Why read Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom?

Book cover of Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom: Rebellion and Revolution on a Virginia Plantation

Book description

Landon Carter, a Virginia planter patriarch, left behind one of the most revealing of all American diaries. In this astonishingly rich biography, Rhys Isaac mines this remarkable document-and many other sources-to reconstruct Carter's interior world as it plunged into revolution. The aging patriarch, though a fierce supporter of American liberty,…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Landon Carter's Uneasy Kingdom as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Hannah Farber

Author

Landon Carter was a fearsome Virginia tobacco planter, politician, and patriarch, with hundreds of slaves laboring under the lash on his plantation. As I learned from this book, he was also a total headcase. This book is based on the diaries that Carter wrote compulsively, alone, because he didn't have anyone to confide in. (It's lonely at the top.)

The diaries reveal Carter as an anxious pessimist, constantly going into tailspins because his slaves, his children, and his fellow Virginia gentlemen constantly defied his authority. The icing on this lousy cake was the outbreak of the American Revolution, which upended…

From Hannah's list on American outcasts, oddballs, and one-of-a-kinds.