Summary Of The Peculiar Institution

The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South takes a profound look into slavery in America from the beginning. The author, Kenneth Stampp, tells the story after doing a lot of research of how the entire South operated with slavery and in the individual states. The author uses many examples from actual plantations and uses a lot of statistics to tell the story of the south. The author’s examples in his work explains what slavery was like, why it existed and what it done to the American people.

According to the Webster Dictionary, Peculiar Institution, means a very interesting form of service. There were many strange events that had taken place that led up to slavery and the duration of it. The author expresses this idea clearly

The book explains how at first, the black salves were similar to white servants. They worked together and were sometimes freed after a certain period. The whites and blacks hung out after work and often had kids. Few have stated that many masters in the South treated their slaves better than those up North. Some may say this because masters in the South saw their slaves as an investment, which makes prefect sense. If the slaves missed a few days working on the plantation because of illness or what the case maybe that resulted in revenue loss. Whereas the North had many other alternatives to making revenue, such as mills and other manufacturing companies; the South basically depending on slaves to have income and to support their

The author also made it known that many plantation owners were accepting positions to claim that "to the Negroes, slavery seemed natural; knowing no other life, they accepted it without giving the matter much thought” (429). Which seems odd because blacks were transported to America and sold to the highest bidder. Their lifestyle prior did not resemble what they had endured in America. When arriving to America they had the impression they were here to help the white man not be inferior to