The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves - Hardcover

Levy, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375508651 ISBN 13: 9780375508653

Publisher: Random House, 2005

Synopsis

Robert Carter III, the grandson of Tidewater legend Robert “King” Carter, was born into the highest circles of Virginia’s Colonial aristocracy. He was neighbor and kin to the Washingtons and Lees and a friend and peer to Thomas Jefferson and George Mason. But on September 5, 1791, Carter severed his ties with this glamorous elite at the stroke of a pen. In a document he called his Deed of Gift, Carter declared his intent to set free nearly five hundred slaves in the largest single act of liberation in the history of American slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation.

How did Carter succeed in the very action that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson claimed they fervently desired but were powerless to effect? And why has his name all but vanished from the annals of American history? In this haunting, brilliantly original work, Andrew Levy traces the confluence of circumstance, conviction, war, and passion that led to Carter’s extraordinary act.

At the dawn of the Revolutionary War, Carter was one of the wealthiest men in America, the owner of tens of thousands of acres of land, factories, ironworks–and hundreds of slaves. But incrementally, almost unconsciously, Carter grew to feel that what he possessed was not truly his. In an era of empty Anglican piety, Carter experienced a feverish religious visionthat impelled him to help build a church where blacks and whites were equals.

In an age of publicly sanctioned sadism against blacks, he defied convention and extended new protections and privileges to his slaves. As the war ended and his fortunes declined, Carter dedicated himself even more fiercely to liberty, clashing repeatedly with his neighbors, his friends, government officials, and, most poignantly, his own family.

But Carter was not the only humane master, nor the sole partisan of freedom, in that freedom-loving age. Why did this troubled, spiritually torn man dare to do what far more visionary slave owners only dreamed of? In answering this question, Andrew Levy teases out the very texture of Carter’s life and soul–the unspoken passions that divided him from others of his class, and the religious conversion that enabled him to see his black slaves in a new light.

Drawing on years of painstaking research, written with grace and fire, The First Emancipator is a portrait of an unsung hero who has finally won his place in American history. It is an astonishing, challenging, and ultimately inspiring book.

About this title

About the Author

ANDREW LEVY was born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, in 1962. He received an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 1986 and a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. Levy has published essays in Harper’s, Dissent, and The American Scholar, book reviews in the Chicago Tribune and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has written or co-edited several books on American literature and writing. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife, Siobhan, and their son, Aedan, and is currently Cooper Chair at Butler University.

Reviews

Starred Review. On the most fundamental level, this work can be seen as an exploration of the "'gross imbalance' between promise and execution" that characterizes American culture. We hold the loftiest ideals of freedom and progress ("liberty and justice for all"; "no child left behind"), argues Levy, but more often than not, these ideals fall flat in practice. Levy presents a painstakingly rich portrait of an American who overcame this imbalance: Robert Carter. A contemporary of Jefferson and Washington, Carter has largely been forgotten by historians because he seems less heroic than these great men; nevertheless, he managed to do something that they and the other founding fathers-for all their greatness-could not: free his slaves with little or no material gain. In so doing, Levy argues, Carter provides an example of an unsung American hero: no tragic flaw of moral failing to set the glow of his great deeds in sharper relief, no titanic struggle on the stage of national politics to realize his ideals, simply a thoughtful man pushing himself in moments of private reflection to rid himself of the moral contradictions of his time. Levy does a wonderful job bringing Carter to life from the somewhat wooden written remains of his account ledgers, business journals and letters, reminding readers just how peculiar his life and his choices were by setting them in the context of the other great Virginians of his time. This well-written and thoroughly engaging book will certainly appeal to readers interested in the history of 18th- and 19th-century Virginia, but also to those interested in the history of slavery and racism in America and in historical biography.
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*Starred Review* In 1791, at a time when the nation's leaders were fervently debating the contradiction of slavery in a newly independent nation, wealthy Virginia plantation owner Robert Carter III freed more than 450 slaves. It was to be the largest emancipation until the Emancipation Proclamation, signed by Abraham Lincoln. Levy offers an absorbing look at the philosophical and religious debate and the political and family struggles in which Carter engaged for years before very deliberately and systematically freeing his slaves as he attempted to provide a model for others to follow. Drawing on historic documents, including Carter's letters and painstakingly detailed accounts of plantation activities, Levy conveys the strongly held beliefs that drove Carter through the political and religious fervor of the time to arrive at a decision at odds with those of other prominent leaders and slaveholders of the time, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Levy offers a fascinating look at one man's redemption and his eventual lapse into historical obscurity despite his incredibly bold actions. Well researched and thoroughly fascinating, this forgotten history will appeal to readers interested in the complexities of American slavery. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter I

King of America

[1728–1768]

“But where says some is the King of America?”

—Tom Paine, Common Sense

T here is only one known portrait of Robert Carter III. He posed for it in 1749 or 1750 in Thomas Hudson’s London studio, and two hundred fifty years later, it is easy enough to imagine what the painter was thinking. Probably, Carter was just another colonial gentleman, raw but wealthy, and the portraitist knew his type, and knew their vanities. And so Carter was draped in a billowing gold suit and silver cape, brown hair neatly tied back and powdered gray, smirking, a mask dangling from the tapered fingers of his left hand. The suit is a century out of date, as if Carter were a courtier to Charles I, or masquerading as one. He looks like he is on his way to a ball, to a lifetime of balls, and has stopped just for a moment before donning the mask.

It is an extraordinary portrait. It takes two glances before one even notices Carter’s head, because brilliant shades of silver and gold cover more than half the canvas: Carter is dressed like money. And Carter’s mask is a wonder: red-rouged cheeks, dark drawn eyebrows, full red lips, and starkly pale otherwise, a minstrel mask in reverse, as if the masquerade Carter was about to attend required him to perform the role of a white man. Finally, however, Carter’s face draws the observer. The smirk is no ordinary smirk: it has Mona Lisa mystery. And the eyes are huge and dark, and imply something open and unfinished, something that resisted being posed as the young patriarch on the rise.

When Carter stood for this portrait, he was twenty-one and poised for a brilliant, even notorious, career. He had wealth: more than sixty-five thousand acres of New World soil and more than one hundred slaves. He had family: his grandfather was Robert “King” Carter, who, in his own brilliant and notorious career, acquired large swaths of the Virginian frontier and distributed huge parcels of land and slaves to his progeny. He had connections: his uncles and aunts had intermarried with some of Virginia’s richest families, the Fitzhughs, Pages, Churchills, and Harrisons; his father’s estate resided within twenty miles of both Stratford Hall—the Lee manse—and Pope’s Creek, where George Washington was born and reared. And lastly, he had arrogance, or some quality worse than arrogance: his cousin John Page, who would later become one of the first governors of the state of Virginia, called him an “inconceivable illiterate and also corrupted and vicious.”

But he also had another quality, something that drew upon the arrogance that wealth and connections provided, but that fought against the destiny that wealth and connections presented. As much as any Virginian of his era, Robert Carter exemplified what it meant to be powerful and wealthy in prewar America: he looked and acted like the kind of aristocrat who needed to fall so that the United States and its new heroes could rise. At the same time, Carter was about to undertake the same education in manners and society that trained other Virginians to become our great, hallowed Revolutionaries. He read the same books and the same newspapers, sold his tobacco on the same markets, negotiated the same land deals. He attended the same political debates, and voted—when he possessed a vote—for the Revolutionary path almost every time. He shared a pastor with George Washington, and teachers with Thomas Jefferson. He even played alongside Jefferson in a musical quartet, the future composer of the Declaration of Independence tuning his fiddle to Carter’s harpsichord amid the echoes of the Virginia royal governor’s long ballroom.

That Carter chose to transcend the conservative roots of his childhood and young adulthood, then, is no surprise. Many did. The surprise lies elsewhere: why did the same republican influences that moved the founders instead move Carter to become their mirror image, capable of doing what they could not, and unable to do what they did so well?

2

For John Carter, the first Carter to plant himself in Virginian soil, the logic of emigration was irrefutable. On the one hand, he was a stubborn royalist, a member of a family of London vintners who supported the monarchy, and Charles I would soon lose his head to Cromwell’s revolution. On the other hand, he was the youngest son in his family, which meant that, according to the ancient law of primogeniture, he would receive little of his father’s wealth. Instead, he would be expected to join the clergy, take the bar, or serve under his brothers in the family firm. Under the old system, he had little future; under the new, it seemed, he had even less.

The Virginia Colony, however, was another story. By 1635, the year that twenty-two-year-old John Carter sailed to the New World, almost three decades had elapsed since a few score of merchants, soldiers, and indentured servants had begun settling on the banks of a wide river they named after King James I. Over the course of those three decades, the free English of Virginia, who numbered in the low thousands, kept the Indians at bay, “seasoned” themselves to the mysterious, infectious American climate, and transformed their family names and modest merchant fortunes into large tracts of American soil. They filled the new colony with little wooden homes, one-and-a-half-story frames with steep cat-slide roofs like they remembered from the English West Country, or multichamber log cabins that undulated with the ground beneath them. They built orchards and laid out cornfields, but mostly they seeded tobacco, in thousands upon thousands of tiny hills each no bigger than a small child, each requiring the care of a small child. To tend those fields, they imported so many Irish, convicts, and recalcitrant indentured servants that reformers on both sides of the Atlantic began to regard Virginia as “a sinke to drayen England of her filth and scum.”

It was an age of great possibility, and great horror. On July 30, 1619, in a small brick church in Jamestown, the first democratically elected assembly in North America gathered, twenty-two men calling themselves “Burgesses.” Three weeks later, perhaps fifty yards down a short embankment to the Jamestown wharf, a Dutch man-of-war delivered the first “twenty and odd” Africans to the continent, men with Spanish names purchased to alleviate the labor shortage. John Carter, possessing a younger brother’s hunger for advancement and wealth, acclimated himself quickly. By 1641, he was elected to the House of Burgesses representing Upper Norfolk, frontier land well northwest of Jamestown. By 1652, he had moved to the Northern Neck, the verdant spit of land reaching out into the Chesapeake between the wide Potomac and Rappahannock rivers. There he had purchased 1,300 acres of land on a windblown, pine-covered little peninsula on the Rappahannock: an exposed place, more bay than land almost, defiantly cool in a Virginia summer, and covered with rich, loamy soil that held tobacco plants like nothing he could have possessed in England.

He built a one-room wooden house on the edge of his windblown peninsula, coated it with stucco made of oyster shells, and called the surrounding farm Corotoman, after the local Indian tribe. Three miles inland, he built a church he named after Christ, another one-room wooden affair. By the time he died, in 1669, he had married five times, produced an unrecorded number of children (four of whom survived him), and served in the House of Burgesses and as a member of the powerful, royally appointed Governor’s Council. As well, he convinced the crown to allow him to “patent” more than six thousand acres of land, and he led an exploratory force against the Rappahannock Indians. Perhaps most important, for himself and his children, he left behind a significant legacy of “tithables”—still mostly white indentured servants, but now also African-born servants for whom no indenture contract promised freedom.

Upon his death, however, he committed the same error of tradition that had inspired his own restlessness: he left control of most of his property to his oldest surviving son, John, and left his youngest surviving son, Robert, with only a thousand acres of land around Corotoman and six years of education in London in the keep of a merchant family named Bailey. One look at an early portrait of Robert Carter I, and a modern reader can easily grasp how little the obstacle of a small inheritance would have mattered to him: he poses in his older brother’s periwig, holding his older brother’s sword, both symbols of family leadership, and the sneer on his face implies that he would rather use the latter than surrender the former.

And when his older brother died, in 1690, and Robert Carter I earned the sword and periwig in earnest, he undertook what is arguably one of the most extraordinary careers in the history of American capital and politics. One year later, he was elected to the House of Burgesses, and he made his reputation there by delivering fearless speeches against the power of English land agents and by inspiring the construction of a “family” bloc of voters—Byrds, Churchills, and Fairfaxes, among others—who would govern Virginia for two generations. By 1696, he became Speaker. By 1700, he was appointed to the Governor’s Council. By 1703, he was taunting English power with even greater ferocity, denouncing Royal Governor Francis Nicholson with such vehemence that the startled Queen recalled her charge.

Shuttling back and forth between London (where he befriended, among others, the great philosopher John Locke) and Virginia, Carter acquired one lucrative administrative post after another: treasurer, naval officer, receiver of duties in the Rappahannock River, and, in 1702, agent for the proprietary of the Northern Neck, a position he had once ...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375508651
• ISBN 13: 9780375508653
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336