The First Emancipator: Slavery, Religion, and the Quiet Revolution of Robert Carter

As a descendant of two families that were a part Carter's manumission, I found this work to be as enlightening and moving as the first time I saw a microfilm copy of the "Deed of Gift ". I pray that this work will become a standard in the library of every person that enjoys the study of American History. It is a testimate to the legacy of my family and the other descendants of the 500 manumitted by Robert Carter the III.

I waited awhile to write this review. I needed some time to think over the impact this was having on me. It's a powerful and well written story. And I admit one of the things I enjoyed most was that Robert Carter was complex. He was not one dimensional. I'm not sure I would have enjoyed spending time with him, but I'm sure I would have found him interesting. Tomorrow I'll be watching '1776'. I first saw the play when I was a child and it became a family tradition that we always watched it together on the 4th of July. The scenes where including the topic of slavery in the Declaration are going to appear different for me this time. Tom Jefferson's "intent" to free his slaves will sound more shallow than usual. Robert Carter is a hero for me. He did what was right. And I'll be thinking of him on the 4th.

American history has a series of standard excuses for the delay in emancipation, but this fascinating account of Robert Carter shows up that myth for what it is. Nothing prevented the founding fathers from extricating themselves from their entanglement in slavery. Stories of the heroes of the American Revolution are too often forced to package them in glory, but without the need for that strategy the story of Carter's time and experiences spotlights what it was really like for planters and their slave holdings, a story with some vivid and grim details. Strangest of all is the way one of the true heroes of abolition has been entirely forgotten. Hopefully this work will make Carter's life and legacy better known.

Had Robert Carter been given his rightful place in American history in the more than 200 years since he freed his slaves, we might well have imagined our nation differently. Instead, Carter moldered in an unmarked grave while contemporaries like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and numerous other contemporary Virginians who kept their slaves were enthroned in an American Valhalla. Andrew Levy not only sets the record straight, he helps us understand why we preferred our history without Carter. Although Carter was wealthier than his famous contemporaries, he was miserably tongue-tied, could not get elected to the colonial House of Burgesses, and was forever searching for a transcendent religious experience, none of which made him a social magnet to his peers. He became a Baptist, which in those days meant he rejected slavery as morally wrong and worshipped side-by-side with slaves and working class whites. The Revolution disappointed him, since the revolutionaries did not free their slaves. When the Baptists segregated their services, Carter moved on to the mystical theology of Swedenborg, which he expected to sweep America. That, too, proved a disappointment. Carter married outside the Virginia aristocracy, a woman from Baltimore, and when marriages to the Washington and Lee families presented themselves to his children, he turned them away. He began preparing his children to live without the services of slave labor. As a slaveholder, he took the side of slaves over whites, refused to allow them to be beaten, and refrained from renting them out or selling them to other landowners. Yet he knew that emancipation would anger Jefferson and other large slaveholders. When he finally freed his slaves, he did so deliberately in a document called the Deed of Gift, which released many of them outside of Virginia and not all at once. He divided his many plantations between his children and moved to Baltimore, where he lived quietly with a daughter. Reflecting on Carter's magnificent gift (it freed nearly 500 slaves and was by far the largest, but not the only, Virginia emancipation) I think that he took more seriously than most people Jesus's warning that it was easier a man to pass through the eye of the needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven. [The "needle" was a break in ancient city walls that required people to unload their donkeys to pass through.] Giving up his wealth probably freed Carter. He was taken by the Swedenborg teaching that people made their own heaven or hell, and he seems to have been more effective at that than in changing the course of American history. Aside from the Deed, none of Carter's writings were particularly inspiring. Levy says that it was easier for Americans to forget his act than to admit that Southerners, especially rhetorically gifted Founding Fathers, failed to do what Carter did. Not long thereafter, the invention of the cotton gin made that slave-dependent crop even m

Levy brings to brilliant light a piece of early American history that famous historians have routinely ignored or overlooked. He suggests that, if Robert Carter's act had been widely known, "the whole thing -- the Civil War, Jim Crow, the Ku Klux Klan . . . could have whimpered and died in the Potomac tidewater." Powerful and thought provoking.