The Deed of Gift (The First Emancipator)

 

 

THE FIRST EMANCIPATOR: THE FORGOTTEN STORY OF ROBERT CARTER, THE FOUNDING FATHER WHO FREED HIS SLAVES. by Andrew Levy (2005)

 

Robert Carter, whose example is enough to remind us that there existed men and woman during the Revolutionary War who knew what was right and did not lack the personal will to act upon that belief.(Levy, p. 194)

 

—Gary B. Nash, professor emeritus, UCLA, author of Red, White & Black: The Peoples of Early North America

 

So, I've finally made my way through THE FIRST EMANCIPATOR by Andrew Levy, a book I picked up as an impulse buy on Sunday April 6th 2007 and only now, over the past few weeks, gotten around to. It was worth the wait. Levy deliberately avoids presenting the story with anything resembling a narrative arc (the better to reflect his protagonist's erratic career). It is a major part of his thesis that Robert Carter was not just forgotten but deliberately obscured because he had achieved what conventional wisdom among the slave-owning Founding Fathers held as an article of faith to be impossible: that gradual manumission could free slaves and integrate them into the community without overly disrupting the local economy or overall society. 

 

Instead of the deathbed manumission fashionable at the time*  Carter worked out a schedule that essentially transformed his slaves into indentured servants and then to freemen. Through a document known as the Deed of Gift(which shd rank as one of the great documents in American history on display in D.C.) he freed four hundred and fifty slaves, taking pains to keep families together and seeing to it that they had help if needed to establish themselves. 

 

 

Why did he do it? The answer is both simple and complex. 

The simple part is that he decided slavery was wrong, largely on religious  grounds. This formed a constant from the time he abandoned his initial Episcopalian/Deist roots from a more radical Baptist faith (he was an important figure in the early history of Baptists in Virginia). As the Baptists established themselves and became more like other churches (e.g., segregating services) he left them behind for Swedenborgism, only in time to leave that behind in turn for a highly personalized faith that owed something to the Quakers but was really a faith of his own. 

 

Having decided that segregation and slavery were wrong, he spent years trying to work out a system that would replace it with something better.  There are hints that he paid a price for this. For one thing he became estranged from his family, who considered he had disinherited them. More ominously, not long after making his Deed of Gift he suddenly abandoned Virginia, sneaking away by night and relocating to Baltimore, where he spent the last fifteen years of his life, refusing even to visit Virginia to visit family; his library he sent for piecemeal over the years. No one knows why he left his home state, but there are hints that he got threats from his peers: in one page of his journal/estate records he wrote the words 'TAR AND FEATHER' three times in large, ragged letters. I suspect he got a visitation from his fellow plantation owners similar to what the Klu Klux Klan wd have done a century later. 

 

Despite the removal of Carter, the process he had set in motion continued its work for years to come, even after Carter's death. A good legacy to leave behind, and an achievement worth celebrating.

 

Here's a good note to end on: 

"eighteenth-century Anglo-American society put a premium on certain traits of character—on circumspection, caution, and calculation; on the control and suppression of one's real feelings"

        (Gordon S. Wood, 1992; quoted in Note 51 page 240)

--John R.

--current reading: THE DRAGON GRIAULE by Lucius Shepherd.

 

 

*as in the case of Washington. contrast Jefferson, who was far less generous to his slaves