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  • Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid Nineteenth-Century South
  • Robert C. Kenzer (bio)
Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid Nineteenth-Century South. By William Kauffman Scarborough. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. Pp. xviii, 521. Cloth, $39.95.)

William Kauffman Scarborough begins his award-winning study by explaining that previous scholars have undercounted the largest southern slaveholders because the manuscript census, the best listing of slaveholding, was organized on a county basis. Thus, the tendency was to consider only the slaves an individual owned in his or her home county. As the first historian to conduct an analysis of the manuscript census of an entire region, Scarborough matches up slaveholdings to owners who owned slaves in multiple counties or even in different states. The result of his efforts is an analysis of 338 individuals who possessed 250 or more slaves in 1850 or 1860. Two-thirds of these large slaveholders resided in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, and one-third alone lived near either Charleston or Natchez. Given the locations of their residence, it is not surprising that four in ten elite slaveholders either grew rice or sugar, with the rest producing cotton in the Lower South or grain or tobacco in the Upper South.

Although the statistical analysis of these elite slaveholders is itself a significant contribution, the study's inclusion of 125 manuscript collections is ultimately what puts flesh on these names. Letters and diaries [End Page 142] allow Scarborough to conclude that these slaveholders "exhibited a life-style and philosophical outlook that was as cosmopolitan as that of any other group in nineteenth-century America" (28). Specifically, they indicate how these slaveholders' ties to the North were shaped by the fact that the North was where many sent their children to be educated, where they vacationed, where they subscribed to journals and newspapers, obtained clothing and furniture, and where they conducted many of their "business operations" (29). The book provides particular insight into the critical role of the Leverich brothers of New York, who managed the commercial affairs of a number of elite slaveholders, particularly from the Natchez area.

Along with their cosmopolitan outlook, Scarborough finds that these slaveholders were much more than agriculturalists, documenting their extensive involvement in banking, manufacturing, mercantile enterprises, transportation, and land speculation. Furthermore, he shows that this activity was not just true of the generation on the eve of the Civil War as it was also the means by which many of their ancestors had acquired their families' initial funding to become slaveholders.

If a cosmopolitan outlook and capitalistic behavior united this group, however, politics tended to be a much more divisive force. Beyond their hatred of abolitionists, there was little agreement among elite slaveholders on political issues. Scarborough points to particularly sharp differences in political participation. In South Carolina, he finds that the elite nature of politics led many large planters to hold numerous state offices (judges, delegates to the secession and constitutional conventions, and lieutenant governors and governors) and national offices (membership in both the United States and Confederate Congress). By contrast, Mississippi's elite slaveholders shied away from, or were not elected to office, especially after passage of that state's liberal constitution of 1832. Amazingly, only one of Mississippi's seventy-one elite planters (John A. Quitman) held the governorship or served as a member of Congress. Indeed, Scarborough concludes that, on the whole, the slaveholding elite "displayed profound contempt and undisguised antipathy for the principles of political democracy. Their preference was for representative government dominated by able, propertied men chosen by a severely restricted electorate" (243–44). He observes further that in 1860–1861, many of these elite southerners were as much concerned about Abraham Lincoln's low social status as his political beliefs.

This book's final strength is that Scarborough takes the story of the [End Page 143] elite slaveholders into the Civil War and immediate postwar years. He finds that only 11.4 percent actually participated in the war, with most too old to serve in the military. He adds, however, that the sons and close male relatives of elite slaveholders had a...

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