Andrew Levy - The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves

THE FIRST
EMANCIPATOR

The Forgotten Story of
ROBERT CARTER
the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves

Andrew Levy

RANDOM HOUSE | NEW YORK

CONTENTS

To Siobhn and Aedan

Emancipation was the key to a promised land of sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the eyes of wearied Israelites. In song and exhortation swelled one refrainLiberty; in his tears and curses the God he implored had Freedom in his right hand. At last it came,suddenly, fearfully, like a dream....

W.E.B. DUBOIS,
The Souls of Black Folk

INTRODUCTION

Celebrated

My plans and advice have never been pleasing to the world.

ROBERT CARTER III,
to his daughter Harriot, 1803.

On September 5, 1791, Robert Carter III of Nomony Hall, one of Virginias wealthiest slaveholders, delivered to the Northumberland District Court a document he called a Deed of Gift. It was a dry document, lists for the most part, little more than a census, with none of the memorable turns of phrase that marked the writing of other, more famous Virginians of the Revolutionary period. It possessed none of the polished rage of Jeffersons Declaration of Independence, for instance, nor the keen ideologies of Madisons share of the Federalist Papers. And yet, Carters document was among the most incendiary songs of liberty to emerge from that freedom-loving period, so explosive in its implications that it has remained obscured into our present day: for what that census signaled was Carters intent to free his slaves, more than four hundred fifty in number, more American slaves than any American slaveholder had ever freed, more American slaves than any American slaveholder would ever free.

What made Carters act even more striking, however, were the circumstances that surrounded it. Carter lived next to the Washingtons and the Lees on the Northern Neck of Virginia; he was friend and peer to Jefferson, George Mason, Patrick Henry, and other members of the Revolutionary-era elite. And Robert Carter, at least at first, was wealthier than any of these men; owned more land, more slaves, as many books; and was the scion of the most powerful family of the Virginian eighteenth century. But as his friends and peers ascended to the mythic status of founders, Carter disappeared from the national stage: he died almost alone in a modest house on Green Street in Baltimore in 1804, and was buried in a grave that remains unmarked to this day.

Similarly, as the stories of his friends and neighbors were told and retold, as the American story itself was shaped around their strengths and their sins, Robert Carters story disappeared. No monuments honor him, nor the Deed of Gift. No published map exists that can direct you to the patchwork ruins of his house and plantation; no stone tells you exactly where his body lies. Sweep through the great bestselling histories of the Revolution and the founders, and you will rarely find even a footnote mentioning Robert Carter. Dig deeper, and go to the library bookshelves full of books and articles on slavery, the founders, and the American Revolution, and you will find an occasional sentence, at best a long paragraph, but usually nothing, and among the best historians, tantalizing patterns of evasion: Philip D. Morgan, in his most recent, most encyclopedic profile of slavery in the Chesapeake, refers to Carter thirty-seven times, not once mentioning that he privately freed more slaves than any individual in American history; Ira Berlin told a newspaper interviewer in 1991 that the Deed of Gift was an extraordinary, very, very exceptional event, yet the one reference to Carter in his sweeping Many Thousands Gone resides more than fifteen pages from the sections of the book describing emancipations. Even the one roadside historical marker commemorating Robert Carters existence, a rusting, wearied affair nestled on the shoulder of Virginias rural Route 202, equivocates: it calls him celebrated, but doesnt say why. One might say Robert Carter and the Deed of Gift have been forgotten, but forgotten is a word that implies they were once acknowledged. This is a stranger story: it is as if, metaphorically speaking, the grave is not marked, and never was, and yet people know to step over and around it anyway.

In early 1998, I began looking for Robert Carter III, my curiosity inspired by a five-sentence reference to the Deed of Gift in Fox Butterfields All Gods Children. Butterfields citation was so short, so confident, that I felt embarrassed: this was surely the kind of detail about American history that everyone knew, and that I had somehow missed. It turned out, however, that Butterfields five sentences were almost as good as it got. As I traveled to libraries, as I found Robert Carter and the Deed of Gift almost completely absent from book after book, article after article, my curiosity increased: something buried this deep must be buried for a reason. Soon, I found my way to the best sources about Robert Carter, in their own ways reproducing the same patterns of evasion I had already observed: an ancient article from an 1893 issue of the Magazine of American Biography that does not make a single reference to the Deed of Gift, but provides an abundance of information about Carters clothing purchases; an intelligent but dated study of Carter from 1941 that dedicates fewer pages to the Deed of Gift than to Carters Agricultural Readjustments; a diligent Ph.D. dissertation that sits unpublished on a shelf in Duke Universitys Perkins Library, an authoritative source, if only more than a handful of people knew it existed.

Every source I could find was expressive, but somehow muted. Shomer S. Zwelling published an insightful, very modern article about Carter in the Spring 1986 issue of American Quarterly; he devotes fewer than one hundred words to the Deed of Gift. Joy Hakim provides Carter four pages in her A History of Us, making her the only author to actually incorporate the Deed of Gift into a textbook. But the audience for her short, photo-laden chapter is nine- to twelve-year-olds: Emancipated! she tells her readers. That means free! Robert Carter freed his slaves! Meriwether Delano composed a sensitive account of a personal search for the meaning of the Deed of Gift in 1991; at that time, she was a senior at St. Timothys School outside Washington, writing for the Alumnae Bulletin. Her father, Frank Delano of Warsaw, Virginia, organized a gorgeous, even heroic bicentennial celebration for the Deed of Gift on the grounds of Carters home plantation. The event drew a thousand people, journalists from USA Today, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and provided Robert Carter with two days worth of publicity he had never experienced before, and has not experienced since.

Let us try to quantify forgetting, if that is possible: The longest description of Robert Carters Deed of Gift ever published is eighteen pages long (and insists on its failure). The total number of published pages devoted to Robert Carters Deed of Giftincluding school newspapers, childrens books, newspapers local to the Northern Neck, and history journals also local to the Northern Neck, as well as notices in major American newspapers and glancing references in scholarship published in national venuesis fewer than one hundred. In over two hundred years. Since Louis Morton published