Both men exhibited intelligence, shrewd judgment and, when challenged, admirable courage. Carter condemned the "Byg Men" who ran Virginia's legislature as their personal fiefdom, refusing to partake in the corruption that passed for business as usual. Thistlewood, for his part, staked his independence from the great sugar magnates who dominated Jamaican society. To their dismay, they learned he was not a man with whom they could trifle. If independence of mind and love of liberty were prized ideals in the eighteenth century--as well as our own--it would be hard to find better exemplars.

Yet the perversities of slave society bent these otherwise commendable traits into heinous pathologies. Enjoying a monopoly of violence and knowing their own success rested on a willingness to employ it without compunction, the planters became twisted personifications of the tyranny they professed to despise. Carter became, at best, a dyspeptic curmudgeon, obsessed with his failed patriarchy; Thistlewood, a monstrous sociopath. But as Isaac and Burnard underscore, the real price was paid by the men and women who fell under the planters' rule.

Landon Carter and Thomas Thistlewood shared much as members of the planter class, but it is hard to imagine two more different individuals. The distinction derived, in large measure, from differences between eighteenth-century Virginia and Jamaica, but the diverse personalities of men of radically different origins magnified those distinctions.

Landon Carter was born into the immense privilege of Virginia's first families in 1710. The son of Robert "King" Carter, perhaps the richest man in the colony, he was educated by tutors at home and then, at age 9, sent to study in London. He returned eight years later to nurse his aged father and, when the old man died, the young Carter inherited his portion of the family estate. In the years that followed, Landon expanded his patrimony, so that eventually his domain became a small empire that reached into all corners of the Chesapeake and numbered some 400 slaves.

Like other grandees, Carter married into another prominent Virginia family (the Wormeleys). When his first wife died, he picked a second from another of Virginia's first families (the Byrds), and when she died he did so yet again (this time a Beale). As he formed and re-formed his domestic life, Carter entered Virginia politics. Like most of the gentlemen of his class, Carter despised the hurly-burly of an electoral system that forced him to appeal for the votes of dirt farmers, whom he held in utter contempt. But he did what was necessary and eventually won a seat in the Virginia General Assembly. He became an early and strong advocate of colonial rights and a minor figure in the struggle for American independence. Along the way Carter kept a diary, which Isaac--whose earlier study of eighteenth-century Virginia won a Pulitzer Prize--suggests might be hailed as a "literary classic," if only it had been a work of fiction. As history, sadly, it is only another source for the study of the past.

Isaac's praise is perhaps a bit too fulsome, but there is no doubt about the importance of Landon Carter's diary as a window on the planter class and Carter himself. It reveals a man who saw himself as a link in the long chain of patriarchy, whose history stretched back to time immemorial. For Carter, as for many members of his class, the patriarchal ideal justified his place in society, rationalized his actions and gave meaning to his life. As the father of "his people"--which included his slaves as well as his immediate family--he offered care and protection in return for deference, obedience and service, even if they had to be extracted by force. Unfortunately for Carter, he arrived at the pinnacle of patriarchal authority at the moment the ancient order of the ruling fathers was being undermined by the forces of modernity, not simply in the world at large but in his own household. Perhaps even more disturbing for Carter, he half-wittingly joined in the assault, cutting the ground from under his feet. His was, as Isaac declares, an "uneasy kingdom."

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