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Title: Peculiar Institution : Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South by Kenneth M. Stampp ISBN: 0-679-72307-2 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 17 December, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.6 (5 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Answers Important Questions on American Slavery
Comment: 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.
Rating: 4
Summary: Good book, but where are his credentials?
Comment: I agree with other reviewers that this book is good. Good, but not to be taken, in my opinion, as the final authority on the subject. Prof. Stampp does not give enough detail concerning his credentials on this subject, and the other thing I object to in general is not that this book exists, but that, like so many others, it concentrates on the institution in the South, and glosses over the role played by our Northern brethren (who btw had much more racist opinions of blacks than southerners at that time as evidenced by their restrictive laws - and why the underground railway ended in Canada and not in a northern state) in buying and transporting these poor souls for profit and fortunes (all of which they and their heirs got to KEEP, not like in the South where all was lost), and the roles played by just about every nation at the time, not to mention the 500 years of slavery the black man suffered under the Islamic rule.
Anyone really interested in the subject should be required to read Rawick's 'The American Slave' based on the Slave Narratives which are interviews taken from actual former slaves during the 1930's. This is hearing it from the horses' mouth, so to speak, for the good and bad aspects.
Personally, my studies have brought me to believe that if handed the situation of slavery (which of course I would never have permitted in the first place), that immediate freedom ultimately was a great injustice to blacks. Given the situation at hand, blacks today would be much better off had slavery first been regulated so that it could have been gradually phased out in an organized and deliberate manner instead of people being 'turned out to pasture like cattle' with no education, no way of livelihood, and at a time when the entire South (even whites) were hard pressed to make a living. I, myself, could write a book on this subject, but suffice it to say that this is why I believe we have suffering today among blacks that are the result of parentless or fatherless homes, lack of education, lack of respect, and lack of culture. It has only been about 4 or 5 generations since the end of slavery, and the first 3 of these not much progress was made because everyone was living poorly. This is not that long of time to right such a terrible wrong, and the correct and best way of righting it might not have necessarily been to seek the fastest and most immediate.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Classic Study of the American Tragedy
Comment: 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.
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Title: Roll, Jordan, Roll : The World the Slaves Made by Eugene D. Genovese ISBN: 0394716523 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 12 January, 1976 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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Title: The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South by John W. Blassingame ISBN: 0195025636 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: November, 1979 List Price(USD): $29.95 |
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Title: American Slavery : 1619-1877 (10th-Anniversary Edition, with a new Preface and Afterword) by Peter Kolchin ISBN: 0809016303 Publisher: Hill & Wang Pub Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America by Ira Berlin ISBN: 0674002113 Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr Pub. Date: 04 March, 2000 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life by Stanley M. Elkins ISBN: 0226204774 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: November, 1976 List Price(USD): $19.00 |
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