Thistlewood ruled by unmediated force, awing slaves with what Burnard calls "fierce, arbitrary, and instantaneous violence." Beyond their subordination, he cared little about their lives. He evinced no interest in the patriarchal ideology that drove Landon Carter. Carter's attempt to reform a slave drunkard would be inconceivable on Thistlewood's pen. While Carter desired to incorporate his slaves into his larger family, Thistlewood simply wrote his slaves out of the social contract. As Burnard notes, Thistlewood was not a racist of the scientific sort who condemned black people as biologically inferior. He lived and worked closely with slaves. He knew them as men and women. He appreciated differences in their abilities and personalities and employed those distinctions for his own purposes. However, he believed his rule could only be secured by mind-boggling terror.

Burnard exposes the monstrous results of Thistlewood's rule, but he also notes the ironies. Thistlewood's vicious physical assaults insulated his slaves from the kinds of psychological imposition of Carter's patriarchal regime. Thistlewood allowed slaves their own family and religious lives to the extent they could establish them within his regime. His slaves were freed from the kinds of imposition that made Nassaw's life a living hell. Thistlewood's slaves enjoyed a measure of independence Nassaw might have envied. Again ironically, while Thistlewood rarely entered into his slaves' lives, he himself became part of a slave family.

Early in his stay in Jamaica, Thistlewood established a lifelong relationship--some thirty-three years--with his slave housekeeper, Phibbah, although he continued to force himself upon other women. Together they had a son, and upon his death he granted Phibbah her freedom. If Thistlewood ever showed affection for another human being, it was for Phibbah. Phibbah used her relationship with Thistlewood to her own advantage and that of the larger slave community, but she also appeared to have deep affection for Thistlewood. When they were apart, Thistlewood noted--perhaps projecting his own feelings--that she was in "miserable slavery."

The relationship of Phibbah and Thistlewood, like that of Carter and Nassaw, demonstrates the difficulty of penetrating the mind of the master. Historians--Isaac and Burnard among them--have explained these divergent styles of mastership from the extraordinary differences of the demography and economy of a sugar island like Jamaica and a mainland colony like Virginia. Where slave masters lived surrounded by an overwhelming black majority--some 95 percent of the population in Thistlewood's portion of the island--whose numbers were constantly augmented by newly arrived Africans, planters believed that only raw terror could sustain their rule. In Virginia, a white majority and an African-American population allowed for other strategies. But Isaac's and Burnard's close reading of the diaries of Carter and Thistlewood make it evident that there is more involved than these structural differences.

Yet emphasizing Carter's struggle with his fellow physician and intimate companion and Thistlewood's relationship with his lifelong mistress also has its dangers. While much of the masters' lives is revealed in these telling relationships (and those of other slaves who lived and worked in close proximity to their owners), Carter and Thistlewood did not know most of their slaves, perhaps in part because their slaves did not want to be known. As Burnard emphasizes, slaves might find real rewards in living close to their owners--if only because it saved them from the harsh, often killing, regimen of field labor--but there were dangers too. Many slaves found it the better part of wisdom to keep their distance and take their chances in the fields. Most, of course, did not have a choice. These anonymous men and women shaped the masters' world as much as the Nassaws and the Phibbahs.

Rhys Isaac's penetrating interpretation of Landon Carter and Trevor Burnard's extraordinarily thoughtful rendering of Thomas Thistlewood suggest how much more is to be learned about those who ruled the universe in the age of the plantation. The planters' achievement in expanding wealth and creating new polities has been rightly acknowledged; their legacy of inhumanity remains to be addressed.

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