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Slippery Statistics. Traditional historians already regard the sociologists and statisticians now invading their discipline as so many Visigoths likely to ruin the already declining quality of written history, substitute accounting for breadth of vision and insight, and eventually relegate old-school historians to peripheral pursuits like intellectual history. In the past, the humanists have managed to hold off the invasion with light scholarly musket fire. Statistics and averages are misleading. (Everyone knows the story of the nonswimming statistician who drowned in trying to wade a river with an average depth of three feet.) Sociologists are well known for expending a king's ransom on graph paper, conferences and field work to prove something that everybody knows, e.g., there is some likelihood you will marry the girl next door. Besides, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. once said, "Almost all important questions are important precisely because they are not susceptible to quantitative answers."
Time on the Cross is offered not as a complete history but as a corrective. The authors bow to the need for psychological studies. They are clearly aware that their statistical base is sometimes small and that their inferences about average well-being on the plantation is morally irrelevant to the outrage of slavery, the psychological anguish it caused, and the agonized voices of indi vidual slaves that have come down from the dark past. Yet the authors, generally moderate, are quite merciless when dealing with what they regard as the fumbling ignorance of Stampp, Elkins and Phillips on the subject of economics and statistics. The message is perfectly clear. Historians who do not have these tools could grope for another hundred years in subjective confusion and never be able even to evaluate or rebut the work of the cliometricians.
It is too early to know what sort of traditional defense (or "If you can't lick 'em, join 'em" strategy) may result from this by far the most massive assault yet by the Visigoths. Preliminarily, though, cliometrics seems to have scored heavily. TIME consulted a dozen American scholars, many of whom had read the book in advance of publication.
All thought that the statistics were sometimes sparse, that they should and would be subjected to extreme scrutiny. Many pointed out the limitations of economics in re-creating the past. Historian Harold Woodman noted, for in stance, that the book's use of per capita income as an index of economic growth is questionable when applied to a nonindustrial society. Economic Historian Murray Rothbard said, "Cliometrics doesn't work for the current economy, so how could it work on information from 1860?" Sociologist Orlando Patter son questioned some of the inferences that Fogel and Engerman draw from their statistics, such as the assumption that young black girls were prudish, not promiscuous, because the average age of black slave women on having a first child was 22.