Stan's Reading List

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finished 31 March 2006

Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom
(2004) Rhys Isaac,
Oxford University Press : New York, NY.

From the 1750s until his death in 1778, Landon Carter kept a diary of events on his tobacco plantation and his various activities within his family and his county in Virginia. These were tumultuous times, with revolt against the rule of King George III in England and Landon's own struggles with his children and slaves. Carter was among the wealthiest and most privileged people of Virginia. He owned and operated eight farm sites with about 400 slaves. Both his son and daughter married offspring of a former overseer who Landon had fired and did not trust, so there was bad blood between them for many years. For a number of these years, Landon was a justice of the peace for his county and was even elected to several terms in the Virginia parliment. Those diaries of his which survive from that time tell his story of his daily happenings.

Rhys Isaac as a historian presents these diary materials with the intention of making the text more readable to a reader.

"But I shall be careful to keep my interventions to a minimum: the diarist must not be supplanted as author by a historian writing out of turn."
Unfortunately, the historian does not do this. All direct quotes from Landon's diaries are carefully kept in italics, but page after page has only a few lines italic, swamped by ponderous explanations of the commentator. The quotes from the diary are scattered all over, grouped into topics which the historian wanted to talk about so there is only a second hand impression of what Carter was saying. The worst are the chapters which deal with slavery. The historian compares what Landon wrote in little pieces intermixed with material from 20th century Smithsonian interviews of former 19th century slaves. I bought this book to get a glimpse of 18th century slave holding, and instead the historian preaches 20th century values that are mostly inappropriate to the original. How I wish we could just read what the plantation records have in them, rather than the bits and pieces thrown together here to justify the modern indignations.

What I could piece together from this book is that there were a lot of floggings and the slaves frequently ran away, but they did not go far, usually to return in a week or two. The plantation owner was always unhappy with the quality of labor he got from his slaves, but that was just accepted as the way of things. He had to have a work force to run his farms with the best soil management techniques of the enlightment science-- mainly recycling manure from the livestock into the fields each spring. Landon was also mainly interested in the practice of medicine on his neighbors, his family and his slaves. This was mainly herbal purgatives to induce violent vomiting or to flush the bowels. He was less interested in blood letting, but did practice it once in a while. One the slaves he had trained as an assistant was credited to be better at blood letting than Landon.

According to this historian, the patriarchial system runs thus: god rules the king, the king rules the gentry, the gentry rule the slaves. Everyone is expected to be content with wherever they are in this heirarchy and to do their best within it. This system was being overthrown by the American revolution in which the gentry were discarding the king in place of constitutional liberties. Landon never says this directly, but eventually he becomes a supporter of the new form of government that is forming before he dies. The historian here says that the unrest in his family and with his slaves comes from their notion that if the king is overthrown, so too should their place in the patriarchy be improved. Once again, this is modern understanding being rudely superimposed upon the original material.

In general this was a slow book to read, mainly done in by the historian who so brutely treated the original diary, hashing it into fragments to support his viewpoints which do not illustrate the time scale presented.