Robert Carter III of Nomini Hall, Virginia
Every time I have to hear yet another paean to the Founding Fathers, or see George Washington and Thomas Jefferson as graven images on Mount Rushmore, I think of the blood, backs, and bones of those enslaved black people they built their wealth on—some of whom were my ancestors—and I want to puke. I've grown weary of hearing Jefferson lauded for hypocritically stating that "all men are created equal" out of one side of his mouth, while buying, owning, selling humans, and siring children on his wife's enslaved half-sister. I've already discussed my perspective on George Washington, the slaveholder, in
George Washington is not my 'Great White Father.' I hold Jefferson in even lower esteem.
If this country needs to applaud and honor any of the early slave-owning historical figures from the days of the founding, my choice would be the man who was the contemporary of and antithesis to Jefferson—Robert Carter III, known also as "Councillor" Carter. His story is told by Andrew Levy in The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves:
Robert Carter III, the grandson of Tidewater legend Robert “King” Carter, was born into the highest circles of Virginia’s Colonial aristocracy. He was neighbor and kin to the Washingtons and Lees and a friend and peer to Thomas Jefferson and George Mason. But on September 5, 1791, Carter severed his ties with this glamorous elite at the stroke of a pen. In a document he called his Deed of Gift, Carter declared his intent to set free nearly five hundred slaves in the largest single act of liberation in the history of American slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation.
More below the fold.
The book description
continues:
How did Carter succeed in the very action that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson claimed they fervently desired but were powerless to effect? And why has his name all but vanished from the annals of American history? In this haunting, brilliantly original work, Andrew Levy traces the confluence of circumstance, conviction, war, and passion that led to Carter’s extraordinary act.
At the dawn of the Revolutionary War, Carter was one of the wealthiest men in America, the owner of tens of thousands of acres of land, factories, ironworks–and hundreds of slaves. But incrementally, almost unconsciously, Carter grew to feel that what he possessed was not truly his. In an era of empty Anglican piety, Carter experienced a feverish religious vision that impelled him to help build a church where blacks and whites were equals. In an age of publicly sanctioned sadism against blacks, he defied convention and extended new protections and privileges to his slaves. As the war ended and his fortunes declined, Carter dedicated himself even more fiercely to liberty, clashing repeatedly with his neighbors, his friends, government officials, and, most poignantly, his own family.
I'm tired of hearing the excuses made for Jefferson and the lies that have made up the myth of the man that we are brainwashed with by most historians and school teachers. Lest you think I am unduly harsh, by branding him the crassest of hypocrites, in this op-ed piece in
The New York Times, Paul Finkelman, a professor of legal history, was far more severe, dubbing him "
The Monster of Montecello":
Thomas Jefferson is in the news again, nearly 200 years after his death — alongside a high-profile biography by the journalist Jon Meacham comes a damning portrait of the third president by the independent scholar Henry Wiencek. We are endlessly fascinated with Jefferson, in part because we seem unable to reconcile the rhetoric of liberty in his writing with the reality of his slave owning and his lifetime support for slavery. Time and again, we play down the latter in favor of the former, or write off the paradox as somehow indicative of his complex depths. Neither Mr. Meacham, who mostly ignores Jefferson’s slave ownership, nor Mr. Wiencek, who sees him as a sort of fallen angel who comes to slavery only after discovering how profitable it could be, seem willing to confront the ugly truth: the third president was a creepy, brutal hypocrite.
Contrary to Mr. Wiencek’s depiction, Jefferson was always deeply committed to slavery, and even more deeply hostile to the welfare of blacks, slave or free. His proslavery views were shaped not only by money and status but also by his deeply racist views, which he tried to justify through pseudoscience. There is, it is true, a compelling paradox about Jefferson: when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, announcing the “self-evident” truth that all men are “created equal,” he owned some 175 slaves. Too often, scholars and readers use those facts as a crutch, to write off Jefferson’s inconvenient views as products of the time and the complexities of the human condition.
But while many of his contemporaries, including George Washington, freed their slaves during and after the revolution — inspired, perhaps, by the words of the Declaration — Jefferson did not. Over the subsequent 50 years, a period of extraordinary public service, Jefferson remained the master of Monticello, and a buyer and seller of human beings.
Rather than encouraging his countrymen to liberate their slaves, he opposed both private manumission and public emancipation. Even at his death, Jefferson failed to fulfill the promise of his rhetoric: his will emancipated only five slaves, all relatives of his mistress Sally Hemings, and condemned nearly 200 others to the auction block. Even Hemings remained a slave, though her children by Jefferson went free. Nor was Jefferson a particularly kind master. He sometimes punished slaves by selling them away from their families and friends, a retaliation that was incomprehensibly cruel even at the time. A proponent of humane criminal codes for whites, he advocated harsh, almost barbaric, punishments for slaves and free blacks. Known for expansive views of citizenship, he proposed legislation to make emancipated blacks “outlaws” in America, the land of their birth. Opposed to the idea of royal or noble blood, he proposed expelling from Virginia the children of white women and black men.
Finkelman is the author of
Slavery and the Founders: Race and Liberty in the Age of Jefferson (shown here is the second edition):
In this significant revision of his acclaimed work, Paul Finkelman places the problem of slavery in the context of early American politics and the making of the Constitution. He argues that slavery was a bone of contention from the first days of the Constitutional Convention to the last, and demonstrates persuasively that the debate on slavery in national politics and the problem of fugitive slaves predated the antebellum period. A new chapter argues that it was the Federalists who took the high road on the issue of slavery by supporting emancipation, while supporters of Jefferson formed the first pro-slavery political party.
Though Finkelman has a strong critique of historian Henry Wiencek's book,
Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves, Wiencek gave Levy's book on Robert Carter III a thoughtful and strong review in the
Virginia Magazine of History & Biography and cites sections of the book that show Carter practiced what he preached:
In 1780 he forbade his overseer from whipping slaves for any reason. He ejected white tenants from some of his farms and turned the land over to slaves. After 1782, when the Virginia legislature passed "An Act to Authorize the Manumission of Slaves" allowing private emancipations, Carter began to lay plans for his deed of gift. The emancipation required very careful planning to satisfy the letter of all the relevant laws, to keep freed families together, and to ensure the safety and prosperity of the freed people. By 1797, as Levy writes, "entire plantations . . . were occupied by freed blacks living on small farms."
Fascinating, densely researched, closely argued, and elegantly written, The First Emancipator explores Carter's extraordinary actions and "Delphic" character but ranges beyond that to present a portrait of gentry society in the second half of the eighteenth century. Carter challenged the notion that "America would fall apart if blacks and whites were free at the same time." Levy rightly points out that Carter threw down a challenge to modern historians as well: "just as nineteenth-century Southern politicians claimed . . . that emancipation was impractical, twentieth century historians continued to make the same argument as a keystone to the defense of the . . . founding fathers." Levy ruefully concludes, "Robert Carter is the founding father of the only American Revolution we truly lost."
The victors of that revolution profited from slavery and the slave trade, in the north and in the south. Small wonder that Carter and his actions were relegated to historical obscurity. If he could free his slaves, the excuses made by Jefferson's defenders about "the context of the times" and the "legal impossibility of emancipation or manumission" become simply a load of b.s.
I stumbled onto the information on Carter and the mass emancipation while conducting my own research in Virginia. One of my enslaved ancestors there was named "Hannah Carter." It was suggested to me by researchers on AfriGeneas that I look at the records of the slaves emancipated by Robert Carter III, owner of several plantations, among them Nomini Hall, in Westmoreland County. Though the Hannah Carter freed by Robert Carter was not my Hannah, I became fascinated by the major emancipation efforts taken by Carter.
Since that time, LaTonya Lawson-Jones established the Nomini Hall Slave Legacy Project, whose members are descendents of the people freed by Carter. You can also view Carter's Deed of Gift:
On August 1, 1791, Robert Carter III took legal steps to gradually emancipate more than 500 of his slaves, the largest manumission of slaves by a single individual prior to the American Civil War and the largest number ever manumitted by an individual in the US. The “Deed of Gift” filed in the Northumberland County courthouse on Sept. 5, 1791.
There were a few other whites of high status who also emancipated blacks, but on a smaller scale. One was a relative of Jefferson.
From Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War:
Thomas Jefferson denied that whites and freed blacks could live together in harmony. His cousin, Richard Randolph, not only disagreed, but made it possible for ninety African Americans to prove Jefferson wrong. Israel on the Appomattox tells the story of these liberated blacks and the community they formed, called Israel Hill, in Prince Edward County, Virginia. There, ex-slaves established farms, navigated the Appomattox River, and became entrepreneurs. Free blacks and whites did business with one another, sued each other, worked side by side for equal wages, joined forces to found a Baptist congregation, moved west together, and occasionally settled down as man and wife. Slavery cast its grim shadow, even over the lives of the free, yet on Israel Hill we discover a moving story of hardship and hope that defies our expectations of the Old South.
I keep harking back to Jefferson's "
All Men are Created Equal":
The contradiction between the claim that "all men are created equal" and the existence of American slavery attracted comment when the Declaration of Independence was first published. Before final approval, Congress, having made a few alterations to some of the wording, also deleted nearly a fourth of the draft, including a passage critical of the slave trade. At that time many members of Congress, including Jefferson, owned slaves, which clearly factored into their decision to delete the controversial "anti-slavery" passage. In 1776, abolitionist Thomas Day responding to the hypocrisy in the Declaration wrote, though the first draft stated " All free men are created equal":
If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.