Tombee: PORTRAIT OF A COTTON PLANTER by Theodore Rosengarten (Morrow: $22.95; 750 pp.)

The exotic forces of cavalier gallantry, racial subjugation, self-destructive pride, and romantic pessimism which swept the Old South over the brink of reason in 1861 hold a timeless fascination for readers of American history. “Gone With the Wind” fused two generations of Southern white mythic memory into a view of the Civil War as a ghastly mistake in which white Southerners paid dearly for the sins of their fathers. Not until after the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school desegregation did historians, like Kenneth Stampp in “The Peculiar Institution,” reveal to a large body of readers slavery’s capricious brutality and systematic debasement of a racial underclass.

Replacing rosy nostalgia about the Old South with hard realism has occupied a generation of historians. Seeing blacks and whites as complex human beings--as well as labor system protagonists--has been even more difficult. A new appreciation among historians of the power and potency of narrative sources has helped them recapture the tragic ethos of the plantation South. “The Children of Pride,” Robert Manson Myers’ edition of the letters of a religious planter family in Georgia published in 1972, employed correspondence to tell stories of love, fear, work, human frailty and death.

Now Theodore Rosengarten has edited a similarly magnificent narrative source, the plantation journal of Thomas B. Chaplin spanning most of 41 years of his adult life, 12 of them, 1845-1857, in continuous daily entries. To help readers make sense of Chaplin’s family, his legal problems, his farming and business methods, recreational, religious, and community involvements, Rosengarten has written a sensitive and insightful book-length introduction to the journal.

“What I found distinctive about the journal,” he explains, “was its picture of ordinary life--the naming of things and the ebb and flow of relationships, the diminution of experience by monotony and its elevation by passion. Great events loom behind the scenes, but in the visible world, people are eating, working, sleeping, falling ill and dying.”

A good example is the entry for April 6, 1845: “Sunday. Intended to go to church. Dressed, brushed, examined critically my taut ensemble, being satisfied herewith was about to depart, when lo--my gloves were missing. A general search produced but one of the missing articles. What was to be done? To go with an ungloved hand was impossible. Besides that member presented a most inelegant appearance, having burnt mahogany colored in my fishing excursions. But in the midst of my turning upside down of trunks and boxes there come up a sudden shower. Fortunate circumstance! I ordered my buggy back, ensconced myself in my elbow chair, and oh! Sin and Satan, spent the morning in reading the ‘Chevalier de Faublas.’ ”

To which Rosengarten and his editorial assistant, Susan W. Walker, add a footnote: “ ‘Les Amours du Chevalier de Faublas,’ a bawdy novel by Louvet de Couvray, published in 1789. The hero enters society at sixteen and embarks on a series of love affairs ending in murder, madness, and suicide.”

This passage tells us a great deal about Thomas Chaplin. An Episcopalian, he went to church to see friends and be seen by neighbors. While one of the wealthier planters on St. Helena Island (near the present resort of Hilton Head Island), with “trunks and boxes” of clothing, he lacked a clean pair of gloves. In truth, he was land and slave poor. His father had died when he was 6, and the bulk of his potential inheritance remained in his mother’s hands. By the time she died at age 84, in 1864, the ravages of the Civil War and the greed and litigiousness of her fourth husband had expended most of Thomas’ expected legacy.

The frenetic quality of that April Sunday morning was typical of Chaplin’s adult life. He did things in fits and starts. While hard working, he lacked the skill, perseverance, and ruthlessness to maximize his profits. Capable of occasional cruelty to his slaves and oblivious to their human personalities, he was known as a lax master.

On his beloved Tombee plantation, he often had to worry about putting enough food on the table to feed his sickly wife, his robust half sister-in-law (whom he later married), his seven children, and assorted relatives down on their luck and in need of work and a meal.

The portrayal of slavery in the Chaplin journal emphasizes the way in which ordinary human faults of pride, egotism, insecurity, aggression and resentment debased the lives of slaves and magnified the weaknesses of masters just enough to make a bad situation inexorably worse. “Trouble gathers thicker & thicker around me,” he lamented in 1845. “I will be compelled to send about 10 prime Negroes to town next Monday to be sold.” Chaplin was not being melodramatic; the need to sell 10 slaves was a financial catastrophe, but even more, it was a personal and emotional debacle:

“I do this rather than have them seized and sold in Beaufort by the sheriff--or rather sacrificed. I never thought that I would be driven to this very unpleasant extremity. Nothing can be more mortifying and grieving to a man than to select out some of his Negroes to be sold. You know not to whom, or how they will be treated by their new masters. And Negroes that you find no fault with--to separate families, mothers & daughters, brothers & sisters--all to pay for your own extravagances. People will laugh at your distress, and say it serves you right, you live beyond your means, though some of the same never refused to partake of that hospitality and generosity which caused me to live beyond my means.”

Chaplin sensed that his own life, as well as the history of his time and place, was a web of relationships and of ever narrowing options and choices. He kept a journal to make sense of that web, to celebrate the astringent joys of living in it, and to escape at least momentarily from its entanglements. He did not leave a pretty picture of himself, but an honest and convincing one.