Reviewed by Peter Thompson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2

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Reviewed by Peter Thompson | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 62.2 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Peter Thompson, University of Oxford

Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation. By Rhys Isaac. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 448 pages. $35.00 (cloth).
"To be the historian who will present Landon Carter as a storyteller witness to the revolutions of his times," Rhys Isaac writes, "is to be the scriptwriter and theater director of a major historical stage show. I shall introduce myself also" (xix). One notes the plural revolutions, reflecting in passing that Isaac has little need to introduce himself. He is rightly celebrated as a most distinguished practitioner of anthropologically inflected historical writing. Scholars working on early America will read Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdomin the expectation that if anyone can put on display the gems "buried in a mass of more routine (though rarely dull) day-by-day recording" (xxi), Isaac can. Such a weight of anticipation must have been almost as daunting for Isaac as the "sheer bulk" (xxi) of Carter's diaries. There is, therefore, more honesty than affectation in the autobiographical asides through which Isaac informs the reader how he kept his distance from Carter, and perhaps his sanity, as he "constantly pondered" (xix) the diarist and his diaries. With the possible exception of his fellow Australian Greg Dening, nobody ponders quite so fruitfully as Isaac, and Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom is an achievement comparable to Dening's superb treatment of Captain Bligh.¹	1
In 1987 Kenneth A. Lockridge chided Michael Zuckerman for taking the secret diary of a Virginian planter (and self-described patriarch) too literally. The writings of William Byrd II presented, according to Lockridge, an insoluble "enigma" whose interpretation, of "necessity," required subtle speculation and guesswork in addition to scholarly close reading. By concluding that "if Byrd visited or was visited x number of times then he was an obsessive visitor," for example, Lockridge claimed that Zuckerman had failed to do justice to the literary qualities of Byrd's diaries; he had, by implication, misunderstood his subject.² Isaac's reading of "the story of the coming of the American Revolution," as seen William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Volume LXII, Number 2, April 2005 through the diaries of "an apprehensive Virginia planter patriarch" (xii), employs a methodology similar to Zuckerman's. He marshals a substantial body of citations to establish that Carter was obsessed by his role as head of a complex and unruly household. No reader of Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom, however, is likely to accuse Isaac of being literal minded. He is up front to a fault about his critical approach to "the many genres of performance" (xix), including the literary, that Carter developed in his diaries.	2
The subtitle alludes to a distinction that his text seems designed to elide. "Revolution" is surely meant as the American Revolution, a quintessentially big event. "Rebellion," in contrast, connotes events within Carter's little kingdom, such as the "intense father-daughter struggle over patriarchal sovereign rights" (37) described in chapter 3, that may be of signal importance to any understanding of life within a constellation of Virginian plantation households but whose broader significance is unclear. For Isaac, Carter's worldview was so structured by patriarchy that revolution and rebellion blended together to form, in his understanding, interrelated revolutions. He considers whether and how the "psychic family" dramas Carter recorded collectively shadow, and intrude on, "the political realm as it is collectively imagined," conscious that to do so may cause "outrage" "in some quarters"(173) of, presumably, the modern historical profession and a general readership. This anticipated outrage may account for the curiously tentative manner in which Isaac links the themes of rebellion and revolution. The first section of the text, a bravura account of a bid for freedom made in 1776 by eight of Carter's slaves, led by one Moses, and the diarist's impassioned response, establishes fairly straightforward linkages that later sections, treating the perceived failings of Carter's white neighbors, approach with serpentine subtlety. When analyzing Carter's understanding of his place in the world outside Sabine Hall, as in "Duties Betrayed" (chapter 10), Isaac's ponderings threaten to become ponderous.	. . .

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