ca, and this fact may have worsened the actual
material situation of South American slave. Nevertheless, in North
America the slave was consistently treated as a "thing." In South America
there was some attempt to treat him as a man. This fact made a profound
difference in the way in which the two systems affected the slave as an
individual, and in the way in which they impinged upon the development of
his personality.

Slavery and the Formation of Character

The study of American slavery, frequently consisting of a heated debate
concerning the institution's merits, has, in recent years, branched into
new directions. Scholars have become engaged in the comparative
examination of differing slave systems such as those of North and South
America. More recently, Stanley M. Elkins has begun an inquiry into the
impact of a slave system in forming the individual character of the
slaves within that system. In his provocative study, Slavery: A Problem
in American Institutional and Intellectual Life, he has made some
interesting comparisons between the American slave system and the German
concentration camps and has endeavored to account for their respective
impacts on character formation through the social-psychological theories
of personality formation.

In Elkins's thinking, the concentration camps were a modern example of a
rigid system controlling mass behavior. Because some of those who
experienced them were social scientists trained in the skills of
observation and analysis, they provide a basis for insights into the way
in which a particular social system can influence mass character. While
there is also much literature about American slavery written both by
slaves and masters, none of it was written from the viewpoint of modern
social sciences. However, Elkins postulates that a slave type must have
existed as the result of the attempt to control mass behavior, and he
believes that this type probably bore a marked resemblance to the
literary stereotype of "Sambo." Studying concentration camps and their
impact on personality provides a tool for new insights into the working
of slavery, but, warns Elkins, the comparison can only be used for
limited purposes. Although slavery was not unlike the concentration camp
in many respects, the concentration camp can be viewed as a highly
perverted form of slavery, and both systems were ways of controlling mass
behavior.

The "Sambo" of American slave literature was portrayed