Stanley M. Elkins is the Sydenham Clark Parsons Professor
Emeritus of history at Smith College. Slavery : A Problem in
American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959), based on
Elkins' doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, was
theoretically innovative and enormously influential in the years
after its publication, although its arguments are largely
rejected today. Elkins made two major, and controversial,
arguments in Slavery. The first was that American abolitionists
undercut their own effectiveness by their insistence on
ideological consistency and purity, and their refusal to
compromise with the slave system. Elkins contrasted them with
British abolitionists who, he argued, were more pragmatic and
therefore more politically effective; he noted that Britain had
abolished slavery without war. Elkins's second argument was that
the experience of slavery was psychologically infantilizing to
slaves, making them follow what he controversially called the
"Sambo" model. He based his arguments on then-rec