Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South [Paperback]

Kenneth M. Stampp (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Review

"A thoughtful, deeply moving book....Mr. Stampp wants to show specifically what slavery was like, why it existed, and what it did to the American people .... There is a massive impact to this book-made all the more effective by the fact that its author writes with a dispassionate and scholarly objectivity -- which helps to make it one of the most valuable and memorable books ever written in this field."-- Bruce Catton

"In ten sparkling chapters the book details and illuminates every aspect of slavery....Slavery is viewed not as a method of regulating race relations, not as an arrangement that was in its essence paternalistic, but as a practical system of controlling and exploiting labor. How the slaves worked, how they resisted bondage, how they were disciplined, how they lived their lives in the quarters, and how they behaved toward each other and toward their masters are themes which receive full exploration.... The materials are handled with imagination and verve, the style is polished, the factual evidence is precise and accurate. Some scholars will disagree with the conclusions. No one can afford to disregard them."-- Frank W. Klingberg, American Historical Review

"The Peculiar Institution is one of the most important and provocative works on Southern history to appear in our generation."-- David Donald, Commentary

From the Back Cover

"A thoughtful, deeply moving book....Mr. Stampp wants to show specifically what slavery was like, why it existed, and what it did to the American people .... There is a massive impact to this book-made all the more effective by the fact that its author writes with a dispassionate and scholarly objectivity -- which helps to make it one of the most valuable and memorable books ever written in this field."-- Bruce Catton

"In ten sparkling chapters the book details and illuminates every aspect of slavery....Slavery is viewed not as a method of regulating race relations, not as an arrangement that was in its essence paternalistic, but as a practical system of controlling and exploiting labor. How the slaves worked, how they resisted bondage, how they were disciplined, how they lived their lives in the quarters, and how they behaved toward each other and toward their masters are themes which receive full exploration.... The materials are handled with imagination and verve, the style is polished, the factual evidence is precise and accurate. Some scholars will disagree with the conclusions. No one can afford to disregard them."-- Frank W. Klingberg, American Historical Review

"The Peculiar Institution is one of the most important and provocative works on Southern history to appear in our generation."-- David Donald, Commentary

Product Details

• Paperback: 464 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (December 17, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679723072
• ISBN-13: 978-0679723073
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 1 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #118,649 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Still THE Sourcebook for Information on American Slavery, March 24, 2005

By 

Robert Boyle (Winnetka, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (Paperback)

Stampp's aim in writing this book was not to provide the complete and comprehensive last word on the subject of the American enslavement of Africans and their American descendents, nor to empathize with the oppressed slaves, nor to apologize for slavery, nor to echo the "voices" of slaves, nor to place it in the context of slavery around the world throughout human history (all of which are worthy topics which have been (and continue to be) addressed by other historians.

Stampp's aim was to provide information lacking (in 1955, and still scant fifty years later) as to the nature of the institution itself, AS an American institution (which it certainly was up until its final (and sloppily inefficient) dismantling beginning 1863 (in the midst of the civil war). The "Peculiar" Insitution (so dubbed by slave owners themselves, in secret (and embarrassed) acknowledgement of the sheer hypocrisy of this institution. Stampp does not attack the morality of slavery, nor does he "witness" the evils of slavery through statements of slaves or abolitionists (he is not writing a polemic); instead he provides us with something far more useful: empirical data on just what the institution was, how it worked, what its practices were and what putative justifications were offered by its proponents for its existence and nature. In doing so, Stampp gives his readers a far more damning criticism of slavery than any other writer I have encountered since reading Stampp's book for a high school history class in 1969. Stampp expertly strips the subject of the emotion and bias (on both sides) that has obscured the facts (history is distinct from myth and propaganda to the extent that it is about *facts* assembled through valid inferences) about slavery.

Some trite but persisting claims about slavery debunked by Stampp are:

(1) the myth that all (or even a majority) of Southern whites owned slaves. [A white family had to be fairly well off even to afford owning even one slave; a huge proportion of whites were scarcely better off financially or in terms of workload than were many slaves.]

(2) the myth that the institution of slavery was in fact predicated upon "bettering" the lot of Africans, or even "taking care of them"(the view that blacks were incurably biologically, poltically, socially or otherwise "inferior" to whites. [Even thoough these arguments for various policies concerning the treatment of slaves were often argued by defenders of the Peculiar Institution, the facts of the actual practice of slave belie both of these claims. Adding up the actual "benefits" slaveowners offered blacks, the fact is that blacks were not subjected to any sort of "improvement". (Bible study, as Mark Twain -- still a key observer of the *realities* of slavery! -- served to entertain and enculturate slaves -- even subjugate them as a "lower class", NOT as moral or social improvement. Policies (actual practices, whatever the rhetoric) toward slaves did NOT lead towards freedom or citizenship at all. (Facts may be cold, as one review pointed out -- but they tend to outweigh rhetoric or sentiment) -- and they are far harder to dismiss or impeach. ]

(3) in connnection with (2), Stampp's collection of data belies the claim that the typical slaveowner had any education or insight into the "care and feeding" -- much less mental and moral development -- of Africans. The chapter on the theory and practice of diet and health as applied to slaves alone (a section guaranteed to make the reader physically queasy) says more about not only the awfulness of the institution slavery, but the incredible -- beyond incredible -- ignorance and poor (one could say "inferior") judgment of slave owners. The myth that slaves were "bred" (or even captured or bought (usually bought) in Africa) and "fed" and cared for with even the insight one needed to raise cattle is dispelled by Stampp. An typcial African in Africa, left to fend for his food and health in "the uncivilized jungles" of the "dark continent" stood a far bettter chance of living healthily and to a ripe age than the typical American slave (I am not even considering the most highly exploited slaves of the very deep south (or in the "island") who were literally worked to death -- even "well treated slaves" were raised and fed and cared in compliance with white superstituions that rivaled any African mystical practices.

(4) One of the biggest myths addressed by Stampp is the myth that the slave economy was even a viable alternative to free enterprise (even in the most rudimentary and primitive sense of 'free enterprise' in which the free worker struggled to get work, do work, and earn enough to stay alive. Even if one writes off slaves as having absolutely NO value whatsoever as human beings to society (a direct and flagrant contradiction to the claims of pro-slave moralists -- but that's one of the many "peculiarities" of the Peculiar Institution!) Stampp provide data to show that as far as economic develop in America was concerned, slavery could be considered at best a poor alternative to other economic systems (not only "free enterprise, but even to "utopian closed-and-regulated societies, of which there were many then as now), a crutch to be abandoned at the earliest opportunity possible, not a "way of life", even for white slave owners, much less poor whites (who did NOT benefit from slavery economically, and only generated a sort of class resentment against African-American slaves.)

And there are plenty of other insights to be found in this half-century-old book that make it still worth purchasing and reading. This book is rich with balanced, documented facts -- conspicuously missing or undervalued in today's "subjective viewpoint historian" arguments. A subjective viewpoint -- even one as twisted as that of the advocates and defenders of "the Peculiar Institution" -- is not easily or effective refuted by another subjective viewpoint. Facts speak for themselves, and Stampp does an excellent job of providing facts which completely undermine the romantic notions (pro and con) of slavery, and showe it for what it was, an inept, ill-conceived, irrational, contradictory, absurd, manifestly unproductive and unfair institution which, if subject to the sort of review institutions these days are accountable to, would never have passed the initial blueprint stage.

Two final comments:

(1) RE comments other reviewers have made about this book. The use of the word "negro" (critized by one reviewer as antiquated) in Stampp's 1955 preface, was NOT antiquated in 1955, but a term accepted (even preferred) by most African Americans. Given Stampp's meaning and use of the term, it is still acceptable by all but those persons (of any race) who can some how manage to read through the account of one of the most unbelievably sickening, savage and idiotic institutions in human history and only take offense at the use of the term "negro", and at a writer who has portrayed a remarkably faithful, accurate, insightful and *useful* look at "the land of the free" 's most infamous institution, the negative effects of which we (all of us) still feel today.

(2) For the would-be reader still not convinced a book of this nature (neither a polemic now an apology, but an empirically based handbook on the pathology of slavery) is good or useful, I highly recommend this book as a useful good in examining the claims of modern-day oppressors (a large number, even if one restricts one's scope to the continent of Africa and the mid-East alone(!) ) that their nations or subcultures are "for the greater good", despite their differences from present-day American "culture". Stampp's book provides a methodology for evaluating such spurious claims the would-be sociologist, political scientist, anthropologist or other "critic" of contemporary human culture is seriously and truthfully and conscientiously attempting to evaluate.

RDB

29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Classic Study of the American Tragedy, February 5, 2001

By 

Robin Friedman (Washington, D.C. United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (Paperback)

Professor Stampp's book on American Slavery was published in 1956-- two years after the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v Board of Education and at the beginning of the American Civil Rights Movement. At the time of its publication, the book was recognized as a seminal study of America's "peculiar institution". Time has not changed the value of the book.

The book attacks a picture of the Old South that attained wide currency after Reconstruction and was carried through American culture in works such as, for example, Gone With the Wind-- that plantation slavery was a benign institution, part of an agrarian way of life, that was accepted by both slave and master. Professor Stampp shows that slavery had an economic, commercial basis, that it was resisted by slaves overtly and covertly, and that led to squalor, cruelty and suffering by the slaves. The peculiar institution does not merit sentimintality in any form.

In reading the book a half-century after its publication, and with some benefit of having read subsequent studies, I was struck with the moderate tone of the book. Yes, there were humane masters in an inhumane system and yes,there were variants in time and place. Stampp gives these variants their due, perhaps more than modern students would be inclined to do.

I was stuck with the tone of slavery's defenders, pre Civil War and thereafter, describing the institution as "patriarchal". Not only is that description in error, as Stampp shows, but for readers in a time beyond the mid 1950s, it is hardly a compliment to call a society "patriarchal", even if it deserved this characterization.

There has been a great deal of writing since the publication of this book on matters such as the nature of the slave trade, the presence, or lack of it, of an indigenous culture among the slaves, and the economic viability of slavery. These studies add to the picture that Professor Stampp has drawn.

This is an essential book for the understanding of our Nation's history. Those looking for an introduction to the Ante-Bellum South could not do better than to read this book.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An eye-opening account of slavery!, November 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (Paperback)

This is a fabulous resource for educators. It is a straight to the point account of slavery. I use it often to teach the Civil War era. It is one of those books that reads like fiction. Super!