Volume 34, Number 3 · February 26, 1987
Southern Gentleman
By Bertram Wyatt-Brown
Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter annotated with the assistance of Susan W. Walker)
(with "The Journal of Thomas B. Chaplin, 1822–1890," edited and, by Theodore Rosengarten
William Morrow, 750 pp., $22.95
Theodore Rosengarten's talents were well displayed in his prize-winning book, All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, a biography of a twentieth-century Alabama sharecropper. He has repeated that success in Tombee, a study of a nineteenth-century low-country slaveholder. His choice of subject, however, raises the question, Why should anyone wish to read a biography and journal of a feckless cotton planter who knew little about himself and less about the society around him? Thomas B. Chaplin of South Carolina lacks distinction, quite in contrast to the patriarchs and matrons of the Jones, Hammond, and Chesnut clans about whom substantial and well-regarded works have recently appeared.[*] With enough resilience to start over again in the chaos of postwar life, these families, living not far from Chaplin, had been architects of late slaveholding civilization.
Review, 3325 words
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