The diary of a Revolution-era slaveholder

By the 1760s, as tensions between the American Colonies and Britain boiled over, Carter found himself beset with rebellions within his own plantation empire. His diary entries became more impassioned and blustery. They reflect the mercurial moods of a brittle patriarch, filled with preening pride and grumpy self-pity, determined to rule at home yet desperate for affection and devotion.

His unruly family provoked constant friction and disappointment. He came to believe his children were eagerly awaiting his death and their inheritances. They defied him with theatrical flair and mulish regularity. His daughter eloped with a man he had forbidden her to see; his obstinate son Robert grew addicted to gambling; his grandson Landon was surly and insolent.

Isaac stresses that Carter "wrote his best at white heat." Quick to anger, his emotions "spluttered off his pen." In 1774, for example, he declared that son Robert "is a monster" eager to torture and defy his father.

Growing rebelliousness in the British colonies during the 1770s accompanied spreading rebellions in Carter's "own little kingdom."

In 1776, for instance, eight slaves stole a gun, "took my grandson Landon's Bag of bullets and all the Powder, and went off in my Petty Auger canoe" to join up with royal governor Lord Dunmore, who promised runaway slaves their freedom if they would join the British forces.

Like many American planters, Carter was an ambivalent revolutionary. By habit and conviction, he preferred maintaining ties with the British, but he eventually concluded that there was no choice but to pursue independence from a distant government grown tyrannical.

Isaac highlights the irony of Carter, the "righteous patriarch," grudgingly endorsing defiance of the King's rule at the same time that he was lamenting the loss of paternalistic authority within his own plantation world. The "king" of Sabine Hall came to loathe his revolting son Robert. In 1776 he recorded in his diary that his "cursed" son was "my most vexatious tyrant, & everybody seems to take pleasure that he is so."

"Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom" provides a captivating view of a leading planter's complex personal life and political transformation during the Revolutionary era. Isaac deftly blends pungent extracts from Carter's diary with illuminating biographical details and historical commentary.

At times Isaac claims to know more about Carter's mental state than the evidence warrants, and he makes too much of the coincidence of the American Revolution with Carter's family rebellion. Yet overall this book is a splendid addition to our understanding of the Virginia gentry - and of ourselves.

• Historian David Emory Shi is president of Furman University in Greenville, S.C.

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