After reading Andrew Levy’s The First Emancipator, the story of Virginia aristocrat Robert Carter III (not to be confused with his grandfather, Robert “King” Carter), I can no longer blithely make excuses for slaveowning Founding Fathers who refused to free their slaves. Motivated by the egalitarianism of his religious beliefs—a combination of Baptist and Swedenborgian theology—Carter in 1791 quietly issued his “Deed of Gift,” which provided for the gradual emancipation of his 452 slaves. ...
Robert Carter, then, stands as the personification of the inconvenient truth that emancipation, even on a large scale, was entirely feasible in the United States, at least at the turn of the nineteenth century. In this way, his life serves as an indictment of the civic gods of America—Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee—who did not free their slaves during their lifetimes. ...
Monday, July 20, 2015
Stephen Klugewicz: "The Forgotten First Emancipator"
Check it out here. A taste:
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Jon - great post to draw more attention to this significant, yet largely ignored Virginian who owned 300,00 acres of land worked by 1,000 slaves, but emancipated 500 of them as a result of a crisis of conscience brought about by the Great Awakening, the Enlightenment, and changing economic circumstances where Carter could make more money by renting land to freed slaves than enslaving them. I mention him every term that I teach colonial American history, providing my students with this weblink to a short NPR interview with Levy at http://www.npr.org/programs/watc/features/2001/antijefferson/010901.antijefferson.html
As Levy noted, "no other Virginian of the Revolutionary era -- including those, like Jefferson and Washington, who spoke out so passionately against slavery -- managed to reconcile freedom in theory and freedom in practice with such transparent simplicity."
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