I wondered how far the careful definitions of paternalism and connections to the Founding Fathers position this not so much as a ‘Virginia book’ (a phrase used in some earlier posts in the Junto Book Club) but as a ‘North America book’. Planters were, almost by definition, uneasy creatures – apprehensive about slave uprisings and other threats to their status emanating from within their households or from across the Atlantic. And it is quite right to zone in on anxiety as the leitmotif in the emotional lives of this elite. Brown’s work on what historians are now calling an ‘emotional community’ among Virginia planters therefore seems ahead of its time. (See, for instance, the AHR Conversation from December 2012). The history of the emotions has come to the fore in recent years. It got me thinking about how the anxieties of this slaveholding elite were related to those of the Jamaican planter class, and – more specifically – to the various worries that Simon Taylor expressed in his letters.īrown’s prescient focus on emotions struck me as interesting. The conversation, led by Joseph Adelman is about the final chapter of the book, on the ‘anxious patriarchs’ of the eighteenth-century Virginian elite.
This post is an expanded version of a comment I made today on the Junto Blog Summer Book Club discussion about Kathleen Brown’s Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, & Anxious Patriarchs.
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