Description

Easton Press leather edition of Kenneth Stamp's "The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South," a COLLECTOR'S edition, one of the LIBRARY OF AMERICAN HISTORY series, published in 1995. COLLECTOR'S NOTES is included. Bound in hunter green leather, the book has paper end leaves, acid-free paper, satin book marker, hubbed spine, gold gilt on three edges---in FINE condition. Enslavement of black Africans by white European settlers began in North America as early as 1619 and was an accepted and integral part of the emerging American society, particularly in the highly agrarian southern colonies and territories. Despite claims that enslaved people loved their status, escape attempts were frequent and well documented---although the prospect for success was extremely dim. Slaves were intentionally kept illiterate and ignorant of geography and black people were not allowed to blend with the general population. Most of the free states enforced laws protecting a slaveowner's right to reclaim an escaped slave. Some slaves, such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas became vital members of the absolutist movement, but the majority of escaped slaves were caught and brutally tortured---sometime killed---for their efforts. Slaves were considered property and nothing more. Severe whipping was by far the most popular form of punishment, although branding and mutiliation were not uncommon. Delaware prohibited importations of Africans in 1787; Virginia in 1778; Maryland in 1783; South Carolina in 1787; North Carolina in 1794, and Georgia in 1798. By 1810, the southern slave population had grown to more than a million. The South of 1860 was overwhelmingly rural. Five southern states---North Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Texas---did not have a single city with a population of 10,000. New Orleans was the only big American city that was truly southern. The "peculiar institution" was part of othe agrarian civilization. The South's nearly four million slaves were unevenly distributed geographically, but most slaveholders had fewer than a dozen slaves. The planter who owned more than thirty slaves were the ones who achieved maximum efficiently, and those owners generally hired full-time overseers. Urban masters often hired out the husbands or children of their female domestics. Arson was the most common slave "crime," as fire was a favorite means for aggrieved slaves to even the score with their master. The status of a child of mixed Negro and white ancestry depended upon the status of the mother. In 1830, more than thirty-six hundred free Negroes or persons of mixed ancestry owned slaves. Marriages between whites and Negroes or "mulattoes," whether free or unfree, were prohibited. But the color barrier did not prevent miscegenation in the Old South. "How many have fallen before this temptation!" wrote a Virginian. "So many that it has almost ceased to be a temptation to fall!" Many parents traced the moral ruin of their sons "to temptations found in female slaves in their own or neighbor's households." Another Virginian complained that whites in the neighborhood interfered with their slave women. "Cato born of Dinah, but some white chap on the commons, and another Virginian affirmed that one of his slave women had all of her children "by whoredom most of them gotten by white men" at a neighbor's house. Two large slaveowners, Turner and Crocker, acknowledged having slave mistresses. Dr. Kenneth Stamps' research is exhaustive. Stamps, who lived from 1912-2009, was the Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California---Berkley.