The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South. By Kenneth Stampp.
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956. Pp. xi + 436)
Until 1956, the historiography of slavery and the U.S. South relied heavily on monographs written by southerners. Most notably, Ulrich B. Phillips’ American Negro Slavery filled the place of slavery’s standard history. Likely Phillips agreed with Stampp’s assertion that antebellum slavery presented the greatest and most difficult moral and economic conundrum to the antebellum United States. But whereas Phillips gave southerners the benefit of a doubt ala the notion of the paternalist master, Stampp offered a vastly different reality to the scholars and students of the South. Stampp stripped the South’s romanticism away and revealed a brutal slave society where African-Americans lived at the tenuous good (or more often not so good) will of their masters.
Stampp’s work opened his work with a history of American slavery. He gave little credence to what he believed were half-hearted platitudes on the abolition of slavery by the Founders. He cast doubt on many of the era’s attempts to remove slavery from the United States because they unusually hinged on removing slaves and not slavery. He excoriated the American Colonization Society; colonization in fact moved free African Americans to an unknown and hostile land. Separation and isolation, not freedom, typified the attempts the Society. The reality of colonization hardly compared with the reality of slavery. Louisiana slaves, Stampp told the reader, literally ate dirt and clay. Malnourishment and appalling living conditions meant that slaves lived little better than animals. Violence and terror entered into the slave’s life often. Flogging in particular became the chief mode of physical punishment for unruly or defiant slaves. The effectiveness of constant physical punishment was limited, for slaves often ran away after being whipped. Rarely, a slave might even dare to assault an overseer for physically abusing a fellow slave. Legal imputations against slavery’s violence rarely ever were enforced. In North Carolina, a white was sentenced to death for murdering slave, but this was occurrence remained rare. Perhaps most sinister of all was just how effective slavery was. Economic efficiency meant that the South, instead of struggling against the aged and unwanted chain of slavery, deliberately ties the regional ships of states to human bondage.
The contribution to historiography provided by Stampp proved invaluable. The Lost Cause school deluded southerners about their cultural baggage for far too long. The sheer ruthlessness of slavery, shown here in all its bloody and sweaty brutality, changed the perception of an entire generation of southern historians. Stampp began with the assumption that slaves were ordinary human beings. More interestingly however was Stampp’s assertion that black men were simply white men with black skin. Stampp correctly identified the major problem inherent in southern slavery and the major immorality in the dangerous religious defenses used to justify the South’s continued reliance on chattel-slavery: Blacks remained absolutely equal with whites in their humanity. But Southerners quickly since the Civil War quickly pointed out that St. Paul never expressly forbade slavery in writings such as Ephesians 6:5 and Colossians 3:22; he further admonished masters to treat their slaves fairly in Colossians 4:1. The problem with such defenses remained their massive incongruity with southern slavery as Stampp portrayed brutally and accurately. To be sure, humane masters existed. Jefferson Davis treated his slaves notably well. But Stampp proved that slavery’s brutal efficiency worsened the conditions of slaves to a horrifying and degrading reality in many cases. Confronted with this fact, even the religious southerner must throw out his New Testament attempts to justify his forbearers, for slavery systematically and totally degraded the humanity of slaves to the point that the vast majority of white southerners believed blacks to be de-facto sub-humans. Thus antebellum southerners desecrated the sanctity of the image of God, biblically forbade in Genesis 9:6 and throughout the entirety of the scriptures.
Miles Smith Texas Christian University
The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South. By Kenneth M. Stampp. New York, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 1956.
Kenneth M. Stampp declared in his work, The Peculiar Institution, Southerners live in the shadow of a real tragedy, American slavery. The peculiar institution, as antebellum Southerners referred to slavery, started as a chattel system that eventually developed into an “inescapable part of life in the Old South.” He claims the tragedy did not spring from inherent evilness of the Southerners, but developed over a period of many years until they had firmly built social structures around it. Stampp’s attempt to understand the Southern slavery system represents one of the first and most influential modern works in this field.
Above all, Stampp finds that slavery remained a labor system and an institution for regulating race relations. Concerns about the organization and efficiency of slaves always took precedence in the minds of slave owners over religious or moral concerns because the institution allowed white upper class slave owners social control and profitability. Most slave owners entered the field with their slaves out of necessity; few obtained levels of wealth that allowed them to fulfill only managerial function. Owning slaves allowed white Southerners to move up in class and status, though few obtained the designation of planter. Only those who owned more than thirty slaves achieved the maximum efficiency and became planters: they developed the most complex economic organizations, the highest degree of specialization among their slaves, and they could withdraw from the fields themselves.
Slaves proved a “troublesome property” for their masters. Stampp finds no evidence proving slaves lived with no concept of freedom and therefore remained content with their lot in life. He finds that slaves actively resisted the institution through small acts of defiance more often than in large rebellions or escape attempts. Freedmen reported that slaves often pretended ignorance and preformed tasks incompetently as a form of rebellion. Many refused to learn a skilled craft, failing to understand any benefit for themselves in doing so. The most common forms of resistance included slowing down the day’s work, performing their tasks carelessly, or damaging property of the masters. Some slaves did attempt to flee to freedom, but the numbers remained so few that this act of resistance did not threaten the survival of the institution. In most cases, runaway slaves lasted only a few days before returning on their own or being captured.
The author seeks to dispel several commonly held myths surrounding the antebellum South and its peculiar institution. He believes that the South chose the institution of slavery; conditions of climate, the need for labor, and ideals of racial hierarchies did not force the South to adopt this lifestyle. He also argues against slavery as being mutually beneficial to slaves and masters. Previous historians theorized that slavery provided institutionalized civility to Africans, preparing them for eventual freedom. Doctors and scientists defended slavery in the nineteenth-century by claiming African Americans possessed certain traits which “uniquely fit them for bondage.” Stampp argues against all these theories and finds slavery to be a brutalizing and immoral institution, designed for economic gain.
The peculiar institution proved profitable for almost everyone who invested in it. Stampp argues that Southerners discussed many reasons for employing slavery, but often chose not to discuss the profitability of the institution. Previous historians posited that slavery ceased to be profitable by the close of the antebellum period, but Stampp argues that slaves on the market continued to be valued very highly as did their labor. If slavery failed to produce a profit, most likely it would have been abandoned. He further argues that slavery “was not purely or exclusively an economic institution: it was also part of a social pattern.” Becoming a slave owner allowed whites to enter the upper class and gain status in the community. The institution of slavery created a structure for regulating race relations and became “an instrument of social control.”
Stampp relies on a variety of materials to develop The Peculiar Institution, primarily the diaries of Southerners. His work is well researched, though modern readers will surely feel that much of Stampp’s interpretations and assumptions are dated. For instances, rather than stating that all men are inherently created equal, Stampp declares in his preface that “Negroes are after all only white men with black skins.” Also of some concern, Stampp relies heavily on accounts from slave owners without seeking out much from the slaves themselves.
Misty Wilson