Stampp was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1912; his parents were of German Protestant descent. His mother was a Baptist who forbade alcohol and strictly observed the Sabbath; his father, a tough disciplinarian in the old-world German style.[citation needed]
His family suffered through the Great Depression, "there was never enough money," but Stampp worked a number of small odd jobs as a teen, managing to save enough to afford tuition, first, at Milwaukee State Teachers' College, and then at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He earned both his B.A. and M.A. there in 1935 and 1936 respectively under the influences of Charles A. Beard (author of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States) and William B. Hesseltine (known for coining the phrase about intellectual history: it's "like nailing jelly to the wall"). Hesseltine supervised Stampp's dissertation; Stampp remembered him as a "bastard" during this time, but the two managed to work together successfully through the completion of Stampp's Ph.D. in 1942. He then spent brief stints at the University of Arkansas and the University of Maryland, College Park, 1942–46, before joining the faculty at Berkeley. His teaching tenure ran 37 years; in 2006, Stampp celebrated six decades of association there.[citation needed]
During his undergraduate years at Wisconsin, Stampp was a member of the Theta Xi fraternity.[1]
In his first major book, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956), Stampp countered the arguments of historians such as Ulrich Phillips, who characterized slavery as an essentially benign and paternalistic institution that promoted Southern racial harmony. Stampp asserted, to the contrary, that African Americans actively resisted slavery, not just through armed uprisings but also through work slowdowns, the breaking of tools, theft from masters, and diverse other means. Through a lengthy scholarly career, Stampp insisted that the moral debate over slavery lay at the crux of the Civil War, rather than other reasons related to the economic or political relationship between the Federal Government and the states.[3][4]The Peculiar Institution remains a central text in the study of U.S. slavery.
Criticism of the Dunning School
His next study, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877, also revised a scholarly stronghold, that of the story put forth by William A. Dunning (1857–1922) and his school of followers. In this rendering, the South emerges mercilessly beaten, "prostrate in defeat, before a ruthless, vindictive conqueror, who plundered its land and ... turned its society upside down...."[citation needed] The North's greatest sin, according to Dunning, consisted of relinquishing control of the Southern governments to "ignorant, half-civilized former slaves."[citation needed]
To systematically refute Dunning's interpretation, Stampp amassed a trove of secondary sources. He was criticized for not employing more primary material.[citation needed] Stampp's rejoinder was seen by some historians as a pro-Northern rationalization: though he clearly admitted that the North walked out on Reconstruction[citation needed] while it was nowhere near completion, he went on to claim that in light of the passage of the 14th and 15th amendments, Reconstruction was a success; he deemed it "the last great crusade of the nineteenth-century romantic reformers."[5] But for an equal number of other historians, Stampp's appraisal rang as eminently "temperate, judicious and fair-minded."[citation needed]
Major monographs
Indiana Politics During the Civil War (1949) [revised dissertation]
And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860-1861 (1950)
^Stampp, Kenneth. America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
^Kenneth Stampp, The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877 (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 101.
References
Much of the information for this article is drawn from three principal sources:
John G. Sproat, "Kenneth M. Stampp," in Dictionary of Literary Biography vol. 17: Twentieth-Century American Historians, ed. Clyde N. Wilson. (Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Co., 1983), 401–407;
