Diaries offer an intimate glimpse into real lives and also help map the contours of life in the past - its customs, concerns, manners, and events. Revolutionary America's most intriguing diarist was Virginian Landon Carter. In "Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom," Australian scholar Rhys Isaac explores and explains the fascinating journals that Carter kept between 1752 and his death in 1778.

Born in 1710, Carter grew up in one of Virginia's leading families. In 1719, upon the death of his father, Robert "King" Carter, Landon inherited several Tidewater plantations covering tens of thousands of acres and eventually worked by some 400 slaves.

He lived at Sabine Hall, a magisterial estate overlooking the Rappahannock River in Richmond County, about 60 miles north of Williamsburg, where he quickly emerged as one of the region's civic and social leaders. He served as justice of the peace, militia colonel, and parish vestryman. In 1752, he began 18 years of service in Virginia's House of Burgesses.

Carter's three wives all died young, having borne eight children. In 1756, the triple widower convinced his eldest son, Robert Wormeley Carter, to bring his new bride to live at Sabine Hall. Son and daughter-in-law helped Carter manage the social responsibilities of his high station, yet they also proved to be vexing companions. Carter came to despise his "devilish" daughter-in-law. "I see in her," he declared, "the cause of all the ill treatment my son has given me ever since his marriage."

Isaac deftly uses Carter's tormented, self-justifying journal entries to explore his turbulent psyche and illuminate the distinctive mental world within which Carter and other Chesapeake planters operated. Carter emerges as a character of Shakespearean complexity and proportion: powerful, vulnerable, vain, and enmeshed in familial distrust and disappointment. His diary served as a catalyst for reflection, as a therapeutic release for his overflowing emotions, and as a historical record. He also used it as a tool for expressing frustrations with his family members, deliberately making it accessible for their furtive readings.

Carter initially focused his diary entries on the daily routine of managing his far-flung agrarian enterprises. The weather was a source of constant concern. "The poor Farmer," he recognized, "must always feel the weather and rejoice when it is good and be patient when it is unseasonable." He waged a relentless war against perennial pests such as tobacco flies, ground worms, and moles.

Like many planters, Carter considered slavery a necessary evil and viewed himself as a "very kind" master. Yet his diary entries reveal a man willing to intimidate and whip slaves caught stealing or deemed indolent or careless. He once insisted that a "negroe can't be honest" - but neglected to analyze how the institution of slavery itself might foster such deceit.

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