Reviews for It is an Evil Day My Son: The Day the Stranger Took Us On A Journey

The average rating for It is an Evil Day My Son: The Day the Stranger Took Us On A Journey based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-06-29 00:00:00 James Martin Without Consent or Contract is incredible. The engagement with the sources and debates within the field of slavery research is meticulous. Fogel lays out an incredible amount of quantitative evidence to bolster any argument he makes. The first half deals with the empirical details of slavery (the productive efficiency of slaves; anthropometric data on height, weight, life expectancy, etc.; price data of slaves; and much more). All the data presented in this section would hopefully convince the reader that the institution of slavery was not going to die because of any internal "paradoxes" in its economic foundations (though apparently some modern scholars seem to think that this aspect is a new discovery) and that it would only wither under sustained political struggle. You will learn that slavery was efficient in its production due to economies of scale (as in the same inputs lead to more output) (this is different than economic efficiency) (small slave farms showed no advantage over free farms); slaves had a shorter workweek than English textile workers; life expectancy and nutrition of slaves was comparable to (or better than) urban workers in the North and in England. Fogel also brings data to the issue of slave culture and family life. On small plantations (15 or fewer slaves), there was too much interaction between slaves and owners for slaves to develop separate culture and family structure on these small plantations is distinctly different from larger plantations: - Plantations with 15 or fewer slaves contained 43 percent of the slave population. - mother-headed families were 50 percent more frequent on these smaller plantations - these smaller plantations account for nearly 2/3 of all slaves living in divided residences and for over 60 percent of slaves in one-parent residences, suggesting conventional family structure was under greater pressure on smaller farms - on plantations with 15 or fewer slaves, just 1/3 of children lived in conventional households while on plantations with 50 or more it was 2/3 The difference between field and house slaves does not seem to have been relevant for describing the typical experience of slaves. Even on a plantation of 50 slaves, just 5 adults would normally have been regularly engaged in non-field occupations, and even house slaves would be sent to the fields at peak times. About 80 percent of slaves resided on plantations with fewer than 50 slaves. When discussing why industrialization lagged in the south, Fogel rests his explanation mostly on the fact that women would work for less money relative to men (40% of men's wages) in the north, whereas in the south women earned 60 to 70 percent of men's wages (women made up a lot of the textile labor force). While relative wages are important in economic decisions, levels also matter. Even if women in the north earn less relative to men, if factory owners are drawing their workforce mostly from the female labor pool, then it is the relative wages of southern women vs. northern women that matters. Since factories are based on scale economies, my prior on why the north was more industrialized than the south would just be that it was more urbanized, and factory owners were able to draw a sufficient number of women due to the population density (i.e. it's relative wages + urbanization). The second half of the book describes the political story behind abolition. This part is much less quantitative and proved less interesting. One interesting aspect of the antebellum era was the increasing role state governments gained in determining the social relationships between slaves and whites, with laws becoming more restrictive as 1860 approached (this aspect does put a minor wrinkle in the "only politics could end slavery" story that Fogel wants to tell). The last chapter is about moral judgment on slavery. This chapter seemed incredibly personal (probably because Fogel was labeled as a slavery apologist by some). In it, Fogel criticizes the view that slavery was bad because of how slaves were treated. Fogel's own research muddies the foundation of this view by showing that urban workers did not fare any better than slaves on many margins. Fogel readily admits to the poor treatment of slaves (noting throughout the book that violence was an integral part of this "peculiar institution"), but if the case against slavery rests on how slaves were treated, then that leaves open the possibility that if slaves are treated well then slavery would be okay. Fogel will have none of that. He rests his case (rightly) on the normative claim that freedom is an absolute right. This last chapter ends with an interesting counterfactual of what if the Civil War had not occurred in the wake of secession. He mentions how powerful the South may have become, increasing its political ties with Latin America and extending the longevity of the institution of slavery. He notes that a $0.05 sales tax on cotton would have yielded $100 million annually during the 1860s (50 percent more than the entire federal budget on the eve of the Civil War). I am a little skeptical since one of the main disadvantages of the Confederacy in the Civil War was the individual states' opposition to a strong central government. One of the difficulties of governing during the early republic was that the 13 states were organized as a confederacy. I don't think the southern states would so easily overcome the problems implied by their chosen governing structure. Also, the federal budget was quite small at that point in time (around 2% of GDP). Further notes are below: - the large sugar farms in the Caribbean often had refining facilities on site (this was relatively heavily mechanized) - the average slave workweek in spring, summer, and fall was 58 hours (in the English textile mill it was 72 hours) - trend of importation of slaves into the US was increasing until 1808 (when it was banned) - most of the slave population in the US came from natural increase (not importation) - the gang system was used to take advantage of economies of scale and split cotton planting and harvesting into multiple task. This was something plantations with more than 15 slaves could take advantage of - tobacco was not amenable to the gang system due to "biological characteristics which limited opportunities for the division of labor and for the organization of production on an assembly line basis." - "Ironically, the English tradition of representative government meant that the formulation of the laws that gave legal definition tho the institution of slavery was left to colonial legislatures dominated by slaveholders - there was an occupational hierarchy (with artisans being at the top). In the Caribbean, lighter skinned slaves were more likely to be trained as artisans - training as an artisan came later for slaves so as to take advantage of the physical stamina of young adults - the doubling of slave prices in Virginia during the late 1840s and 1850s owed relatively little to the western demand for slaves and much to the resurgence in the European demand for tobacco. - On cotton productivity: "If slaveowners had been confined to the counties that they already occupied in 1850, and if they had been barred from adding to the total acreage already improved in 1850, they could still have doubled cotton production over the next decade merely by shifting 1/15 of the land normally planted with other crops into cotton." - Accounting for superior land and capital, there is no productivity advantage of small slave farms and free farms. - Plantations with 16 or more slaves, however, exhibit a 39% productivity advantage due to the use of the gang system - the average slave workweek was 10 percent shorter than the average free northern farmer workweek (this is the result of livestock and dairying accounting for 38 percent of northern farm output) - the fundamental form of exploitation of slave labor was through speeding up the labor rather than increasing the clock-hours (this resolves any paradox about longer work breaks and greater time off on Sundays for slaves than free men -the fraction of southern households who owned slaves declined from 36 percent in 1830 to 25 percent in 1860 - before the Civil War most of the super rich lived in the south, afterwards 4/5 lived in the north - slaveowners responded quickly to changes in the price of cotton (contrary to theories of slaveowner irrationality) - Among the developments that made cotton farming more efficient: improvements in seed varieties, cotton gin, reduction of transportation and other marketing costs, relocation of cotton production to the more fertile lands of the New South - the breakup of the gang system after the war is the largest factor explaining the postwar decline in productivity - studies of manufacturing firms that used slaves find that slaves could perform routine factory production and engineering and supervisory duties equally (if not better than) with free men - slavery most likely stunted long term economic development of the south in favor of short term gains. This might be a result of vertical integration of large plantations that inhibited the growth of small manufacturers, but this explanation belies the fact that the south was as well represented in the optimum range of firm sizes as the North Central states. - Manufacturing firms in the south had to pay higher wages to women (60 to 70 percent of male wages vs. 40 percent in the North) to get them to leave the farm (thus the pool of cheap labor was not as large) [I'm not sure I'm convinced by this argument for why the South lagged in economic development (doesn't actually take into account the actual wage, just the relative wage between men and women)] - death rates on slave ships were high for both slaves and crew (crew death rates generally ran 30 percent above those of slaves - tropical regions tended to have negative rates of natural increase for slaves, while the US had positive rates of natural increase in the slave population. The rate of natural increase for slaves follows the whites closely for the US. The difference between tropical and US rates of natural increase is mostly due to higher fertility rates (rather than lower death rates) - the type of crop had a significant effect on slave mortality with Jamaica sugar slaves having a 50 percent higher mortality than those growing coffee and in Trinidad sugar slaves had mortality rates 3 times higher than cotton slaves - meat consumption among US slaves was high (slave average meat consumption in 1860 was almost as high as the average meat consumption in the US in 1879) - high infant mortality came from working pregnant women too hard, sending those women back to work too soon after birth, and weaning children using raw milk - most malnutrition of slaves occurred in childhood - One study revealed that the proportion of slave women who bore children was substantially lower on plantations with 100 or more slaves than on those with only a few slaves - the impressive efficiency of gang laborers belies the idea that slaves were constantly engaged (or even sometimes engaged) in resisting the slave owners. While there was probably some day-to-day resistance it was highly variable. - Stealing was over 8 times more frequent on plantations of masters who provided meager rations - slave resistance was rarely political, but focused on protection of the family and on the amelioration of conditions of life - large plantations permitted slaves to live together in close-knit communities where they could develop their own culture, whereas slaves on small plantations had much more interaction and less isolation from whites - most of the study of slave culture comes from evidence based on slaves from large (over 50 slaves) plantations, which only covers 20 percent of the slave population - positive incentives for work are a sign that slaves had a least some bargaining power and that naked force was not enough for efficient production - studies show that the average diet fed to slaves on large southern plantations was about twice as expensive as it had to be to satisfy modern nutritional standards - The British abolition of the slave trade seemed to be only costly to traders and not to slave owners - British consumers paid 48 percent more for sugar during the first four years of freedom than they had in the last four years of slavery (amounting to an extra 21 million pounds), in addition to the 20 million pounds paid to slave owners as compensation - Popular interest group politics aided in the British abolitionist movement - while Quakers got the ball rolling, it was the Methodists who carried the day - a telling quote: "It is," wrote Harriet Martineau, British author and social critic, after retuning from a tour in the US, "a totally different thing to be an abolitionist on a soil actually trodden by slaves, [than] in a far off country, where opinion is already on the side of emancipation." - at the Continental Congress, the most insistent demands for action against the African slave trade came from Virginia [though one shouldn't make too big of a deal about this since if everyone was in agreement, then the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the US would have ended in 1789 rather than 1808] - by despiritualizing the problem of chattel slavery, the moral urgency of the issue was blunted. p 254 - temperance movement mission creep: abstinence from alcohol pledges initially did not include hard cider or wine and distilled hard liquor for "medicinal purposes" - during the expansion to the south and west, New Englanders toyed with secession (1814-1815) - pro-slavery (aristocratic) pamphlets and newspapers intimated that a society in which whites, as well as blacks, are slaves might be best - comparisons between the situation to the poor state of urban workers and slaves (meaning free market, industrial economy not necessarily great) - during the 1830s, state legislatures passed laws to enforce social isolation of slaves - interesting counterfactual story for if the south had been allowed to remain independent (he suggests the South would have become a major power with strong links to South America).

Review # 2 was written on 2013-06-12 00:00:00 Darius Kimpson This is the follow-up volume to Fogel and Engerman's "Time on the Cross", which performs an economic analysis of the institution of American slavery. It is brilliant and challenging work, which earned Fogel a Nobel prize in economics. Fogel passed away yesterday and I realized that I hadn't added this book. This is amazing research and Fogel will be missed.