The history of Louisiana is replete with many prominent personalities who were instrumental in guiding the social and political direction of the state through the portentous decades of the nineteenth century.

There were individuals in Louisiana who rose for periods of time to greater levels of political and social influence; however, no other individual in nineteenth-century Louisiana sustained as high a position of influence for a longer period of time than Duncan Kenner. On first view his life appears to personify much of the glamorized "moonlight and magnolias" culture that has characterized so much of literature on the nineteenth-century South. However, this examination of Kenner reveals a far more capitalistic and multi-dimensional existence than the aristocratic lifestyle associate with the Southern planter.

The author offers the reader not only a fresh look at an important Lousisianian of the past but also places Kenner within the perspective of his times.