In Memoriam: Remembering OAH Past President
Kenneth M. Stampp

James Oakes

Kenneth M. Stampp, one of the towering figures of our profession, died on July 10, 2009, just shy of his ninety-seventh birthday. Physically robust until well into his nineties, Ken’s health began to fail only a few years ago. Yet he remained intellectually sharp until, a week before he died, his heart failed him, he fell, and never recovered. His first marriage ended in divorce. His second wife, the magnificent Isabel, died in 1996. He is survived by his four children--Kenneth, Jr., Sara, Michele, and Jennifer--and his fiancée, Jean Working.

Although best known for his groundbreaking study of slavery, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Antebellum South (1956), Stampp was his generation’s most formidable advocate of the thesis that the Civil War was an “irrepressible conflict” over slavery. His research was impeccable, his prose limpid, and passion seeped from his every sentence, engaging readers well beyond the academy. He was rewarded with high honorsa Guggenheim fellowship, the Lincoln Prize, the Harmsworth Professorship at Oxford, the Commonwealth Fund lectureship at London, the presidency of the OAH.

It was an impressive rise from modest beginnings. Stampp was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on July 12, 1912, to German-American parents of strict protestant virtue and democratic-socialist ideals. Stampp’s mother hoped her son would become “a good socialist lawyer,” but from an early age he was fascinated by the American past, telling a friend when he was still a young boy that he intended to become a history teacher. He earned his bachelor’s degree in 1935 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, his M.A. a year later, and after a brief stint as a high school teacher he returned to Madison where he took his Ph.D. in 1942.

Being at Madison during the Great Depression reinforced the political commitments to which Stampp had been reared. He considered himself a socialist, attended a few communist party meetings, and minored in labor economics with Selig Perlman. His dissertation, which became his first book, was a study of Indiana Politics During the Civil War (1949) and it reflected the enormous sway that Charles Beard held over historians of that generation. The Beardian inflections were tempered in Stampp’s later work, but the passion never subsided.

Upon graduation, Stampp taught for a year at the University of Arkansas before moving to the University of Maryland, where he formed enduring friendships with Richard Hofstadter, Frank Friedel, and the sociologist C. Wright Mills. He took advantage of his residence near Washington, D.C., to do the research for his next book. In 1947, Stampp moved one last time to the University of California at Berkeley, where he would remain for thirty-seven years, before retiring in 1983 as the Alexander F. and May T. Morrison Professor.

Stampp was at heart a historian of the Civil War era--but with a particular slant. From 1950 onward, all of his work was framed as a challenge to the “revisionist” interpretation of slavery and the sectional crisis--the view that the Civil War and Reconstruction were caused by nothing and did no good, that they were unnecessarily provoked by irresponsible politicians and wild-eyed radicals. Stampp spent forty years, Javert-like, hunting revisionists down.

His second book, And the War Came (1950), established his reputation as a major scholar and also announced his engagement with revisionism. A close analysis of Lincoln and the Republican Party during the secession winter of 1860-1861, the book was at once a work of impressive research and vigorous argument. Disputing the revisionist critique of Lincoln and the Republicans for their failure to compromise, and thus avoid civil war, Stampp argued instead that the Republican Party’s opposition to slavery’s expansion was so fundamental that no compromise was possible. Every proposal for sectional reconciliation, Stampp declared, was either stillborn or fraudulent. And where revisionists denounced Republican radicals as irresponsible, Stampp saw them as the ideological backbone of the party. “This was a cause worth fighting for!” Stampp wrote, paraphrasing the radicals, but endorsing the sentiment as well.

The Peculiar Institution followed logically from its predecessor. It was aimed at one of the intellectual godfathers of Civil War revisionism, Ulrich B. Phillips, the distinguished author of American Negro Slavery (1918). Phillips was disdainful of antislavery politics and, in effect, responded by portraying antebellum slavery as a benign, albeit backward, system that “made fewer fortunes than it made men.” He likened the plantation to a settlement house where masters provided paternal guidance for a childlike race unready for freedom. Though his students would lead the revisionist charge, Phillips introduced many of the elements of Civil War revisionism into his own work--slavery was inefficient, it was geographically restricted, so it would have died anyway; it was a benevolent system undeserving of abolitionist condemnation; it was less a class system than a structure of “racial adjustment.”

The Peculiar Institution did not attempt to reproduce the magisterial breadth of Phillips’ book, but concentrated instead on the antebellum years. Both agreed that slavery lacked the economic incentives of free labor, but for Stampp this explained why violence was essential to the slave labor system. The brutality intrinsic to slavery in turn provoked the slaves’ resentment. Where Phillips saw “slave crime,” Stampp saw slave resistance. And in a crucial chapter on “Slave Mongering,” Stampp pointed to the slaves’ status as property, as commodities, as a central feature of the system. Thus understood, slavery was bound to raise moral objections within the northern middle class--as indeed it did. But if slavery had caused the Civil War, Stampp argued, emancipation justified it. When freedom came, “the slaves had nothing to lose but their chains.” This was, after all, a cause worth fighting for.

In the historiography of slavery, The Peculiar Institution took on a life independent of the conceptual framework within which Stampp envisioned it. Rather than an intervention in a debate over the causes of the Civil War, the book became the point of departure for all subsequent studies of slavery in the American South. It freed the next generation to approach the study of slavery in entirely new ways, ways barely hinted at in The Peculiar Institution. Stampp was interested in these approaches and, over the years, he engaged with some of them. But they rarely addressed the questions that were uppermost in his own mind. He spurned repeated requests by his publisher to write a new introduction.

In his next book--The Era of Reconstruction (1965)--Stampp returned to familiar ground, where the questions that provoked debate over the causes of the Civil War spilled into the historiography of the war’s aftermath. Was Reconstruction unnecessary? Was it the handiwork of blundering politicians and hell-bent radicals? Was it worth it? Now Stampp’s target was William Archibald Dunning, a penetrating constitutional historian who had written an influential series of essays deploring Reconstruction as an era of sordid corruption, racial madness, and radical excess. Stampp dubbed this the “Dunning legend.” He may have disappointed his mother by not becoming a lawyer, but here he pursued Dunning with prosecutorial zeal, subjecting him to a withering cross-examination. If slavery had been the fundamental issue that led to the Civil War, emancipation had inescapably raised new and equally fundamental questions. Above all: What would be the place of the former slaves in post-Civil War America? Reconstruction was, for Stampp, a profound struggle over that critical issue. And once again it was the radicals--the villains of the Dunning legend--who emerged from Stampp’s courtroom vindicated.

Stampp’s continuing engagement with such issues was reflected in his later works. In 1980, he published a collection of essays whose overall theme was by now familiar to his readers. In the signature piece, “The Irrepressible Conflict,” Stampp carefully laid out the revisionist interpretation of the Civil War before proceeding to eviscerate it. In his last book, America in 1857: A Nation on the Brink (1990), Stampp turned to a conceptual issue raised by his own interpretation: At what point did the conflict over slavery become “irrepressible”? His answer was embedded in his title.

Passionate and engaging on the printed page, Stampp was sometimes forbidding in person. But if you asked him about the opera, a favorite restaurant, or the recent elections, the mask of aloofness fell away and Ken became playful, witty, and irreverent.

He brought these qualities to his teaching. He delighted generations of Berkeley undergraduates with his superbly crafted lectures. Formally delivered yet bristling with vitality, they always managed to end with a cogent conclusion, precisely fifty minutes after they began. He held his graduate students to the highest standards, emphasizing a deep immersion in the sources and clear, unpretentious writing. His criticism, neither unfair nor unkind, was nonetheless severe. But he appreciated the sheer joy of intellectual engagement, and that made his seminar thrilling. Hit the right topic and Stampp’s professional demeanor once again gave way to satirical riffs and sly mimicry. It was a winning formula. Over the years he trained a cohort of graduate students who went on to write some of the most important books in the field. They form no school, they tow no line. But their names are familiar: Leon Litwack, Robert Starobin, William Freehling, Joel Williamson, Robert Abzug, William Gienapp, Janet Hermann, Shearer Davis Bowman, Mark Wahlgren Summers, Reid Mitchell, and more. I count it one of the great fortunes of my life to be on that list.

James Oakes is a professor of history at the City University of New York. The author of several published works on slavery and politics during the Civil War era, Oakes’s latest work is The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics published by W. W. Norton (2007).