Slavery was called the "peculiar institution," and it was stoutly defended by those who benefited from it, the white plantation owners in the South, just as is was vehemently opposed by abolitionists in both North and South who saw it as an evil. Slavery was a business for some, an economic necessity for others, and for those enslaved, a way of life from which they could only rarely escape. The slaves served a dual role. on the one hand, they were controlled and exploited by the slaveowners so that they would serve as a cheap and available labor force. They also served a role, though, however inadvertently, in shaping Southern society and in acculturating the races into a workable arrangement that kept social peace while contributing to economic stability. As laborers the slaves were exploited directly, while as an important element in the social structure of the South, their very existence served to create social controls and social norms that came to characterize the society and give both the slaves and the whites a sense of place.
Kenneth Stampp in The Peculiar Institution notes that two of the persistent characteristics of slavery in the South were the unequal size of individual slaveholdings and the uneven geographic distribution of the slave population (28-29), and the pattern of slave ownership is equated by Stampp with the way southern society developed. It is evident that in terms of serving as a labor force, the slaves were a vital part of the economy and a valuable type of property (27).
Stampp finds that the slaveowners expended a good deal of energy in fighting what they saw as recalcitrance on the part of the slaves, and this produced a number of elements in Southern society dedicated to controlling the slaves and directing their work. Attitudes of superiority were used to control the slave population. Fear of slave revolts was a permanent part of plantation life, and there was an intricate and powerful ...