Two Enlightening Books

.
I just finished reading one very interesting book and I’m about 2/3 of the way through another about the experiences of black people just before and during the Civil War.

The first book is “Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery,” by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman. It is a refutation of the widespread belief that all slaves were malnourished, ill housed and ill clothed, and the victims of sometimes daily, brutal physical punishment.

Instead, it paints a portrait of a class of people over whom care was taken to make sure they had not only the tools they needed, including healthy bodies, to perform their duties but in some cases skills so valued that the slave became a source of income for his or her master when leased out to other plantations. The authors even prove that sometimes the slaves were allowed to keep a sizable percentage of the payment received for their services.

The second book is called “The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted During the War for the Union,” by James M. McPherson. It is a collection of contemporary writings showing how the Civil War affected both slave and freedmen and what they were able to do to advance their case.

I’m not a scholar of the Civil War, and it is difficult for me to judge the accuracy of the portraits drawn in these books, but I find myself drawn to both arguments. It always seemed counterintuitive to me that slave owners would have abused chattel that cost them so much money and could earn them so much more. Oh, I didn’t doubt that whippings happened. There is too much evidence that they did. But whippings that disabled a slave for work just weren’t reasonable.

(Not that the authors or I want to suggest that slavery without whippings and starvation is somehow acceptable. Slavery is immoral. It never should have been allowed to come to our shores, and the United States should have followed England’s lead when they abolished it peacefully.)

I’ve never cared for the picture of black people sitting passively by, just wishing and hoping that freedom would come some day, not doing anything to better their condition, except maybe lying to get out of work. That did not comport with what I know of the human spirit. To accept that picture was to accept the canard that slaves somehow were not human.

Instead, it is in the long quotations from Civil War newspapers, private letters, and military reports that I find the indomitable black spirit that I believed was there. I believed that even when others most insisted that freedom had been handed to the slaves, that they had done little or nothing to wrest it from the hands of Confederate plantation owners.

One startling sentence with two statistics says it all: “By October 20, 1864, there were 140 Negro regiments in the Federal service with a total strength of 101,950 men.” Until I read that line, my knowledge of black service in the Civil War had begun and ended with the story told in the movie “Glory” of the Massachusetts regiment that fought so gallantly and was sacrificed so cruelly in the assault on Fort Wagner. That is only one in a litany of acts of courage and resolve by slaves who ran away to become black soldiers – and the freedmen who volunteered in droves.

The black community of today can look back on the slaves and freedmen of the Civil War era with justifiable pride. The racism rampant in that day and for a century and more since then may have dismissed blacks as somehow inferior, but we do not have to extend that error one more day into our time.
.