Neoclassical economics borrows from Adam Smith's early "capitalist" notions of self-interested, rent-seeking, profit-(or utility-) maximizing rational actors pressing toward some optimum outcome called equilibrium. Homo economicus was easily conjured in theory but seldom seen in real life. What is rational behavior in the face of a never before seen financial catastrophe? Agency is the power of an individual to make the choice to act. Lepler seems to suggest that agency was suspended in the face of these panics, resulting in physical and physiological manifestations of anxiety. It became a "sign of the times" or "providence," or more commonly, partisan politics as the harbinger of the pronounced uncertainty in the financial markets. Less than 20 years old, the two-party political squabbles were an easy scapegoat for the crisis. Whigs blamed Democrats who blamed businesses who blamed paper currency. Like slaves, affected parties in New Orleans, New York and London claimed they had no agency, no power in the commencement or current of what was occurring around them. An interesting contrary to this is the concept of 'clerk agency,' those cogs of capitalism who not only process market behaviors, but take an active role in spreading information - insider and otherwise. Perhaps the most (in)famous clerk and Free Laborer was John D. Rockefeller, a bastion of American capitalism.

The book's legacy to modern economic thought are early musings on business cycles, government interventions, central bank policy, monetarism, bailouts and constricted credit markets following prolonged periods of prosperity and even longer periods of scarcity. To say the panics of 1837 is like that of 1929 or 2008 is too easy. The more difficult question is why these three eras are so similar to the economist and the historian?


- dls