Slavery Series: An Introduction

The slave system, as Stampp points out, was not spawned at once but build little by little over many years. Equally important is the fact that at first, such a system build slowly out of deliberate choices was indeed created with little understanding of the ultimate consequences of those choices.¹ The result was an institution of labor by 1860 so well-entrenched in the American economic and social system that it seemed any effort to destroy it would lead to the demise of the livelihood of an entire people. And necessary or not, it was a war which cost 650,000 American lives - black and white - that would finally change the overall nature of the American economic system. This is the story of American slavery.

Notes

1. Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 5-6

Series Bibliography

Franklin, John Hope and Moss, Alfred A, Jr. From Freedom to Slavery: A History of African Americans, 7th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1994.

Kolchin, Peter. American Slavery, 1619-1877, 2nd ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia, 2nd ed. New York: WW Norton and Company, 1995.

Nash, Gary B. Red, White, and Black: The Peoples of Early North America, 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1992.

Stampp, Kenneth M. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, 2nd ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Takaki, Ronald. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America. New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 1993.

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