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Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South

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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

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.

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!

The Peculiar Institution is a detailed, logical book but it does not hold one's interest well. It is difficult to stay focused when attempting to wade through the details. Stampp addresses every issue, including the food eaten by slaves and how they ate it.

There is not much prior knowledge expected of the reader. Stampp addresses the information he intends to disprove. For example, he shows that not all slaves wanted to escape their chains since many believed God wanted them to serve their masters.

The sources used not only maintained Stampp's credibility, it added perspective. The slave owner's diaries and the diaries of the slaves were utilized and helped project everyone involved as human instead of the monsters they are depicted as in elementary school.

It is interesting to take into account the time period in which this book was written, right after Brown v. Board and at the beginning of the civil rights movement. In a time when Gone With the Wind's pro-South sentiment was a popular way to remember the Civil War, Stampp's book must have changed many opinions.

Overall, this is a useful history of slavery.

In the mid-1950s, Jim Crow was still commonplace in the South, Brown vs. Board of Education made integration mandatory, and blacks refused to move to the "back of the bus," leading the United States Supreme Court to condemn Alabama's segregated public transportation. Morrison Professor of History Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley, and a specialist in nineteenth-century history, Kenneth M. Stampp wrote The Peculiar Institution; Slavery in the Ante-bellum South during the infancy of the civil rights movement. Stampp's book refutes the Gone With the Wind view of the paternalistic slaveowner and his "cheerful and acquiescent" bondsmen. (86)

Southern slaveowners rationalized the ownership of black human beings for more than a century, and with greater vigor as the institution increasingly fell from acceptance in more liberal societies. Pro-slavery writers used "religious, historical, scientific, and sociological arguments to demonstrate that slavery was a positive good for both Negroes and whites." (383) Stampp assumes the burden of proof, and meets each of these arguments head-on with irrefutable evidence taken from first person sources: inventories, diaries, newspaper advertisements and editorials, slave narratives, and the personal letters of slaveowners. He finds an "important form of protest" in the advertisements for runaway slaves, (110) "managerial inefficiency" not "evidence of the unprofitability of slavery" in the account books of debt-ridden planters, (391) and heartrending humanity in the letter of one slavewoman who, sold away, begged for her daughter, Jennie, to be restored to her, after their separation. (242)

While debaters might quibble about the respective benefits slaves and slaveowners derived from slavery, there can be little debate about the mercenary benefits of the system. Stampp reserves his strongest arguments for his penultimate chapter, Profit and Loss. Slavery's defenders protested that slavery was unprofitable, in an effort to strengthen their claims of benevolent paternalism. The author's careful review of "the business records which many masters kept, and in the reports which some prepared for various publications," he finds slave labor produced handsome profits, even for the small owners with just one or two slaves. The average slaveholder had moderate expenses, "the annual tax on able-bodied slaves was usually between fifty and seventy-five cents," and with necessary items, such as "Negro shoes," selling for a dollar or less, and annual food costs of between $7.50 and $15.00 per slave, the maintenance of a captive labor force seldom exceeded $35.00 a year per slave to the plantation owner. (405-406) Profits ranged from a very comfortable $250 a year per hand in the thriving southwest of the 1850s, to the Deep South where slaveholders seldom failed to reap returns of seven to ten percent annually. The bottom line is slavery was profitable, and continued to be profitable until emancipation. If free labor, or divestment of slaves and land, had proven itself to be a more profitable venture, surely the "peculiar institution" would have found few adherents.

A more honest book on the slave experience had likely never been written when Kenneth Stampp took up the task. In his well-written and exhaustive history, he re-affirms the historian's "article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present." In the preface, written in 1955, Stampp acknowledges that "American Negroes . . . still strive to break what remains of the caste barriers first imposed upon them in slavery days." (vii) More than fifty years later this book is still relevant, and deserves to be called a classic of antebellum American History.

One of the main reasons I picked up The Peculiar Institution was to learn why a nation that was founded on the basis of a popular government would then turn around and aggressively import African slaves. The book tells of the creation of the institution of slavery in the New World as something that evolved, rather than something that European settlers consciously constructed.

It also does a good job of discussing the demographics and economics of slavery. Only a small number of white people in the south owned slaves, and those that did usually owned just one. Yet, because ownership of the vast majority of slaves was concentrated in the hands of a few, most slaves lived on huge plantations. Because slave labor was so cheap, business managers would frequently choose to buy or lease out slaves for work. This forced free labor to compete with the slaves for jobs and wages declined.

These portions of the book are utterly fascinating, and I couldn't put the book down. However, there was a bit more than I really cared to know about the average diet of slaves, and it seemed to belabor the rather obvious fact that free whites were usually able to commit violent crimes against black slaves with impunity. In these sections the book dragged a bit, and I felt that the author would have done the reader a favor by cutting a few of the 400+ pages.

If you are a "lay reader" first venturing into a study of Southern slavery, then this may not be the place to start. However, for scholars, students, and those with a foundation in the topic, Stampp's "Peculiar Institution" is a must-read.

Admittedly, his writing is deep, yet it is vital and relevant. Stamp is a myth-buster busting myths with first-hand quotes, statistics, and primary sources. For an understanding of the true, and tormenting, nature of American slavery, "Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South" is an excellent resource.

Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of "Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction," "Soul Physicians," "Spiritual Friends," and the forthcoming "Sacred Friendships: Listening to the Voices of Women Soul Care-Givers and Spiritual Directors."

A major landmark on slavery, Stampp's book is too often judged harshly by current standards. The controversial line in the Preface, "...Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins" obviously falls short in terms of culture, identity and power relations. But back in 1956, asserting equality among peoples was a big advance in understanding compared to Ulrich Phillips' work. Exhaustively using the same kinds of plantation sources as Phillips, Stampp revived the neo-abolitionist interpretation and reshaped our view of US slavery, crafting a book that remains the essential starting point for all later work. Further advances built upon this achievement, notably by using direct slave testimony (personal narratives, the WPA oral histories), but the perspective of later studies such as J. Blassingame, "The Slave Community" and E. Genovese, "Roll Jordan Roll" is similarly sympathetic to those held in bondage. The other main shortcoming is that Stampp deals mostly with the 1830-60 period while assuming it represented the overall experience of American enslavement, which it did not. It is still a monument of 20th-century historiography by any standard.

In his The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956), Kenneth M. Stampp provides the first challenge by a non-African-American to the interpretations found in Ulrich B. Phillips American Negro Slavery (1918). Phillips disseminates a paternalistic interpretation of slavery in his text that became the predominate perspective in American literature, scholarship, thinking, and memory until the 1960s and 1970s. Stampp, largely using the same evidence as Phillip, argues that slavery was anything but a paternalistic social institution; it was a profitable system of labor (not restricted to agriculture) deliberately chosen by Southerners and reinforced, for example, by law, religion, and custom. This system of control-based and mobile labor deprived African-Americans of their African and familial cultural mores. There was a conscience effort to keep the system of slavery intact by manipulating truth and science (for example, with the help of Joseph Nott) resulting in the proslavery arguments. Significantly, Stampp asserts, "This institution deserves close study if only because its impact upon the whole country was so disastrous. But, in addition, such a study has a peculiar urgency, because American Negroes still await the full fruition of their emancipation" (vii).

Throughout the book, Stampp provides interesting and organized information. He establishes the context by providing an overview of the setting in which slavery took place. Stampp explains the way in which slaves (and others on the plantation) worked and when. Stampp discusses runaway slaves and other ways in which slaves resisted their condition, stealing and causing fires, for example. "A Troublesome Property," more than any other chapter in The Peculiar Institution, directly provides slaves with agency. Slaves found relief in actions such as dancing, drinking alcohol, and by various religious practices. Nat Turner especially but also Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad were causes for fear among the slave-owning class. As slavery continued despite African-Americans' noted dislike of their condition, Stampp's continues by discussing the harsh treatment with which masters treated their human property. Legislative bodies passed laws at various levels of government to regulate aspects of slavery, but judges, witness, and juries selectively and rarely enforced these laws. Due to the inhumane treatments and conditions, including a lack of food and rest, slaves were often ill. Regardless of the social position or desires of both whites and blacks, everyone lived in limbo zones due to the illogical nature of the Southern social and cultural systems. Finally and especially important, he emphasizes that slavery has not always been the same.

Although Stampp's research and writing for this book preceded the famous 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision, calls by individuals and organizations for an increase in African-American autonomy surely influence his topic and interpretation.

Stampp seems to use a diverse range of sources. Significant portions of The Peculiar Institution consist of secondary sources, as indicated by his footnotes. Although largely lacking the African-American voice, especially that of slaves, he does include the voice of Frederick Douglass. Furthermore, Stampp recognizes and states several times that all slaves were individual and different. During his time, this would have been a profound statement. Not until the 1970s would scholars really come to use and value the voice of African-Americans when telling their story. Occasionally, it seems that Stampp is generalizing information or at the very least he lacks footnotes and more than one example for important information. For example, he says masters sometimes assigned two people to be husband and wife and other times let them choose each other.

Altogether, Stampp provides an interesting, enlightening interpretation of slavery that is still an important and relevant work. Regardless of the interpretations, he has good information for students new to slavery, and he has written with clear, precise prose. This is an enjoyable and welcome revisionist interpretation. Although this author recognizes it is beyond the scope of The Peculiar Institution with its economic perspective, this work largely neglects discussion or recognition of the true and multiple physical and psychological horrors of slavery. When Stampp does occasionally mention them--such as punishments for runaways--they lack pathos. Stampp, nevertheless, made an important contribution with this work.

This book was excellent since Mr.Stampp doesn't impress his conclusions on the reader but rather presents a landscape of the ante-bellum south inwhich the reader can for there own opinion.