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 was a tough disciplinarian in the old-world German style. His family suffered through the
Great Depression, "there was never enough money," but Stampp worked a small odd jobs as a teen, managing to save enough to afford tuition. He first attended 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. While a student at Wisconsin, Stampp was a member of the
Theta Xi fraternity. He died at age 96 on July 10, 2009, in
Oakland, California.
The Peculiar Institution 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.
The Peculiar Institution is 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 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...." The North's greatest sin, according to Dunning, consisted of relinquishing control of the Southern governments to "ignorant, half-civilized former slaves." To refute Dunning's interpretation, Stampp presented a trove of secondary sources. He was criticized for not employing more primary material. Stampp's rejoinder was seen by some historians as a pro-Northern rationalization: though he clearly admitted that the North walked out on
Reconstruction 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." But for an equal number of other historians, Stampp's appraisal rang as eminently "temperate, judicious and fair-minded." ==Major monographs==