Rhys Isaac has provided a captivating look at Revolutionary America in his 2004 book Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation. Landon Carter, a wealthy Virginia planter and member of the House of Burgesses, was an enthusiastic diarist whose often deeply personal musings provide an extraordinary insight into everyday life on an 18th century Tidewater plantation. Isaac embroiders the rich content of the diaries with an ample amount of historical context and, with a novelist’s flair, brings the contentious and blustering Carter, and his world, to life.
Landon Carter is far from a sympathetic figure. Petulant, pompous, misogynistic, and often mean-spirited, Carter hardly fits the stereotype of a proper founding father. Especially galling is the brutality that Carter so casually inflicted on the hundreds of slaves living and working on his sprawling plantation. Though Isaac occasionally suggests that condemnation of Carter’s behavior regarding his slaves is anachronistic, excusing the old planter as simply a “man of his times” is unacceptable. For his “people,” as Carter euphemistically referred to his slaves, his governance was a veritable reign of terror. Threats, blows, whipping of the bare skin of both male and females, shackles, and “heels to neck” roping were all routine occurrences on Landon Carter’s plantation. Almost as offensive as his shocking cruelty were his smug self-justifications. “I have no kind of Severity in the least to accuse myself of to one of them,” Carter confided to his diary after one flogging. “but on the contrary a behaviour on my part that should have taught them gratitude if there ever was a virtue of the sort in such creatures.” (p. 34).
Yet, Carter was, in a sense, a founding father. As a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1763 he vigorously protested the imposition of the Stamp Act. He boldly and consistently denied Parliament’s right to legislate in the colonies’ internal affairs. Carter, however, could never embrace the movement for independence. Even as he cheered the successes (often misreported) of Washington’s army in the field, he continued to insist that the purpose of the war was to secure the constitutional rights of the colonists within the British Empire. Until his death in 1778, Carter, the patriarch of Sabine Hall, clung tenaciously to the old patriarchal order of the Empire, even as it was crumbling around him.
While the old political order was disintegrating, Carter perceived that his “parental” authority on the plantation was crumbling as well. Not only were his slaves growing increasingly recalcitrant, but also to Carter’s great dismay, eight of them had escaped to link up with the British, who were promising freedom for slaves who joined the royal cause. Furthermore, as Carter grew older his children were becoming more and more defiant and disrespectful, leaving the old grandee increasingly frustrated by what he believed were vicious assaults on his patriarchal authority.
It is on this point, intriguing though it may be, that Isaac sometimes runs into trouble. His incessant attempts to draw a parallel between Carter’s troubled home life and the changes brought about by the Revolution grow rather labored. Nearly every description (and there are a great many) of a dispute between master and slave or father and son is followed by an analogous reference to the break between America and her political “father” across the Atlantic.
Isaac also can’t seem to resist injecting himself into the narrative from time to time. From an autobiographical sketch in the preface that would have been more appropriate on the book’s jacket, to an occasional superfluous “I think,” Isaac seems to want to remind the reader that there is, after all, a Pulitzer Prize winner at the controls.
These minor criticisms aside, Isaac has provided a profound insight not only into the mercurial and troubling psyche of one man, but also into the revolutionary world in which he lived. ( )

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