Throughout the years, historians have attempted to convey the way American slaves felt about their experiences, but many accounts contradict each other. Professor Kenneth Stampp, Nobel Prize recipient Robert Fogel, Dr. Stanley Engerman, and Professor Eugene Genovese are just a few of the many historians that were intrigued by the lives of slaves. In "A Troublesome Property," Stampp rejected the common portrayal of American slaves as being inherently deceitful. Many people at the time believed slaves would feign illness to avoid working and would run away the first chance they got. Stampp said that slaves did this in attempt to take down the system. He correctly assesses as to why plantation owners and overseers were unwise to the slave's tactics. In Genovese's "The Black Work Ethic", slaves are described as being overly optimistic when working in groups and unrealistically dedicated to such work by plantation owners and historians. Genovese claims that this isn't realistic as many slaves were changed over the years and likely, formed a new culture to adapt to their circumstances. Similar to Stampp, Genovese believes that this was a tactic used to take down the system. The most realistic paper is the one by Fogel and Engerman called "The Quality of Slave Labor and Racism." These authors take a more objective approach to the topic, and discuss the economics of plantations. They rejected the assumption that slaves were generally lazy, insisting that slaves were actually thirty-four percent more efficient than white farmers were. Fogel and Engerman claim that the slaves also had to have been skilled workers, because otherwise plantations could not have been productive.
Fogel and Engerman's perspective was not based on any previous prejudices or opinions. Instead, they looked at the benefits of slavery from an economical standpoint. Fogel and Engerman aren't in favor of slavery per se, but they can see how, when correctly implimented, slavery can be a very profitable enterprise.
