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

By Rhys Isaac

Book Overview

Landon Carter, a Virginia planter patriarch, left behind one of the most revealing of all American diaries. In this astonishingly rich biography, Rhys Isaac mines this remarkable document--and many other sources--to reconstruct Carter's interior world as it plunged into revolution.
The aging patriarch, though a fierce supporter of American liberty, was deeply troubled by the rebellion and its threat to established order. His diary, originally a record of plantation business, began to fill with angry stories of revolt in his own little kingdom. Carter writes at white heat, his words sputtering from his pen as he documents the terrible rupture that the Revolution meant to him. Indeed, Carter felt in his heart he was chronicling a world in decline, the passing of the order that his revered father had bequeathed to him. Not only had Landon's king betrayed his subjects, but Landon's own household betrayed him: his son showed insolent defiance, his daughter Judith eloped with a forbidden suitor, all of his slaves conspired constantly, and eight of them made an armed exodus to freedom. The seismic upheaval he helped to start had crumbled the foundations of Carter's own home.
Like Laurel Ulrich in her classic A Midwife's Tale, Rhys Isaac here unfolds not just the life, but the mental world of our countrymen in a long-distant time. Moreover, in this presentation of Landon Carter's passionate narratives, the diarist becomes an arresting new character in the world's literature, a figure of Shakespearean proportions, the Lear of his own tragic kingdom. This long-awaited work will be seen both as a major contribution to Revolution history and a triumph of the art of biography.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195159268
• ISBN13: 9780195159264
• Release Date: July 2004
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 423 Pages
• Weight: 1.56 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.4" x 6.5" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Insightful

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.

Wonderfully researched and written but poorly edited.

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.

An Intimate Glimpse of Colonial Virginia

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.

More than the title suggests

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.