Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South (Book Review‪)‬

Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South. By William Kauffman Scarborough. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, c. 2003. Pp. xx, 521. $39.95, ISBN 0-8071-2882-1.) William Kauffman Scarborough has been working on Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South for more than a quarter of a century, with special intensity for the past decade. Given the prodigious research in the manuscript archives of the slave-owning elite, it is hard to imagine how the book's findings could be overturned by subsequent scholarship. There is no question that this is an impressive work, yet it is also a curiously modest one. Scarborough is a good old-fashioned historian, one who never strays far from his sources and therefore leaves some analytical wiggle room for those of us cursed with more reckless imaginations.