Slavery and the Slave System
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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
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nd of leisure-class family indulgence of its domestics" (326).
Stampp further notes that the acculturation process involved a duality of its own. The slaves outwardly mimicked the morality of their white masters as they were encouraged to do, but inwardly the domestic regimes of the slave cabin and of the "big house" were very different. Whites would explain this to themselves as being caused by racial traits, but in fact, as Stampp notes, the slave regime itself made the white pattern meaningless. The slaves thus lost their native culture without being able to find a workable substitute. Again, they lived outwardly in the same moral atmosphere as the whites but inwardly in a chaotic cultural environment (340). The ability of the slaves to appear to fit in helped with the acculturation process while never providing them with a real home.
Work Cited
Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.
Catherine Clinton in her book The Plantation Mistress makes her intentions clear in her Introduction as she notes her desire to explain and examine the role of women in the ante-bellum South and to correct many of the myths that exist about this period. One of the primary of those myths is tha
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Peculiar Institution, Clinton North, South Sex, South Clinton, Plantation Mistress, North South, , white women, southern society, Catherine Clinton, Vintage Books, plantation mistress, stampp notes, peculiar institution, black women, social structure south, structure south, labor force, gender race, women terms, Pantheon Books1982,
Approximate Word count = 1650
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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