This carefully researched book provides a group portrait of the southern planter elite on the eve of—and during—the Civil War. In a series of topically arranged chapters, William K. Scarborough focuses on some 338 individuals who, according to the federal census returns of 1850 or 1860, owned 250 or more slaves. (Ninety-three persons qualified in both censuses.) The result is an extremely useful volume, although more for its descriptive information than for its analytical insights.

Although these “aristocratic slaveholders” (p. 2) differed among themselves in a variety of ways, as a group they had much in common. The great majority lived in the deep South, with more than two-thirds residing in the three states of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi and more than one-third living “in or near” (p. 6) Charleston or Natchez. Almost all of them grew cotton, sugar, or rice. They were heavily southern-born (with 21 born abroad and 29 in the North), heavily Episcopalian or Presbyterian (with one Jew), and heavily male (of 22 women, all but one was a widow who inherited her elite status). They valued education for their children, showed little doubt about the morality of slavery, and despite having been split between Whigs and Democrats were united in their “common resentment against Northerners, especially the increasingly vocal abolitionist minority among them” (p. 247). Overall, they were “well-bred, cosmopolitan in background and outlook, intellectually curious, broadly educated, articulate, trained for leadership, and gifted with exceptional entrepreneurial skills” (p. 1).

Despite his emphasis on these common characteristics, Scarborough seems uncertain whether he wants to stress the distinctiveness of these men of “immense influence” (p. 1) or to suggest that they were pretty much like other southerners and northerners—only richer. This dualism is especially evident in his discussion of the much-debated relationship between antebellum planters and capitalism. After sensibly noting that whether one views the great planters as capitalists or “paternalists” depends on one's definition of capitalism (and, one might add, of paternalism), Scarborough rejects what he sees as a false-minded Marxist definition in favor of one in which “capitalism is simply an economic system in which individuals invest capital, from whatever source and by whatever labor system derived” (p. 409). On the basis of this definition, he concludes that his planters were “clearly capitalists,” who “exhibited values little different from their free-state counterparts” (p. 409).

Scarborough also touches on controversy in his interpretation of these planters' wartime activities. Suggesting that the relatively few “die-hard Unionists” in his group “acted out of economic interest” (p. 307), he stresses by contrast the principled commitment to the Confederacy of most planter-aristocrats, as well as their many sacrifices for the cause. In making this argument, he does not so much dispute as ignore the work of James L. Roark, who in his classic Masters Without Slaves: Southern Planters in the Civil War and Reconstruction (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977) described wealthy planters as acting resolutely in pursuit of their own self-interest, whether or not it coincided with—or undermined—the interests of the Confederacy.

If Scarborough often appears to be not just an admirer but a defender of his planters, at times he displays a quirky, conservative bent that lends his book a decidedly old-fashioned tone. “I commenced this project with no preconceived thesis,” he notes, “nor have I been guided by any of the so-called theories, models, and paradigms to which the current generation of historians seems increasingly wedded” (p. 2). Continuing such jabs at modern failings, he praises the “young women in these nineteenth-century planter families” for displaying “a zeal for learning and an intellectual inquisitiveness that seems sadly lacking in the youth of the present generation” (p. 79). Women appear as “‘members of the fair sex”’ (p. 89) or “distaff members” (p. 101) who—despite their inability to vote—were “by no means second class citizens” (p. 95). After the war, blacks “roamed aimlessly over the countryside” (p. 374), and soon “the Negro became a political pawn of the Radical Republicans” (p. 404).

It would be too bad if readers let such irritants obscure this book's utility. Masters of the Big House provides lots of valuable data, including appendices that list all 338 members of the planter elite, along with each one's birthplace, state and county of residence, crops cultivated, and (sometimes multiple) slaveholdings for 1850 and 1860. Because these data can support diverse interpretations, including some quite different from those propounded by Scarborough, many readers are likely to find this book most useful as a sort of primary source, more for its historical information than for its historical analysis. Historians will be profiting from this volume for many years to come.