LANDON CARTER’S UNEASY KINGDOM

Poignant documents on the collapse of an old world, mixed with learned commentary: an outstanding work of history.

Isaac (Emeritus, History/La Trobe Univ., Australia) works an annaliste’s dream trove: a set of notebooks kept by a Virginia planter named Landon Carter, a devotee of “habitual diarizing,” who progressed from making cribnotes on parliamentary procedure and agricultural observations to recording wounded personal feelings and grievances against the English crown alike—or, as Isaac nicely puts it, from recording the tumults of the larger world to recording “rebellions in his own little kingdom.” Carter’s troubles are many: his daughter has eloped with the man he has forbidden her to see, and she despises her father because he will not share his fortune with the newlyweds (“I will contrive that she shall not want for Personal necessities, but I will give nothing that either Reuben or his inheritors shall claim”); his son has taken to acting out; his neighbors are saying slanderous things about him; and worse, at the dawn of the American Revolution, his slaves are constantly conspiring against him, and not without reason. As Isaac’s narrative opens, eight of those slaves have stolen a gun, “took my grandson Landon’s Bag of bullets and all the Powder, and went off in my Petty Auger canoe” to sign up with royal governor Lord Dunmore, who has offended planters up and down the Chesapeake Bay with the promise that runaway slaves who joined his Royal Ethiopian Regiment would be granted their freedom. Carter, a learned man fond of reading and quoting from Tristam Shandy, has plenty more difficulties, suspects the world of conspiring against him, and seems well on the way to becoming a cranky old man save for his enthusiasm for the rebel cause. Isaac’s surrounding commentary is intelligent and useful, though old Carter is quite able to speak for himself—and does so, grumpily but affectingly.

An extraordinary, fascinating set of firsthand accounts from the revolutionary era.