"This Peculiar Institution"

samuel orris

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I am currently reading Bruce Catton's The Coming Fury for the second time. In it he quotes several people referring to slavery as "peculiar." I have seen this term used in other instances as well. How did slavery earn the term peculiar? Peculiar to me means to be odd or different. Other than slavery put fellow human beings in captivity, what else was peculiar about it? Was it a term used only by Abolitionists? I don't mean to sound ignorant, just curious if there are any thoughts.
 
Kenneth Stampp, who wrote the book The Peculiar Institution argued that the phrase was designed to allow southerners to avoid using the term "slavery" in discussing slavery. Calling it their "peculiar institution" was somehow more genteel, which suggests that most slaveholders probably didn't buy the argument that slavery was a positive good.
 
I am currently reading Bruce Catton's The Coming Fury for the second time. In it he quotes several people referring to slavery as "peculiar." I have seen this term used in other instances as well. How did slavery earn the term peculiar? Peculiar to me means to be odd or different. Other than slavery put fellow human beings in captivity, what else was peculiar about it? Was it a term used only by Abolitionists? I don't mean to sound ignorant, just curious if there are any thoughts.

It was peculiar to the South. In other words, it belonged exclusively to the South.

https://books.google.com/ngrams/gra...iar institution;,c0;;Peculiar Institution;,c0
 
Kenneth Stampp, who wrote the book The Peculiar Institution argued that the phrase was designed to allow southerners to avoid using the term "slavery" in discussing slavery. Calling it their "peculiar institution" was somehow more genteel, which suggests that most slaveholders probably didn't buy the argument that slavery was a positive good.

Yes. Southerners sometimes also referred to slaveholding as their "domestic institution." It sounds much more benign that way. For example, in South Carolina's "Declaration of the Immediate Causes:"

We affirm that these ends for which this Government [i.e., the United States] was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.
 
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