Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South

Masters of the Big House: Elite Slaveholders of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century South by Scarborough, William Kauffman. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780807128824.

William Kauffman Scarborough has produced a work of incomparable scope and depth, offering the challenge to see afresh one of the most powerful groups in American history the wealthiest southern planters who owned 250 or more slaves in the census years of 1850 and 1860. The identification and tabulation in every slaveholding state of these lords of economic, social, and political influence reveals a highly learned class of men who set the tone for southern society while also involving themselves in the wider world of capitalism. Scarborough examines the demographics of elite families, the educational philosophy and religiosity of the nabobs, gender relations in the Big House, slave management methods, responses to secession, and adjustment to the travails of Reconstruction and an alien postwar world. AUTHOR BIO: A professor of history at the University of Southern Mississippi, William Kauffman Scarborough is the author of The Overseer: Plantation Management in the Old South and editor of The Diary of Edmund Ruffin. He is a recipient of the B. L. C. Wailes Award and the Richard Wright Award for Literary Excellence for the entire body of his work. A past president of the Mississippi Historical Society and the St. George Tucker Society, he lives in Hattiesburg.