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Reviews in American History 33.4 (2005) 493-500



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Cosmic Authority and Stories of Self in the Diary of a Virginia Patriarch

Rhys Isaac. Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xxiv + 424 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00.

Rhys Isaac is among the foremost practitioners of ethnographic history. His 1982 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Transformation of Virginia, 1740–1790, introduced students of early America to an extraordinarily fruitful dialogue between historians and anthropologists. Using metaphors drawn from theater to translate simultaneously across cultural and temporal distance, the book was a breakthrough study of "the meanings that the inhabitants of other worlds have given to their own everyday customs." It represented a touchstone text in what would shortly be called the New Cultural History, a subgenre of historical writing heavily indebted to readings of Clifford Geertz's interpretive anthropology. At its heart was a simple, democratizing program of enquiry: "finding people doing things, and finding ways to interpret the statements made by what they did and the style of their doing." From this basic approach would emerge a sort of "ethnographic everybody's history—of women and men, of blacks and whites, of gentry and common folk."1

In his latest book, Rhys Isaac has chosen instead to write "someone's history." Where The Transformation of Virginia rendered colonial and revolutionary history through the encompassing social landscapes of the Chesapeake region, Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom uses a remarkable diary to show how the American Revolution entered the world of a lone eighteenth-century patriarch. In many respects the book can be read as the flipside of the old feminist axiom that the personal is political; here, the political is shown to be deeply personal. Landon Carter's diary has long been an indispensable source for the history of colonial Virginia, but this is the first time it has received such thorough treatment. Situating Carter and his journal in both the expressive conventions of its time and in the changing context of colonial politics, the book provides brilliant insights into the life experience of the Virginia planter during an extended period of existential angst. [End Page 493]

Landon Carter was born in 1710, the son of Robert "King" Carter, one of the richest planters in Virginia. When his father died, Landon inherited a portion of the estate, which he cultivated by industry, luck, and shrewd management. By his own death in 1778, his dominion comprised a sprawling network of plantations and more than four hundred slaves. His palace was Sabine Hall, where he lorded over his dependents and where, in his private study, he recorded most of the entries in his voluminous diary. Isaac uses the highly self-conscious journal to reconstruct Carter's version of the world as well as his arguments with it. Transformations in Carter's self-representation thus provide the narrative drive in Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom. Carter began his diary in a period of "enlightenment calm," recording his observations on the weather, his theories and techniques of medical science, and his commentaries on the world of letters. But, with his projections of scientific control shaken by the crises in King George III's overseas empire, he ended by cataloguing resentments against the crumbling of patriarchal authority in his own uneasy kingdom.

Patriarchy was a fundamental organizing principle for Landon Carter's entire universe. Indeed the deference owed to patriarchs was justified by myths of paternal divinity. Isaac brilliantly illuminates the patriarchal ethos at the heart of Carter's self-understanding. At the apex of a great chain of being there was God the father providing cosmic metaphors of absolute authority for all the fathers below him. Exemplar of, as Isaac sees it, a vast and ancient cultural inheritance, Carter was not shy about "assuming God's prerogative" in his relations with his dependents (p. 219). Inspired by a metaphor of his own infallibility, Carter took a high-handed approach to discipline and punishment...

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