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.
From the Hardcover edition.
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