[1] The book directly challenged the long-held conclusions that American slavery was unprofitable, a moribund institution, inefficient, and extremely harsh for the typical slave.
[2] The authors proposed that slavery before the Civil War was economically efficient, especially in the case of the South, which grew commodity crops such as cotton, tobacco, and sugar.
These types of crops were usually grown on plantations that employed a gang system of labor, which was closely monitored and considered more efficient than task-based work by smaller groups.
White militias directly attacked and intimidated freedmen, and with the agricultural economy being decimated, causing widespread problems and suffering among the entire population.)
Fogel and Engerman wrote: "[S]lave owners expropriated far less than generally presumed, and over the course of a lifetime a slave field hand received approximately ninety percent of the income produced."(p.
5-6) They were estimating the value of housing, clothing, food and other benefits received by the slaves and argued that they lived as well in material terms as did free urban laborers; life was difficult for both classes.
Rather, they asserted, their goal was to counter myths about the character of black Americans—myths they said had gained currency in the antebellum slavery debate and had survived into the civil rights era.
The book received unusually broad mainstream media attention for a work of economic history; its revisionism in the decade following some achievements by the civil rights movement caused controversy.
[5][page needed] Historian Edward Pessen wrote in 1985, "A major problem with the findings of Fogel and Engerman, in addition to flaws in their data, mathematical errors, and lapses from logic that are apparent even to general readers, is the harsh critical reaction to their work by their fellow cliometricians, who have attacked the 'persistent [theoretical] bias' in their study, its lack of a 'scientific foundation,' and its needlessly difficult and inaccurate equations, among other faults.
New scholarly articles and books have been published that use similar methods to evaluate such factors as the physical stature of slaves (related to their health and material well-being) and their standard of living.