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THE *eeuliar IInstitution Marygrove College Library Paperback Collection The Peculiar Institution THE jPECULIAR Institution Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South by Kenneth M* Stampp VINTAGE BOOKS A Division of Random House New York Vintage Books are published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. and Random House, Inc. © Copyright, 1956, by Kenneth M. Stampp All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copy¬ right Conventions. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. REPRINTED BY ARRANGEMENT WITH ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA For my father and mother [vii] PREFACE P rior to the Civil War southern slavery was America’s most profound and vexatious social problem. More than any other problem, slavery nagged at the public con¬ science; offering no easy solution, it demanded statesman¬ ship of uncommon vision, wisdom, and boldness. This in¬ stitution 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 Ne¬ groes still await the full fruition of their emancipation— still strive to break what remains of the caste barriers first imposed upon them in slavery days. With the historian it is an article of faith that knowledge of the past is a key to understanding the present. In this instance I firmly believe that one must know what slavery meant to the Negro and how he reacted to it before one can comprehend his more recent tribulations. Yet there is a strange paradox in the historian’s involve¬ ment with both present and past, for his knowledge of the present is clearly a key to his understanding of the past. Today we are learning much from the natural and social sciences about the Negro’s potentialities and about the basic irrelevance of race, and we are slowly discovering the roots and meaning of human behavior. All this is of im¬ mense value to the historian when, for example, he tries to grasp the significance of the Old South’s “peculiar institu¬ tion.” I have assumed that the slaves were merely ordinary human beings, that innately Negroes are, after all, only white men with black skins, nothing more, nothing less. Preface This gives quite a new and different meaning to the bond¬ age of black men; it gives their story a relevance to men of all races which it never seemed to have before. What I have written about slavery is built, as all books about history are built, upon what others have already writ¬ ten. Those who have made major contributions to this subject are cited in my footnotes. Ulrich B. Phillips’s Amer¬ ican Negro Slavery (1918) is the pioneer work of scholar¬ ship in this field; and though he approached the subject with different assumptions and from a different perspective, I learned much from his methods, his sources, and his find¬ ings. Since 1918 many others have written more specialized books and articles about slavery, and the best of them have pointed toward revisions of some of Phillips’s conclusions. Without these recent studies an attempt at a new synthesis would have been infinitely more difficult, if not impos¬ sible. Among the more outrageous forms of human exploita¬ tion is the kind to which an author subjects his friends. To acknowledge their patience and pains afterward is a feeble gesture, but I can at least absolve them from responsibility for the stylistic gaucheries and interpretive errors that sur¬ vive their labors. My entire manuscript was read and criti¬ cized by Carl Bridenbaugh, Richard N. Current, Frank Freidel, Richard Hofstadter, Henry F. May, and Paul S. Taylor. In addition, I have received valuable advice at dif¬ ferent times from Reinhard Bendix, John Hope Franklin, R. A. Gordon, Fred H. Harrington, William B. Hesseltine, John D. Hicks, and James F. King. I am grateful to the staffs of the various libraries I visited for the numerous courtesies they extended to me. A John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship en¬ abled me to devote a year to research; and the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of California provided funds for typists and travel. viii