Slavery, Ideology, and "Cliometrics"

Abstract

On the eve of World War I, Ulrich B. Phillips initiated the pioneer studies of slavery which made him the dominant scholar in the field until the late 1950s. The Georgia historian, who shared with slaveowning parents scorn for abolitionist accusations and love for sentimentally conceived plantation life, maintained in American Negro Slavery (New York, 1918) that antebellum bondage was technologically backward and poor investment for masters but the best available labor system and positive good for the wretched black bondsmen. In an analysis which enthusiastically expressed the realities of white racial oppression in the Progressive Era, Phillips insisted that only the paternalism of the plantation owners and the iron necessity of controlling grossly inferior race kept the inefficient and unprofitable institution of slavery alive in the years before the Civil War. Through many generations New World planters had profited by importing thralls for their brawn to follow orders passively and the enslaved black savages gained greatly from good material conditions and the training school ofplantation discipline, but the South in the 19th century fell behind the advancing industrial and commercial North and became technologically backward in large part because of the poor quality of laborers who lacked any full-force incentive of gain and all inherent capacity to be thorough workmen.' Nearly four decades later economic and social changes among blacks, the Cold War competition for influence in the new colored nations, the decline of racist ideologies, and the evolution of slavery studies, all combined to set the stage for the alternative synthesis offered by Kenneth M. Stampp in The Peculiar Institution (New York, 1956). Stampp, with superior scholarship and without the racism of Phillips, found substance in abolitionist charges that bondage as a system of labor extortion depended upon force, violence, and