Robert Carter lived out what he believed: a prophet in deed

When it comes to ethics – namely, living out what we believe – hypocrisy is a trainwreck. It always ruins the good we wish to achieve.

We expect evil people to do evil and good people to do good. So, when we find a mix of good and evil in the same person, our minds warp and our spirits sag. How naïve as a young man I was to believe Senator Harrison Williams when he spoke on character in our town’s prayer breakfast; he later went to prison for his role in the Abscam scandal.

Occasionally while reading certain topics, I get so overwhelmed I have to take a break. I go looking elsewhere for a ray of hope.

I found such a ray this summer in an obscure document called the “Deed of Gift.” I was slogging my way through Eric Foner’s Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863-1877.¹ Aside from the eye-wearying paragraphs and documentation, Reconstruction gets dark – very dark.

I knew the book would have a deplorable ending when I started reading it. The U.S. Reconstruction was an abysmal attempt by the nation to rid itself of its original sin, an effort that quickly and relentlessly went south, pun notwithstanding, into yet another appalling era – segregation. The irony is that Reconstruction has a bad rap to this day precisely because of how it exposed our own fallenness.

I was fine through most of the book, until I got to where Foner writes of “a wave of counterrevolutionary terror that swept over large parts of the South” from 1868 to 1871.² Such terror was not uncommon throughout much of the region’s history, but this season was especially gruesome and intense.

Foner does not write sensationally; in an academic and straightforward manner, he records the violence meted upon newly freed and never-enslaved Black Americans whose only sin was living in the South. He generally doesn’t detail these killings, maimings, and destruction. My exhaustion came from the piling on of cases in short order.

When I reached the end of that section, I set the book aside. I looked elsewhere for a contrasting example of hope.

I found that hope in Andrew Levy’s The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father who Freed His Slaves.³ Equally well researched and documented, if a bit more readable, The First Emancipator begins with an act that defies all logic and custom of Carter’s day. In contrast to fellow Virginians such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, Carter frees his 450 black slaves, then purposefully exits Virginia.

Robert Carter III was born into a life of privilege. His grandfather, “King” Carter, had been an acting governor and the wealthiest of Virginia colonists, a man who’d taken his own father’s landholdings and turned them into an empire. King greatly expanded the institution of slavery in the colony, owning more than a thousand enslaved people upon his death.

King’s grandson, Carter III, was born in 1728, four years before his grandfather and father died. He married the daughter of a former governor of Maryland. Together they had 17 children, 12 of whom made it to adulthood. The estates young Carter inherited and expanded were centered at Nomini Hall,⁴ a vast plantation in Virginia’s Northern Neck, where the Potomac River flows into the Chesapeake Bay.

Robert increased his wealth through trade, manufacturing, and crop diversification. He sold some land and slaves to pay debts in 1758, but he never bought any more people.

Then in 1791, three years after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, he did the most memorable thing, an act time all but forgot. He delivered a legal document titled a “Deed of Gift” to the Northumberland District Court. As Levy writes:

“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 Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, for instance, nor the keen ideologies of Madison’s share of the Federalist Papers. And yet, Carter’s 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…”⁵

For a time around the American Revolution and the forming of the new nation, all this talk of independence among the free white colonists was having an intoxicating effect – creating an impulse to end slavery. The impulse led to gradual emancipation and abolition of the enslaved in the North, starting in 1780, 4 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

But southern governments never ordered the enslaved to be freed and generally forbade masters from freeing their own enslaved voluntarily, an act called manumission. Exception was made during the Revolutionary War, when masters could set slaves free to fight in the war. As the war came to an end, some southern masters even came to believe that slaveholding violated their political and/or religious principles, and for that brief window, manumission was given legal approval.

Jefferson, who penned the immortal words “all men are created equal,” himself toyed with the idea of manumission, but in the end could not bring himself to do so. While he freed a handful of his enslaved, the rest of his 200-plus human “properties” were sold off at auction to cover his debts after he died.

George Washington wrote into his will that his enslaved were to be freed after both he and Martha had died. But Martha, who outlived George, freed their slaves before her own death, concerned they might hasten it.

Other slaveholders freed their enslaved, but few and far between, and none on the scale of Robert Carter. Levy writes that Carter freed “more American slaves than any American slaveholder had ever freed, more American slaves than any American slaveholder would ever free.”⁶

Why did Carter do something that his illustrious peers, who preached and fought for freedom so convincingly, could not? Manumission was a messy process and for all Carter’s attempts at doing it well, it still came off with complications and occasional adverse outcomes. Yet by the time Carter died, his enslaved were free and his grown children and white neighbors were furious.

Shortly after he began the process of manumission, he fled Virginia for Baltimore to escape the anger of his neighbors and to rid himself of the very culture which had nurtured his slaveholding ways. He deeply regretted having sold off those earlier enslaved, breaking up their families in the process. And he urged – and in some cases forced – his children northward, out of a mostly vain hope they too would escape the enslaving culture.

As the 1780s gave way to the 1790s, that fleeting moment of liberty and freedom in the South faded. Most famously, the cotton gin was invented, providing a much more efficient use of forced labor. With or without the invention, that season of hope gave way to a society more than ever firmly built on and defined by slavery. Far more often than manumission, surplus slaves were sold further south where life was exponentially more dire.

Theories abound as to why slavery became more entrenched after all that talk of freedom. Plantation owners saw the dangers of rebellion elsewhere – Haitians throwing off their colonial overlords, for example. Owners believed the groundless theory that freeing one’s enslaved was a form of economic suicide. They could not resist peer pressure. Regardless of motive, temptations to remain a sinner are always myriad.

The question remains: why was Carter, one of the wealthiest of plantation owners who never spoke or wrote eloquently about freedom or God-ordained rights, so different from his peers who did?

Lest we think otherwise, Carter was no saint. After all, he owned other people and, on the basis of race, forced them to do his bidding. He was slow to live up to his own ideals. But he was more humane than most masters, listening to their concerns (increasingly), keeping families together (mostly), forbidding whippings (generally), allowing them to pursue their own interests (to a point).

Over time he grew to find the ownership of other human beings a moral burden too heavy to bear. He came to see slavery “a psychological expense to the slaveholder,” to use Levy’s words.⁷

There is no simple explanation for Carter’s exceptionalism. But in short, he was a religious dissenter and his religious dissent and his political dissent shared the same voice.

His growing religious faith played a significant role. He left the church of the masters, Anglicanism, for the persecuted dissenters – Methodists, Baptists, Friends, many of whom preached abolition. He supported the launching of numerous lower-caste churches with their mixed races and mixed pews. His growing spiritual devotion even drove him to repudiate the title of master. And when fellow religious dissenters changed their views on slavery to fit in with Southern morals, Carter left them too.

He came to believe the values of the American Revolution should be lived to their fullest. Whereas most of the country’s new leaders felt that freeing the enslaved would undo the republic, he believed their political and religious visions were unauthentic, hypocritical. For others, maintaining social order and national unity was paramount; for Carter, being true to what one believed was, regardless of the consequences.

Again, to quote Levy, “For Carter, it was more important to keep alive the spirit of the Revolution than keep a new country united.” He really believed, and the Deed of Gift testifies to that belief, “that the American Revolution would not be complete until African-American slaves were free.”⁸

Carter wasn’t by nature an outwardly rebellious person. As the war approached, he took his time shedding his loyalist colors for those of a Patriot; then he became a thoroughgoing Patriot.

But he was never open about his politics. The more convinced he became of his beliefs, the more private he grew. Never expressive about why he freed his enslaved, his journal entries, while extensive, are cryptic. He was not a writer the likes of Jefferson or Madison.

Rather, Carter was a prophet in deed. He avoided at great cost breaking up enslaved families, selling them south, or removing them elsewhere. He prepared them, to a large degree, to be self-sufficient upon being granted their freedom, even providing them with land and housing. Because he believed that “slavery, like all sin, was intertwined in every major institution of his life,”⁹ he abandoned both the plantation life and the culture that had birthed him.

He had the will to do what all true prophets do – buck the age they live in. As David Brion Davis writes, “All significant moral change springs from people who are in some sense deviant, at least insofar as they are willing to suffer the risk of continuing unpopularity.”¹⁰

Carter may have sunk into obscurity, but from his unmarked grave he continues to speak, refuting the arguments that:

1. The Founders should be judged only by the standards of their day.
2. Although the Founders wanted to free their slaves, no practical plan existed.
3. There was no workable answer for what should happen to the slaves after they were freed.¹¹

As I finished reading Levy and Foner, I realized every generation has its prophets – those who discover how to avoid hypocrisy and live fully into what they believe. Sin has no excuse. I also realized that, in a unique kind of way, Carter journeyed through the borderlands of his day.

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Photos: Robert Carter III, Nomini Hall, “The Freedman” sculpture by John Quincy Adams Ward

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1. Updated edition (Harperperennial, 2014). ↩︎
2. Foner, 425-44. ↩︎
3. (Random House, 2007) ↩︎
4. Varied spellings, including “Nomony”. ↩︎
5. Levy, xi. My emphasis. ↩︎
6. Levy, xi. Levy’s emphasis. ↩︎
7. Levy, 188. ↩︎
8. Levy, 135, 174. ↩︎
9. Levy, 131. ↩︎
10. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Oxford University Press, 1999), 17; see also Levy, 189. ↩︎
11. Levy, 191. ↩︎