Patriarchy in Peril: William Byrd II and Slavery in Early Virginia

＂William Byrd II was a prominent eighteenth-century Virginian who at the time of his death owned over 180,000 acres of land and employed laborers and enslaved Africans. This book examines a neglected stage in the formation of slavery in Virginia by analyzing the practices and beliefs of one of the more prominent slave owners of the period. Byrd was perhaps the early colonial definition of a patriarch, and author Dennis Todd here grounds the concept of patriarchalism in a series of concrete practices and expectations. Doing so, Todd argues that patriarchal principles, which are often assumed to have justified slavery and to have offered a template for slave management, in fact did neither＂--

DENNIS TODD is emeritus professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Defoe’s America and Imagining Monsters: Miscreations of the Self in Eighteenth-Century England.