The Peculiar Institution
The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South is a
Stampp answers historians such as
The use of the expression "peculiar institution" to refer to Southern slavery began in 1830 with leading Southern politician John C. Calhoun, and became widespread.[2]
Key points
Stampp's intent is to answer prior historians who had characterized slavery as a mostly benign, paternalistic tradition, helpful in many ways to the slaves, that encouraged racial harmony in the Southern states. Stampp also condemns those who claim that "to the Negroes, slavery seemed natural; knowing no other life, they accepted it without giving the matter much thought. Not that slavery was a good thing, mind you—but still, it probably hurt the Negroes less than it did the whites. Indeed, the whites were really more enslaved than were the Negro slaves" (429). Stampp likens this claim to pro-slavery arguments before the Civil War, which were "based on some obscure and baffling logic" (429).
Stampp held that the national debate over the morality of slavery, rather than
Chapters
- I. "The Setting" - background and demographics in the Old South.
- II. "From Day Clean to First Dark" - slaves' toilsome daily lives; slavery within southern labor systems.
- III. "A Troublesome Property" - defiance of slaves; Stampp asserts that African-American slaves actively resisted slavery, not just through uprisings and escape, but also through work slowdowns, feigning illness, damaging plantation machinery and work implements, theft, and other means. He lauds these actions as honorable resistance by slaves, which could be used as models by other oppressed groups, not least black Americans in the 1950s.
- IV. "To Make Them Stand in Fear" -disciplinary practices and submission; slave feelings of inferiority; fear and dependence in slave life; religion; incentives offered to slaves; power structures; cruelty of slaveowners and overseers.
- V. "Chattels Personal" - conflicts in racial classifications; slave laws and codes; limited freedoms for slaves.
- VI. "Slavemongering" - slave movement and sales; African slave trade prior to the nineteenth century; separation of slave families.
- VII. "Maintenance, Morbidity and Mortality" - slave food, clothing, housing and sickness.
- VIII. "Between Two Cultures" - class and caste systems; personal relationships of slaves and masters; social positions; sex, family, religion, leisure.
- IX. "Profit and Loss" - slave value; economic gains and losses through slavery; slavery in the economic system; agrarian vs. industrial development in the Old South; land exhaustion in the Old South.
- X. "He Who Has Endured" - moral ambiguity of slaveowners; the desperate defense of slavery; destructive effects of slavery on free labor, non-slaveowners and white yeomen in the Old South; intellectual torpor in the South due to rigid pro-slavery positions.
Use by Martin Luther King Jr.
In Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), author Martin Luther King Jr. quotes extensively from The Peculiar Institution. King describes Stampp's "fascinating" depiction of "the psychological indoctrination that was necessary from the master's viewpoint to make a good slave."[3]
References
- ISBN 978-0-394-70253-7.
- ^ "Peculiar Institution". Dictionary of American History. Gale. 2003.
- ISBN 9780807000687.