| 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.
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.
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