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The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders

James Oakes' Pulitzer Prize-winning history of the planter elite that dominated antebellum America, from the Civil War to the Great Depression.
A sweeping narrative that reveals how the planter class shaped American society and culture.
Oakes draws on a wealth of primary sources to tell the story of the Randolph family, from their rise to wealth and power in Virginia to their fall during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The Ruling Race is a fascinating and important book that offers a new perspective on American history.
Oakes is a masterful storyteller who brings the past to life in vivid detail.

"A sweeping and spirited history of Southern slaveholders."―David Herbert Donald

This pathbreaking social history of the slaveholding South marks a turn in our understanding of antebellum America and the coming of the Civil War. Oakes's bracing analysis breaks the myth that slaveholders were a paternalistic aristocracy dedicated to the values of honor, race, and section. Instead they emerge as having much in common with their entrepreneurial counterparts in the North: they were committed to free-market commercialism and political democracy for white males. The Civil War was not an inevitable conflict between civilizations on different paths but the crack-up of a single system, the result of people and events.