Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.

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 more valuable.

In the North, where slavery became outlawed, people liked to believe they were morally superior to their Southern neighbors. And so the compromise that permitted slavery to endure extended year after year, state after state, until it broke down, and the nation paid a hideous price in civil war. As we put aside these myths, maybe we can give Carter the celebration that he deserves. We might also look for other myths that again divide us Red, rather than Gray, from Blue.

In retrospect, history is neat and clean and progress marches on. In our own time we wrestle with thorny issues such as our dependence on oil and our economic woes.A convenient story that we tell ourselves is that our young nation was born out of a revolution, but the contradiction of slavery thrived in the American republic and our founders did not know how to deal with the contradiction. Our favorite exemplar of that contradiction is Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence who could never quite make the break from the "Peculiar Institution". Author Andrew Levy adds a loud "Wait a minute" to that old argument in his book, The First Emancipator. His subject is Robert Carter III, grandson of the owner of vast lands and slaves, Robert "King" Carter. Carter the third was a super wealthy member of the Virginia aristocracy who freed over 500 slaves during his lifetime in his 1791 "deed of gift". Why did he do it? Was it because of ideology from the American revolution? Was it because of his radical religious beliefs which called for racial equality? Was it because he felt a better alternative to slave labor was to rent land to free African- Americans? Was he just eccentric? The reader must decide and come to some sort of conclusion, but what Andrew Levy offers us is a challenge to our national narrative. Many founders struggled with slavery and were paralyzed. Robert Carter III acted and is forgotten. This is not a gripping read, but it will make you think. Would the history of our country be different if more people acted like Carter? This is an important addition to our national debate on slavery.

This writer has brought together a lot of material, but, for me, this was not a smooth read. Maybe it was details (like his wife wanted him to give her "a park and stock it"... a murder in his church is mentioned and dropped... is he rich or totally in hock?) that made this hard for me to follow from paragraph to paragraph but not on the whole. I agree with another reviewer that pictures, maps (where were these plantations in relations to each other) a family tree, etc. would have helped.

I was not aware how difficult it was to emancipate slaves in Revolutionary and Post-Rev. Virginia. All the handwringing of our glorified VA patriots could have been spent stemming manumission laws.. or at least tempering them.

It would seem there would be nothing more to say about Lincoln, and pre-emancipation studies are certainly fertile territory. Perhaps Levy's book will inspire more research in this area.

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.

My two favorite topics in history is the revolutionary period and slavery (particularly emancipation). With that being said, I quickly picked up this book when I saw it available.

I had never heard the story of Robert Carter prior to this book which made it interesting right from the beginning. The author, Levy, does go into some detail through out the book of trying to describe slavery at the time and the debates that took place concerning the emancipation of slaves. I found it very interesting the arguments people would make against emancipation and the various ways the government would try to prevent the release of slaves.

All that being said, I found the book to be a little hard to follow at times (this could be partially due to me reading it over the course of multiple sittings), but Robert Carter's life seems complex and quite often Levy tries to make assumptions about how to fill in details which doesn't make it flow any smoother.

When I finished reading the book, I found that I walked away with a new look at emancipation during that period but I also felt that this material could have been condensed quite a bit. If it had been condensed it would have been easier to follow and would have helped emphasize those points of Carter's life that are truly worth discussion.

I'm glad that Andrew Levy's book has brought Robert Carter III some public attention. He was, indeed, a fascinating man. Unfortunately, the man that Levy describes and the historical personage are not quite the same. In "First Emancipator" Levy has created a psychobabble account of Carter's life, motivations, and emotions, apparently allowing imagination to fill in where facts were lacking. It makes great reading if you know nothing about Carter (and can ignore 18th century cultural history). Fortunately for historians, Robert Carter left reams of written material from which scholars have pieced together a large part of his life. Their accounts may not be "luminous," but they are based on careful research rather than fanciful assertion. For a contemporary account of Carter's household, see the "Journals and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian," who was a tutor to Carter's children in 1773-1774. I also recommend Louis Morton's book "Robert Carter of Nomini Hall: A Virginia Tobacco Planter of the Eighteenth Century." Unless, of course, you just want a historical novel, in which case "First Emancipator" will do just fine.

Robert Carter's action is the response to Dr. Johnson's snort about "Virginia slavers who preached the equality of man". He demonstrated that all the fine phrases could not, and cannot, cover up the hypocrisy of the Founders who could not think outside the box when it came to their personal lives and their personal benefits.