Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Rebellion and Revolution on a Virginia Plantation

I read this book while on vacation at Colonial Williamsburg, Virgina. It would be hard to imagine a better atmosphere in which to consider it. The focus of the book is the conflicting world views of the patriarch, Landon Carter (whose plantation is in the Williamsburg area), his slaves, and his son. The book illuminates the cognitive disconnects and churning dissatisfactions that plagued Carter, his heirs, and their plantation slaves because of rigid social separation, institutionalized deceit, and the dissolution of personal and power relationships at the coming of the American Revolution. I generally dislike social histories -- however necessary they may be -- if only because they seem always to be selective, poorly documented, and subject to easy contradiction. This one -- perhaps because it is so concentrated on the microcosm of one Virginia family -- manages to come across as solid, scholarly, believable, and a pretty good story to boot.

Mr. Isaac's book is an excellent idea and almost perfectly executed. Far from being a "psycho-babble" book, Mr. Isaac explores in a powerful fashion the life of a man in such a way that we very much get to know him. Carter is a man who we have all met, known, or even lived with at one time or another. The only thing that I disagreed with was the ordering of the book's treatment of Landon Carter. I would have appreciated a more chronological presentation. Still, I understand why Mr. Isaac wrote it using the organization based on subject matter, but I disagree.

By editing and contextualizing the voluminous diary of Landon Carter, Rhys Isaac has made a significant contribution to the social history of early Virginia and colonial America. By placing excerpts from Carter's diary within a larger framework of colonial society, readers can gain a more thorough understanding of the changing mores of mid 17th century Virginia. Carter emerges as a flesh and blood person throughout the book, though rarely sympathetic when seen through the eyes of 21st century readers. Of particular impact were Carter's regularly inhumane interactions with slaves and increasing inability to reconcile relationships with his own children. At times the book is abstract and academic in style, yet the end results are more than justified for anyone with an interest in knowing more about our "peculiar institution" and the origins of American society and culture.

This book isn't as popular as it should be because the title makes it seem something of a dry academic tome and, let's face it, Landon Carter doesn't have the popular name recognition of Alexander Hamilton (i.e. Chernow), George Washington (i.e. Ellis) or Benjamin Franklin (i.e. Wood). The star of the show in this case is Carter himself rather than the author. Dr. Isaac does a wonderful job of framing and interpreting Carter's diary to make a coherent analysis of the profound social changes which occurred during the Revolutionary period. Carter was a first hand witness to the transformation of the American society from a rigid colonial society based on patronage to a participatory, republican society in which people made lives for themselves. The transformation is nothing less than a journey of existential self-discovery for Carter, which is something ANY person can appreciate. So this book is not just a biography of a member of the Virginia planter aristocracy, but a reflection of the undermining of the feudal, patriarchal social structure Americans largely rejected during the Revolution. And it illustrates that the highly dualistic interpretation of Americans of the period as either "patriot" or "loyalist" is largely a modern historical construct with little basis in truth. Marvelous work by one of the foremost historians of American colonial history.