House of Cards: Leisure, Freedom, Authority, Revolution, and the Diary of Landon Carter

Abstract

Landon Carter, a wealthy planter in the Tidewater of Virginia during the eighteenth century, kept a diary that possesses great value for scholars of sport history. His writings showcase a wide emotional range, including white-hot rage and bubbling pathos. In his diary, Carter often decried the leisure habits of others, especially his son Robert Wormeley Carter, who constantly gambled on horses and cards. For Landon, if leisure was allowed to run wild, it threatened republican virtue, which was the basis of social authority and political power. Although Carter's diary is limited to the perspective of an elite, white, male planter from Virginia, his worldview was shaped by the assumptions of patriarchy and the institution of slavery. His lamentations about rampant games reflected his worries about his own corroding paternal authority - a private drama amid his larger, public anxieties about a crumbling social order during the era of the American Revolution.

Publication Title

Journal of Sport History

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