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The Slavery Debates, 1952-1990: A Retrospective. By Robert William Fogel. The Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. [xii], 106. $22.95, ISBN 0-8071-2881-3.)
Robert William Fogel tells us at the beginning of this slender volume that what follows is "a personal, retrospective meditation on a series of debates that extended over most of my adult life" (p. ix). The author, of course, played a critical role in the intense scholarly debates over slavery that took place between the early 1950s and 1990, and he deserves a careful hearing from all of us who try to understand the complex and tangled history of human bondage in the American South. But readers should be aware that the format in which he presents his views, the 2001 Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History at Louisiana State University, forced him to be highly selective in his choice of debaters.
After opening with a discussion of the long-lasting impact of Ulrich B. Phillips's American Negro Slavery (New York, 1918) and Kenneth M. Stampp's opening salvo against Phillips, "The Historian and Southern Negro Slavery" (American Historical Review, 31 [April 1952], 618-24), Fogel moves quickly into a discussion of the "New Directions in the Study of Slavery" launched by the cliometric revolution of the late 1950s and 1960s (p. 18). Cliometrics, which Fogel defines as "the systematic application of the behavioral models of the social sciences and their related mathematical and statistical methods to the study of history" (p. 19), burst onto the scholarly stage with Alfred H. Conrad's and John R. Meyer's article "The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South" (Journal of Political...