The First Emancipator a story unknown to most Americans.

Random House 2005

I've just finished reading this book  (hint, hint - my copy is going back to the Sarasota County Library system on Friday 20th).

It's a remarkable account of Robert Carter III an extremely wealthy northern Virginia plantation and slave owner in the latter days of the colonial era, and the early days of the new American republic,  who in 1791 by Deed of Gift freed almost 500 slaves.

Carter was by no means an idealist, and his journey from being a member of the Colonial era aristocracy to becoming a great emancipator was a tortuous voyage which took forty years.  He wrestled with his inheritance, his education, his family and his religious convictions, and his soul. Indeed he was a tortured soul.

He left the Latitudinarian Church of England and became a Baptist, in the days when Baptists were new to Virginia. The elites regarded them as being outside the bounds of respectable society

He loved the egalitarian impulses of those early Baptists where slave and free, back and white worshiped together, prayed together and received Communion together. 

But as the white members of his Baptist Church attained greater social respectability the leaders sought every excuse to excommunicate slaves.

Carter left them, and flirted with The Church of the New Jerusalem  (Swedenborgians) when he left Virginia and moved to his late wife's birthplace in Baltimore.  But his soul was ever restless.

Robert Carter never had a Damascus Road experience.  His conversion took more than forty years.

But thanks to Andrew Levy's great  (and extensively researched) book we are introduced to a Founding Father who has been ignored or written out by most historians of the emergence of the United States from the thirteen British Colonies. 

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Here is a better review of the book than I could ever write.


http://thehouseandhomemagazine.com/culture/virginia-s-first-emancipator-and-his-deed-of-gift/