| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

William Kauffman Scarborough. Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 2003. Pp. xviii, 521. $39.95.
A core element of the northern critique of slavery was the belief that southern society was ruled by a small, selfish aristocracy opposed to basic elements of American democracy, Christian morality, and economic and social progress. Southern defenders as well as abolitionists helped to construct this image of a traditional southern ruling class, and antebellum propaganda wars continued in post-Civil War interpretations of the sectional conflict. A century later, they would be echoed in scholarly debates as Eugene D. Genovese, in several important works, argued that the South was ruled by a class of planters who embraced and propagated an ideology of paternalism that was rooted in the master-slave relationship and opposed to the liberal values that shaped free labor capitalism elsewhere in the modern world. Much of the reaction to Genovese aimed at refuting his ideas about the paternalistic nature of the master-slave relationship. Other revisionists, notably James Oakes, examined slaveholders as a group, noted their great diversity, and emphasized their affinity with capitalism and their striving acquisitiveness.	1
William Kauffman Scarborough has presented the first thorough analysis of the South's largest slaveholders, those who owned at least 250 slaves in 1850 or 1860. His is an ambitious book that sheds light on a number of controversies. Historians planning to rebut Scarborough will have their work cut out if they try to match his empirical research, which includes a meticulously compiled data set on the wealth and social characteristics of some 340 leading slaveholders across the South. Still more impressive is the massive amount of research into family papers, plantation records, and other primary sources that enables him to reach beyond the "masters of the big house" to reveal the lives of others who inhabited this world, including wives and children, slaves and overseers. The book includes richly detailed accounts of religious life, women and gender relations, master-slave relations, and economic affairs, as well as political thought and behavior.	. . .

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