Kenneth Stampp was a professor of History at the University of California, Berkley. Stampp was known for countering the arguments of famous historians about the characterization of slavery. He is best known for his revised assessments of three central chapters in the American experience: slavery, the coming of the Civil War, and Southern Reconstruction. Pinpointing the relationships between slaves and their masters along with searching for their personality during the 19th century is an ongoing question that's being asked and answered from several viewpoints. Kenneth Stampp says, "Nevertheless, whatever methodological or conceptual strategies a historian may devise, his search for answers to questions concerning slave behavior and personality must begin with the accumulation of a reasonable amount of empirical data." Stampp in this article tries to carve a middle ground that accounts for knowledge, description and acquaintance. He criticizes the analysis of historians Herbert Aptheker and Stanley Elkin, others and reviews the contrasting images of slaves. .
Herbert Aptheker was an American historian and political activist. He admitted that he studied history to solve a series of political problems. Aptheker examined slaves and their mentality toward bondage in American Negro Slave Revolts. Aptheker described slaves as active participants in the culture of revolution perpetuated by slave life. Stampp criticized Aptheker for his faith in the limited source material. In other words, Aptheker practiced a tunnel-vision empiricism without a rigorous critical examination. Aptheker claims to have found almost two hundred fifty slave revolts and conspiracies for freedom, each including at least ten slaves. Stampp notes that while white fear and supposition of revolt mean something about slave culture, they do not necessarily mean revolt. Stampp also says that Aptheker argued beyond the evidence and took written records at face value as absolute proof, and failed to establish his thesis that rebelliousness was characteristic of American Negro slaves.
