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Because the book also takes up the authors' beliefs about how so many historians misread the past—through misuse of figures, inadequate training in economics and statistics, reliance on isolated eyewitness accounts and subjective "impressions"—it offers a fascinating insight into how historians work, and how living political attitudes affect views of the dead past. Any stigma will do to beat a vicious dogma. Accordingly, says Time on the Cross, the trail of historical error began with the rhetorical zeal of abolitionists. Justly considering slavery a crime against God and man, they did not hesitate to exaggerate its iniquities I and weakness. Abolitionists like Frederick Law Olmsted and Cassius Marcellus Clay and slavery critics like Fanny Kemble were the main source of early stories about widespread cruelty and sexual abuse, and the assertion that slavery was an economic disaster that retarded the growth of the South. The inefficiency of plantations and black labor came as a natural corollary, both in logic and because many abolitionists, ironically, were racists who assumed black inferiority as a matter of course. Olmsted, a New Yorker, traveled in the South but stoutly asserted that slaves did a third to a half as much work as "the commonest, stupidest Irish domestic drudges at the North." Opined Cassius Clay: "God made them for the sun and the banana."
Such views, especially regarding economics and slave inefficiency, lasted into the 20th century, when they were adapted by Historian U.B. Phillips, a Southern racist whose aim was to rehabilitate the cruel plantation owners. Though he successfully showed that many slaves were well fed and cared for, he accepted the notion that plantations were not run for a profit. Instead, he argued, plantations, "were the best schools yet invented for the mass training of that sort of inert and backward people."
Dumbfoundingly, Phillips' American Negro Slavery, published in 1918, remained a dominant force in slave historiography for 30 years. Despite WPA interviews with former slaves in the 1930s and the work of a number of black historians, which went largely ignored, it was not until the period between Gunnar Myrdal's American Dilemma in 1944 and Kenneth Stampp's The Peculiar Institution (1956) that emphasis began to be placed on environment and the effects that slavery had on blacks and black culture. The stereotype of childlike, lackadaisical behavior of plantation blacks remained, though it now began to be explained away in all sorts of sympathetic, guilt-ridden and ingenious ways. Stampp regarded it as a kind of defense against the pressures of the peculiar institution. Historian Stanley Elkins' Slavery (1959) even suggested that "Sambo, the typical plantation slave ... docile but irresponsible, loyal but lazy, humble but chronically given to lying and stealing," resembled not so much a kind of survivor's soft-shoe sabotage of Massa as the form of demoralization and infantilism that set in among inmates of Nazi concentration camps.