The First Emancipator
The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves
-
- $13.99
-
- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.