Carter's frustrations were played out in every corner of his domain. Carter considered himself an affectionate husband, a loving father to his children, a devoted master to his slaves and--when he obtained public office--a dutiful leader. Yet his efforts were for naught. Carter lived surrounded by unruly ingrates, who continually sabotaged his attempts to do right by them and himself. Although his various wives seemed to have been silently submissive, his children constantly challenged his best efforts, disregarding his advice and dismissing his authority. His son would have no part of his father's disciplined world of work and study, and instead gambled, whored and drank to excess. Like Carter's daughter, he married against his father's wishes, and when Carter half-heartedly threatened to disinherit both of them, they and their spouses rebuked him in a most cutting manner. Carter's grandson picked up on his parents' disdain and mocked his grandfather. When Carter cuffed the disrespectful brat, his daughter-in-law viciously tongue-lashed the old man.

Carter similarly found that his authority carried little weight with his slaves. Wielding the lash, Carter could force them to work. The lash was ubiquitous on his plantation. According to Isaac, the Carter diary is a catalogue of violence reported in the most routine, offhand manner. "They have been severely whipd day by day," reads one unaffected entry, as Carter hurries to the more important matter of manuring. Still, his "people" stubbornly rejected his rule. At every opportunity, they challenged him--malingering, breaking tools, plundering the storehouse and then selling the booty for their own benefit. They took to the woods--in effect, striking--when their labor was needed most. When the Revolution provided an opening, key members of his enslaved workforce abandoned him for British lines, making it clear that they too regarded his putative fatherhood as a sham.

For Carter, the traitors to patriarchal rule were everywhere. His inability to bend his "children" to his will left him in a chronic state of dissatisfaction. The cantankerous patriarch spent endless hours pouring "indignant stories of disobedience" onto the pages of his diary. Isaac rightly calls it a narrative of subversion.

The ultimate failure of Carter's patriarchal rule came not at the hand of traitors within his household but from his own hand, and Isaac documents the delicious irony in fine detail. A jealous guardian of his liberties and those of his class, Carter became an early and ardent defender of American rights against the imposition of Crown tyranny. Slowly he was drawn into the growing opposition and finally into open rebellion against the monarchy, the very model of patriarchal rule that he so cherished. Even as he denounced the King and his ministers, he fulminated against the antimonarchical and regicidal impulse of the emerging republicanism. Landon Carter came to understand that he was "Sabine Hall's George III."

The parallels between the struggle within Carter's household and those within the British Empire can be easily overdrawn into a vast psychodrama. But Isaac is too good a historian to detach Carter's predicament from the material and ideological realities of the revolutionary crisis. In arguing "the symbolic pulling down of patriarchal monarchy as the keystone of the cosmic arch of public and private authority," Isaac appreciates that patriarchy withstood that blow and the many that followed. With American independence, the father King was quickly replaced by the Founding Fathers. Still, Isaac's larger point that the Revolution was a central event in the decline of patriarchy is incontrovertible.

As Carter's world deteriorated under assault from his children, his slaves and his own antimonarchical politics, he compensated for his double loss--his own and the King's--by turning the full weight of his patriarchal energies on Nassaw, his personal attendant and most intimate companion. He "formed now a great project of redeeming Nassaw from the fires of hell." Isaac's rendition of the struggle between Carter and Nassaw is nothing short of brilliant, for it demonstrates in close detail the havoc patriarchy wreaked upon its subjects. A man of considerable parts, Nassaw was a healer of great skill. Carter, who regularly doctored his people, had enormous respect for Nassaw's ability as a physician, for, in truth, Nassaw was one of the finest surgeons in colonial Virginia. Carter's determination to save Nassaw from the bottle was more than matched by Nassaw's powerful resolve. The struggle was intense. Carter had Nassaw "tied Neck & heels all night" and threatened to "send him to some of the islands." Nassaw petitioned, prayed and promised, but the requisite change was not forthcoming. Again Carter whipped, and Nassaw gave "the solemn Promise." When Nassaw's pledges came to nothing, Carter--certain that he was "justified both to God and man"--pressed ever harder. Although Nassaw survived, the old doctor paid an extraordinary price. As Isaac concludes, "the social and psychological cost...to Nassaw would never be reckoned."

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