| Subject: Kenneth M. Stampp, Civil War Historian, Dies at 96 |
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died July 10
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Date Posted: Thursday, July 16, 2009, 05:40:51pm
Kenneth M. Stampp, a leading Civil War historian who redirected the scholarly view of slavery in the antebellum South from that of a benign relationship between white plantation owners and compliant slaves to one of harsh servitude perpetuated to support the South’s agrarian economy, died Friday in Oakland, Calif. He was 96.
The cause was heart failure, said Richard Hill, a friend who was also the family lawyer and a former student of Mr. Stampp’s.
Mr. Stampp, who taught at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1946 to 1983, wrote several influential books about the Civil War period, from the decade leading up to the war to Reconstruction.
His reputation was founded on two books that turned accepted wisdom inside out and engendered seismic shifts in the scholarship of the period. They became staples of university classrooms.
The first, in 1956, was “The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South,” which juxtaposed the views of slaves themselves with the more conventionally researched perceptions of slave owners, yielding a far different picture of the institution than historians had previously created.
Rather than portraying slaves as docile, simple-minded creatures who were complicit in their own subjugation, Mr. Stampp showed how by working slowly, breaking tools and stealing from their owners, the slaves were in constant rebellion. And rather than portraying the owners as beneficent upholders of a genteel culture determined to maintain racial harmony, Mr. Stampp revealed the slave-keeping impulse to be an economically motivated choice.
“We now viewed slavery not only through the eyes of the masters but through the eyes of the slaves themselves,” said Leon Litwack, a long-time colleague and former student of Mr. Stampp’s at Berkeley, and the author of “Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery,” which won a Pulitzer Prize in 1980. “He was clearly one of the influential historians of the 20th century. All you have to do is open history textbooks and compare what you find in them to what you found before 1960.”
The second seminal book, “The Era of Reconstruction, 1865-1877,” published in 1965, demythologized another favorite trope of previous historians: that the decade after the Civil War was disastrous for the South, a time of vengefulness visited upon it by the North, of rampant corruption and of vindictive political maneuvering.
Mr. Stampp’s more measured account showed that much good was accomplished in the period; he called Reconstruction “the last great crusade of 19th century romantic reformers” and viewed it as a progenitor of the 20th-century civil rights movement that was in progress as he wrote.
“He was really a pioneer, demolishing the magnolia and mint juleps view of slavery,” said Eric Foner, a professor of history at Columbia. “And the Reconstruction book was in the same revisionist mode, sweeping away myths. Among serious history scholars, nobody is going to go back before Stampp.”
Kenneth Milton Stampp was born in Milwaukee on July 12, 1912. His parents were from German stock; his father was a postal worker. He was educated at the University of Wisconsin, where he received bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees. Before landing at Berkeley, he taught at the University of Arkansas and the University of Maryland.
His other books include “The Southern Road to Appomattox” (1969) and “America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink” (1990). In 1993, Mr. Stampp was awarded the Lincoln Prize for lifetime achievement by the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College.
Mr. Stampp’s first marriage ended in divorce. His second wife, Isabel, died in 1996. He is survived by his companion, Jean Working; a son, Kenneth Jr., of Oakland; three daughters, Sara Stampp, of Berkeley, Michele Macartney-Filgateof Toronto, and Jennifer Stampp, of El Cerrito, Calif.; and four grandchildren.
Formal and organized as a lecturer, Mr. Stampp was a revered teacher of undergraduates and grad students; his supervision of doctoral candidates resulted in a veritable Stampp diaspora in history departments across America.
He could be imposing. Mr. Litwack, who took his first undergraduate history class from Mr. Stampp just before “A Peculiar Institution” was published — “I first heard it in lectures,” he said — recalled the day he asked Mr. Stampp to supervise his dissertation.
“I went into his office and I bumped into a chair,” he said. “And I quickly said ‘Excuse me’ to the chair.”
Mr. Litwack paused and added: “I modeled myself after him as a teacher. His lectures always had a beginning and an end. He never said, ‘We’ll pick this up next time.’ ”
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