[citation needed] His family suffered through the Great Depression, "there was never enough money," but Stampp worked a number of small odd jobs as a teen, managing to save enough to afford tuition, first, at Milwaukee State Teachers' College, and then at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
Beard (author of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States) and William B. Hesseltine (known for coining the phrase about intellectual history: it's "like nailing jelly to the wall").
Stampp asserted, to the contrary, that African Americans actively resisted slavery, not just through armed uprisings but also through work slowdowns, the breaking of tools, theft from masters, and diverse other means.
Through a lengthy scholarly career, Stampp insisted that the moral debate over slavery lay at the crux of the Civil War, rather than other reasons related to the economic or political relationship between the Federal Government and the states.
In this rendering, the South emerges mercilessly beaten, "prostrate in defeat, before a ruthless, vindictive conqueror, who plundered its land and ... turned its society upside down...."[citation needed] The North's greatest sin, according to Dunning, consisted of relinquishing control of the Southern governments to "ignorant, half-civilized former slaves.