Compiling resources on Robert Carter III for reference:

Why do I care about Carter?

A CNN article quoted Andrew Levy, who wrote a book on Carter, on why Americans seem to bury Carter’s story:

Levy, whose books include a biography of Carter, “The First Emancipator,” has another suspicion: America doesn’t care – because it’s inconvenient.

“It blows an enormous hole in this legacy we’re trying to balance for these founders,” he said.

As Levy sees it, American history feebly attempts to level the founding fathers’ fondness for freedom with their ownership of humans by uncritically parroting their assertions that there was no pragmatic way to emancipate hundreds of thousands of slaves. Slavery was a necessary evil, to hear the founders tell it.

“If Carter is the anti-Jefferson,” Levy wrote in his book, “the man who did not lack the will to free his own slaves but who did lack the vision and clarity to make his love of freedom eloquent, then the Deed of Gift is the anti-Declaration of Independence, a document that makes liberty look dull but which is so absent of loopholes and contradictions that no result but liberty could prevail.”

Jefferson had said about slavery, “As it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other.” He wanted to say freeing slaves would sacrifice self-preservation, but that view was self-serving. Carter belied it, having freed his slaves thirty years before Jefferson wrote those words.

People today see pollution and depletion as Jefferson saw slavery: we know what’s right yet we tell ourselves we can’t do it. I’m like Carter: I’m doing it, showing that we’re lying to ourselves.

The Resources

• The Anti-Jefferson: Why Robert Carter III Freed His Slaves (And Why We Couldn’t Care Less), by Andrew Levy: This piece was a journal article in the spring 2001 issue of The American Scholar.
• The First Emancipator: Slavery, Religion, and the Quiet Revolution of Robert Carter, Andrew Levy’s book
  • New York Times review of Levy’s book: Setting Them Free
  • At the New York Public Library
  • At Amazon
• Wikipedia: Robert Carter III
• Encyclopedia Virginia:
  • Robert Carter (1728–1804)
  • Deed of Gift, Robert Carter III’s
• CNN piece: Like Washington and Jefferson, he championed liberty. Unlike the founders, he freed his slaves
• The Forgotten First Emancipator at The Imaginative Conservative
• ‘He had a heart for mankind’: Virginia’s Robert Carter III and his “Deed of Gift” freed more than 500…, an article on him in 2022
• Andrew Levy at Butler University
• Never Pleasing to the World: A Man and His Slaves, a novel about Carter by Peggy Patterson Garland in 2019
• Related:
  • The other book the New York Times reviewed in the piece on Levy’s book: Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s Through the Civil War

More to come.

• ← This week’s selected media, January 5, 2025: The Anti-Jefferson: Why Robert Carter III Freed His Slaves (And Why We Couldn’t Care Less) and The Individualists
• Why we feel so busy →