These include the plantation masters and their families, as typified by the Byrd family.

A victory for Hubbert would represent an internal revolution against power alignments that have prevailed since 1890, when the plantation masters stole the governorship from Reuben F. Kolb, a dirt-road populist elected by the white yeomanry and poor blacks.

In place of a Simon Legree or a cavalier fop as the typical plantation master, the book presented a shrewd businessman running a well-managed, efficient and highly profitable enterprise with labor policies that anticipated those of modern industry.

Some are adaptations of those of the French plantation masters.

Living in the plantation, Carlinhos became familiar with the social inequalities between the plantation masters and their employees; in addition, he almost joined the Cangaço (he even asked the bandit Antônio Silvino to let him follow the group).

Family lore has it, though, that Susan and Ellen's father was a white plantation master.

A paper by LeeAnn Whites of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University argued that the defeat of the South had a "feminizing" influence on a culture that until that time had been dominated by authoritarian white male plantation masters.

Mr. Shepherd's death in 1858 left Nancy as both plantation master and mother of six children to raise.