"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...