In his 1956 classic The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South, historian Kenneth M. Stampp shattered the myth of slavery as a gentle system. Using plantation records, letters, and slave narratives, he revealed that white enslavers deliberately sought to create the “ideal” or “perfect slave”, obedient, submissive, and dependent. To achieve this, they enforced strict discipline, instilled fear, crushed self-worth, encouraged loyalty to the master, and denied education to keep the enslaved ignorant and helpless. Slavery, Stampp showed, was not just an economic system but a calculated machinery of psychological control and dehumanization.
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