Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Rebellion and Revolution on a Virginia Plantation

Landon Carter and his fellow eighteenth-century Tidewater grandee William Byrd both famously left exhaustive and strikingly candid diaries that historians have long exploited. But these documents hardly speak for themselves, because their writers inhabited a mental world profoundly alien to our own. Rhys Isaac probes and interprets Carter's journals to reveal the attitudes and values of the Virginia gentry and the collapse of the established social order that attended the Colonies' rebellion against Britain. Isaac — who in his first book, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790, inventively adopted anthropological methods and approaches to examine the social, cultural, and political impact of evangelical Christianity on the colony — is a sensitive guide to Carter's world, and reading his systematic exploration is the only way for the layman to comprehend the diaries properly. He convincingly portrays Carter, one of Virginia's twelve richest men, as a figure ensnared by contradictions: In his energetic defense of American liberty, Carter appreciated that he was helping to destroy a hierarchical world to which he was intensely attached and which gave him enormous power and prestige. And just as he challenged the King's rule, so he found his slaves and his children defying his patriarchal authority and tearing the ties of dependence and obligation that bound them to him. In his diaries he's often furious and blustering — and invariably lacking in self-awareness — as he tries to reconcile one self-image as a stern patriarch and master with another as a caring, sentimental father and protector of the weak and dependent (the book reveals slavery to be a paradoxical institution — a paternalistic system built on the ever present threat of unlimited violence). Alas, though, the vagueness, pomposity, and self-consciously literary style that marred The Transformation of Virginia often render this book puzzling and highly annoying ("To be the historian who will present Landon Carter as a storyteller witness to the revolutions of his times is to be the scriptwriter and theater director of a major historical stage show. I shall introduce myself also ... I came into the world as one of identical twins, the first-born to kind and wise parents who never had much property but lived off their stock of learning as professional scientists") — and not infrequently threaten to make it unreadable.

Jack Greene's lengthy introduction to the two-volume diaries, which astutely assesses the political culture of the Virginia gentry during the revolutionary period, and was published separately as Landon Carter (1967), is a far more stylish biography; but Isaac's study, in spite of its intrusive qualities, is deeper and richer. To illuminate the tangled relationship between slaves and slaveholders in late Colonial and revolutionary Virginia, read also Philip D. Morgan's Slave Counterpoint, Sylvia R. Frey's Water From the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age, and Mechal Sobel's masterpiece of historical anthropology, The World They Made Together: Black and White Values in Eighteenth-Century Virginia.

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