Masters of the Big House (review)

In this exhaustively researched and richly documented study, William Kauffman Scarborough considers the experiences of the South's largest slaveholders—those planters who owned at least 250 slaves—between the eve of the Civil War and the end of Reconstruction. It is unlikely that anyone will ever again examine the manuscript sources so thoroughly or so rigorously, and as a guide to the sources this book will prove invaluable to future scholars of slavery. Scarborough spent more than three decades in the archives, examining scores of manuscripts of these great planter families. The result is the most thorough study in existence of the antebellum great planter class.

Scarborough organizes his study around a carefully defined group: the 338 planters that he was able to identify as owning more than 250 slaves during the 1850s and 1860s. His list is based on a systematic reading of the manuscript census and his untangling of frequently dispersed and highly complex slaveholding patterns. Assembling these materials into a massive—and in the history of slavery, unequaled—database, he attempts to reach some conclusions about the distinctive behavior of this group. Master of the Big House examinesgreat planters' collective social characteristics, religion and culture, performance as businessmen and capitalists, methods of slave management, involvement in politics, attitudes toward the sectional crisis, and Civil War and post-emancipation experiences. Scarborough's slaveholders are a diverse group. They came from across the South, with the greatest number inhabiting Deep South states South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and Alabama. Like Jane Turner Censer, he finds that great planter families tended to be conjugal and tended to share middle-class, Victorian attitudes about childrearing, education, and gender roles. As businessmen, Scarborough portrays a varied group unified by its determination to consolidate its wealth, and he shows how great planters dominated various late antebellum business enterprises. Although Scarborough's portrayal of great planters as slaveholders is generally sympathetic, he concludes that this group included both benevolent and cruel masters. As Scarborough shows, great planters were not a political monolith: although most were avid secessionists, some of them were also Unionists. Scarborough challenges the common assertion that great planters avoided military participation; he shows that a considerable number served the Confederacy. He further illustrates how emancipation and the end of the Civil War destroyed the material bases of the planter class, disrupted relations between the races, and laid the foundation for a new postwar social system.

Writing a narrative that hugs the primary sources and rejects "so-called theories, models, and paradigms to which the current generation of historians seems increasingly wedded" (2), Scarborough tries to understand great planters' particular characteristics. If Scarborough has a central, guiding interpretive concern, it is whether these slaveholders adhered either to Eugene Genovese's paternalist model or to James Oakes's depiction of them as entrepreneurial capitalists. Scarborough, in general, leans in Oakes's direction: these great planters were, without question, modernizing capitalists, and they maintained a family structure and exhibited emerging bourgeois attitudes then prevailing in the North.

This is a book that will remain on the shelves of southern historians, and it is unlikely that Scarborough's labor will be duplicated. Nonetheless, some historians of slavery will this book frustrating. Despite the size of the sample, one wonders whether "great planters"—with their diversity and difference—actually existed as an interconnected class in the antebellum South. Were planters cultivating rice that similar to those cultivating cotton? In interpreting his massive load of evidence, Scarborough does little to venture beyond what is now an old debate about planter paternalism, and this is a book framed around the historiography of the 1970s and 1980s. It is probably time to move on. Masters of the Big House is, moreover, a study that is first and foremost about an elite—the richest slaveholders in the late antebellum and postbellum South—and it is a story told almost entirely from their point of view. There is little attempt to understand how...