Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth Century South (review)

Scarborough goes out of his way to portray the richest planters of the South as ordinary people. In this interpretation, elite slaveholders were not much different from their northern counterparts; they were family men and capitalists who simply invested the bulk of their money in southern plantations and the ownership of slaves.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this line of argument. Scholars have debated for decades whether slavery was a capitalist enterprise, and one of the most difficult things in discussing slavery is portraying this nasty and vile institution in human terms. The problem with this book is that although Scarborough recognizes the negative side of slavery, he often is so enamored with his subject—the big planters—that he goes too far in the other direction.

In his chapter on slave labor, Scarborough devotes more than thirty pages to planter benevolence in housing, food, medicine, and overall treatment. He even refers to the "yuletide season" as an "extended vacation" (199). (Slaves like Frederick Douglass directly repudiated this idea). At the end of this litany on the good "massa," Scarborough offers some qualification by writing one paragraph about the self-serving nature of this behavior and a shorter paragraph on the darker side of slavery. Then, having bowed to conventional historiography, he launches into a discussion of slave resistance to oppression from the planter's perspective. Most recent examinations of slavery have emphasized the role of resistance from the slaves point of view to demonstrate their agency in the face of adversity. Scarborough writes, "Elite masters were confronted with a variety of slave transgressions [implying that slaves were the wrongdoers]. Some, such as petty theft and malingering, were relatively minor and were often viewed with equanimity by masters and their families [implying benevolence again] (207)." So taken is Scarborough with this approach that when he reports the recapture of a runaway slave he writes, "Fortunately for Whitfield [the planter], one of his agents recognized her [the slave], and she was soon returned to her rightful owner" (210, emphasis added).

The book itself is based on prodigious research. Using manuscript slave-census data, Scarborough has identified several hundred slave planters who owned more than 250 slaves. He then uses prosopography to examine a variety of characteristics, including family, religion, education, and investments. Scarborough places these men, and some women, in their historical context, relating their reactions to the crisis of the 1850s, the election of 1860, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. Despite several appendixes listing the individual slaveholders, Scarborough does little with statistics to provide any sense of how these planters could be grouped. Instead he relies on telling stories about individual planters. This methodology runs into trouble, since Scarborough's pro-planter bias—he claims he began this study "with no preconceived thesis"—raises questions about how and why he selected the individual anecdotes.

To make matters worse, there is a certain stars and bars quality to the book. Almost every time Scarborough mentions Wade Hampton's name, for instance, he also reminds us that Hampton was a Confederate general. In fact, he reiterates repeatedly in the non–Civil War chapters how this or that planter served in some capacity in the Confederate army. Scarborough does counter this tendency with occasional statements asserting that slavery was wrong, and he admits that the cause of the Civil War was slavery. But when he quotes southerners about moonlight and magnolias (370), and the lost cause (403), without much context, and refers to race animosity as a legacy of Reconstruction (403), viewing "the Negro" as a "political pawn of the radical Republicans" (404), he seems to be writing in a distant age.