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American Slavery: A Look Back at The Peculiar Institution
WHEN KENNETH STAMPP titled his 1956 study of southern slavery The Peculiar Institution he selected a title redolent with multiple meanings. Antebellum southerners, of course, had referred to slavery as their "peculiar" institution, as if to render it a quaint curiosity. In Stampp's book, the phrase evoked altogether different meanings. For Stampp, slavery was "peculiar" in the sense that it was aberrant, deviant, grotesque, and strange. He had no tolerance for the moonlight and magnolia mythology that contaminated many portraits of the Old South. His book is an earnest and methodical repudiation of everything that the term "the peculiar institution" had once stood for. In the four decades since its publication, Stampp's masterpiece has been recognized as one of the most influential modern works of American history. As John David Smith of North Carolina State University explains, "It marked a major turning point in the understanding of American slavery and set the intellectual tone for the next two generations of historians."
To study the history of chattel slavery in the United States is to grapple with weighty questions about national character, southern identity, and American race relations. Slavery, after all, as Stampp pointed out, had been America's "most profound and vexatious social problem." The place of human bondage in our past understandably had gripped the imaginations of professional historians since the late nineteenth century when the first generation of historians earned their doctorates. During the first half of this century, the prevailing interpretation of slavery reflected the influence of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. In numerous books and articles written during the teens and twenties, Phillips deployed his considerable literary skills and extensive research in plantation records to present an almost idyllic picture of plantation slavery. He emphasized the humanity of slave holders and left no doubt about his belief in the inherent inferiority of blacks and their suitability to chattel slavery. As rendered by Phillips, slaves were not unlike the amiable, submissive, child-like primitives who were then stock characters in minstrel shows. Blacks were less the victims than the beneficiaries of the slave trade; they had escaped barbarism and had been introduced to the rudiments of civilization. This remarkably sympathetic portrait of slavery did not go unchallenged...