This post concludes a series exploring Causes of the Civil War.
A review of the literature reveals – not surprisingly – a lack of agreement over whether the American Civil War was inevitable. Given the fact that it did occur, the question under consideration might be better stated [...]
Continue Reading →
The folks at the Berkeley’s public affairs office confirmed for me today that Kenneth M. Stampp died. His book The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956) is required reading in my program and rightly so. The view into slavery was groundbreaking.
A full obituary will be posted shortly on Berkeley’s news [...]
Continue Reading →When considering slaves, Colonial Virginians abandoned the English tradition of partus sequitur patrem (one’s status was determined by the disposition of their father) in favor of the Roman principle of partus sequitur ventrem, a “child inherits the condition of the mother.” (1) Thus offspring of slave women were the property of their mother’s owner whether [...]
Continue Reading →Kenneth Stampp’s chapter “Chattels Personal” is excellent. I suspect that “chattel” is not a word most of us learn unless we study law or Antebellum American history in depth. Its meaning in the context of slavery is, of course, that person’s slaves were consider legally as “chattel personal.”
Being a person quite taken [...]
Continue Reading →[This post continues the series On Slavery (1 here).]
Kenneth Stampp in his book, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, suggests that [...]
Continue Reading →
What I am Reading
New From Publishers
New Acquisitions
