Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South.

Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South. By William Kauffman Scarborough. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c. 2003. Pp. xx, 521. $39.95, ISBN 0-8071-2882-1.)

William Kauffman Scarborough has been working on Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South for more than a quarter of a century, with special intensity for the past decade. Given the prodigious research in the manuscript archives of the slave-owning elite, it is hard to imagine how the book's findings could be overturned by subsequent scholarship. There is no question that this is an impressive work, yet it is also a curiously modest one. Scarborough is a good old-fashioned historian, one who never strays far from his sources and therefore leaves some analytical wiggle room for those of us cursed with more reckless imaginations.

Masters of the Big House isolates the planter aristocracy of the Old South and tells its story from about 1820 to the postwar years. Scouring the U.S. census returns for 1850 and 1860, Scarborough found 339 slaveholders who owned at least 250 slaves. This was no simple task. Many planters distributed their slaves over multiple plantations, often in different counties or even different states. The initial statistical profile alone is revealing, sometimes in ways that the author does not fully explore. From the data in Appendix B, for example, it appears that at least 75 percent of the wealthiest slaveholders owned plantations on which they did not reside. Likewise, Appendix C shows that although cotton was the single most popular crop among the wealthiest slaveholders, sugar and rice planters made up a disproportionately large percentage of the antebellum aristocracy.

Having compiled his list of planters, Scarborough turned next to a variety of other sources: local histories, monographs, travel accounts, and published memoirs. The guts of his study are derived from surviving letters, diaries, and account books of the families of the slaveholders themselves. What has the author found? Planter aristocrats had large numbers of children, and a high percentage of those children died before reaching adulthood. Elites were excessively fond of intermarriage, up to and including first cousins. They were well educated and cosmopolitan in their outlook. They saw to it that all of their children--boys and girls--were well educated and that their sons were sent to the best universities. They were devout Christians, though seldom members of evangelical denominations.

Given the privileged social stratum that Scarborough has isolated, I would have expected him to have found more dissolute drunks, idiots, and lazy slobs among his aristocrats. But my prosaic bourgeois biases have been resoundingly overthrown. Even among the very wealthiest planters, families of long standing as well as upstarts, the author has found only relentless acquisition and the cast of mind that went along with that goal. Planters' sons, Scarborough writes, "were expected to cultivate habits of industry, order, perseverance, frugality, and temperance, which, in turn, would produce achievement and success" (pp. 80-81). Within their homes, domesticity reigned supreme, and patriarchy was benevolent. Most marriages were happy, parents were affectionate, and children were loved.

In a useful chapter on wives and daughters, Scarborough does not flinch from recognizing that plantation mistresses fully accepted the prerogatives of class and treated their slaves with the racist invective that the institution of slavery facilitated. In another chapter, the author shows that husbands devoted their lives to the methodical acquisition of what Scarborough properly labels "agrarian empires" (p. 122). Few elite planters in the 1850s could trace family wealth beyond their grandparents. In fact, the sugar economy of Louisiana was barely a generation old when the war came. While a less aggressive concern with material acquisition may have emerged with passing generations, it apparently had not done so by 1860. Indeed Scarborough has found no more moderation among established South Carolinian families than among recently enriched Mississippians. In short, the planter aristocrats behaved like slaveholders in general. And the slaveholders organized their lives in the ways familiar to the prosperous middle class of mid-nineteenth-century America.

But these were slaveholders, not bankers. They did exhibit diligence and fervor in the accumulation of their wealth, but their wealth was grounded in the labor of slaves. And this fact made planter aristocrats different from their northern counterparts. Recognizing this distinction, Scarborough devotes an entire chapter to the subject. Here the author's research in the slaveholders' personal papers runs up against intrinsic limits. Masters of the Big House openly acknowledges the brutality and oppressiveness of the slave system. But the author has thoroughly ensconced himself within the letters and diaries of the wealthiest planters. From this perspective slavery's structural imperatives toward violence and exploitation are not readily apparent. The slaveholders wrote a good deal about weeds and drought and death, and so we read a great deal about them here. But as the author of the definitive study of the overseers, Scarborough knows better than anyone that the day-to-day management of slaves was generally left to others, especially among this elite subgroup whose plantations were spread across the South. These were people who could write lovingly, or at least knowledgeably, of a few favored house servants and drivers, and Scarborough quotes many such effusions. But these were also people who could not possibly know the hundreds of slaves on their various plantations. And it is this absence from the source--much less its broader implications--with which the book never quite comes to terms.

For Scarborough, the cruelty of slavery is a function less of its intrinsic nature than of its most abusive masters. There is a good-guys/bad-guys quality to his chapter on the labor system. The inescapable use of physical coercion and reliance on an extensive internal slave trade that systematically destroyed families are not part of the book's analytical framework. Instead, whipping, sexual abuse, and broken families are attributed to the evildoing of the worst owners. At one point the author cites without comment the postwar claim of one of the South's largest planters "that he had never bought or sold a single slave and that the ancestors of his three hundred slaves had been in his family since 1735" (p. 194). The claim is preposterous, but Scarborough uses it and several like it to dispute the conclusions of "some scholars"--notably Michael Tadman--who have allegedly "exaggerated the extent to which slave families were destroyed by heartless masters" (p. 194). The word heartless is the joker in the sentence because it inadvertently exempts Tadman from the very critique Scarborough aims at him. And at the same time it exposes Scarborough's own impulse to see matters in terms of individual personalities. In any case, such anecdotes are hardly adequate to counter the impressive statistical evidence that Tadman so carefully compiled. Similarly, it may be fair to argue that William Dusinberre has exaggerated the rates of sickness and death among slaves in the rice swamps, but his general conclusion that the rice slaves reproduced themselves at a rate of only 4 percent per decade is persuasive. It cannot be rejected on the basis of Scarborough's citation of a single plantation on which the slaves did better than the norm. Diaries and letters tell us a great deal, but they don't tell us everything.

On the other hand, the conspicuous virtues of the author's total immersion in the planters' papers come back to the fore when he turns his attention to the political attitudes of his subjects. Scarborough adds his voice to those who see the South Carolina elite as unusually powerful and reactionary. He argues that the big planters' political power diminished in the wake of Jacksonian democracy, although his own numbers suggest that a very high proportion of them still held significant elective offices. Scarborough finds among his planters a consensus in the defense of slavery, the right to secede, and the dangers of democracy, in particular, demagoguery. At one point the author seems to endorse the old revisionist claim that the Civil War was brought on by a blundering generation of "inept politicians and fanatical demagogues," but this turns out to be the view of the planters themselves (p. 246). Notwithstanding widely shared views, the planters disagreed among themselves over many specific issues, from nullification and the tariff to the proper response to a rising northern threat. These are not startling conclusions, but they are so well established that they have the incalculable benefit of being definitive.

Three hefty chapters, nearly a third of the text, carry the story of elite planters from the secession crisis through the war years and into the period of postwar adjustment. These chapter are largely concerned with the planters' responses to the rush of political and military events. Here again the conclusions are unlikely to surprise most readers. But because he has covered the field so thoroughly, Scarborough is able to spot local and individual distinctions among the slaveholding elite that otherwise might be glossed over. The depth of the Natchez planters' Unionism stands out in starker relief when contrasted to the radicalism of the South Carolinians, for example. But shared experiences dominate the text: the enthusiasm for war as well as the trials of war, the shock of unfaithful slaves, the difficult adjustment to military defeat, and the social revolution that was emancipation. Scarborough neither romanticizes nor pities the planters whose lives were shaken by the Civil War, although he has a generally sympathetic view of the South's position in the sectional crisis.

In a brief concluding chapter entitled "Lords and Capitalists" Scarborough takes his readers on a brisk tour of some of the major historiographical debates of the past generation, naming names and issuing summary judgments. Were the big slaveholders capitalists? Yes. Were they paternalists? Yes, but so were the bourgeoisie of the North and of western Europe. Paternalism had nothing to do with the master-slave relationship, says Scarborough. Did wealthy planters suffer from guilty consciences? Not at all, why should they? Did plantation mistresses evince a sisterly sympathy with the similarly subjugated slaves? Absolutely not. These judgments seem reasonable and fair, but they are an awkward prelude to Scarborough's closing reiteration of his central theme that the elite planters of the Old South "differed little from their northern counterparts in their emphasis upon such bourgeois values as industry, frugality, self-discipline, and acquisitiveness" (p. 426). As a conclusion this seems unassailable, yet somehow inadequate to the author's heroic research. Here is where intellectual modesty opens the way for readers to draw still other conclusions. I shall confine myself to one such possibility.

Scarborough paints the picture of a southern planter elite that is not nearly as different from its New World counterparts as has been commonly assumed. The holdings of the slaveholding aristocracy were enormous by southern standards but comparable to those of Brazil and the Caribbean. As elsewhere in the New World, absentee ownership was the rule rather than the exception. Most large planters were effectively absent even from their home estates. Scarborough shows elites taking summer vacations that averaged ten weeks and wintering in New Orleans or Charleston. A disproportionate number of the southern elite grew rice and sugar, the two crops whose demographic profiles most closely resembled the deadly plantations of the sugar islands and Brazil. They looked upon their plantations as investments, managing them as part of their larger portfolios rather than as extensions of their own families. Scarborough does not see his large planters as distinctively southern. Rather he has drawn an equally compelling portrait of a southern planter class that no longer seems distinctively American. But he has left this and other conundrums to the rest of us to wrestle with.

JAMES OAKES

City University of New York Graduate Center