The Peculiar Institution

The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South is a non-fiction book about slavery published in 1956, by Kenneth M. Stampp of the University of California, Berkeley, and other universities.^[1] The book describes and analyzes multiple facets of slavery in the American South from the 17th through the mid-19th century, including demographics, lives of slaves and slaveholders, the Southern economy and labor systems, the Northern and abolitionist response, slave trading, and political issues of the time.

Stampp answers historians such as Ulrich Phillips, who said that many Southern slave owners were kind to their slaves and provided well for them. While it was sometimes known for slaves to have lives as good as or better than those of poor Northern workers, Stampp exposes this behavior as a selfish strategy to ease the lives of some slaves in order to prevent dissent among the rest, or to prevent possible legal action for mistreatment of slaves. Stampp argues that this treatment did little to convince slaves that their lives were acceptable, and that dissent and opposition were common, making slaves "a troublesome property", as they were called at the time.

The use of the expression "peculiar institution" to refer to Southern slavery began in 1830 with leading Southern politician John C. Calhoun, and became widespread.^[2]