| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

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

William Kauffman Scarborough, author of the classic The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South (1966) and editor of the magnificent three-volume work The Diary of Edmund Ruffin (1972–1989), explains in the introduction to Masters of the Big House that he gathered material for this collective biography of the South's elite planters for nearly forty years. At first out of the corner of his eye, then systematically, Scarborough built a vast database for the wealthiest planters, those who owned 250 or more slaves in 1850 or 1860. The census identified and provided information for 338 individuals, two-thirds of whom lived in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana and 22 of whom were women, all widows save one. In addition, Scarborough mined some 125 manuscript collections for elite planters' "attitudes, philosophy, motivation, values, and ideology" (p. 5).

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