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.


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