Making History

Historians not only study, interpret, and describe the past. The great ones make history. Thucydides, Herodotus, Gibbon, Macaulay, Guizot, and their peers belong in the annals as surely as do the events, persons, and trends they recorded. Kenneth Stampp joins the elect.

He specialized in the era of the Civil War -- its preceding decades and its aftermath. His scholarship changed the way Americans understood their national story and themselves. The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South is his masterpiece. Even those who have not read it have been affected by its arguments.

Stampp took the mythology out of slavery and described it as it was. Romantics during slavery's prime (and after) held it as a relatively benign counterpoise to the crude industrialization that exploited workers toiling for wages. (Richard Hofstadter identified John C. Calhoun as the Marxist of the master class.) If after the war few defended slavery outright, then a "Gone With the Wind" sensibility nevertheless prevailed. Stampp exposed slavery as a ruthless and profitable economic system its practitioners were determined to preserve, even at the risk of war. And the war came.

Stampp's work on Reconstruction challenged assumptions and provoked rebuttals as well. His students remember him as an exacting albeit inspiring teacher. Teaching is a noble profession, and Kenneth Stampp stood at the head of his class. He died this month at 96.