On August 1, 1791, 225 years ago, Virginia plantation owner Robert Carter III, scion of generations of slaveholders, announced that he would start to gradually manumit his slaves.
Although his great-grandfather had freed slaves in his will, and provided homesteads and livestock for them, manumission became illegal in 1732, the year Carter's father and grandfather died, and did not become legal again until 1783. Born in 1727 or '28, Carter came of legal age in 1749; by then he owned 6500 acres of land and 100 slaves.
Carter travelled to London, studied law at the Inner Temple, and returned to Virginia in 1751 before being admitted to the bar. He took up residence at Nomony Hall, in Williamsburg, and served in the Virginia courts and legislature.
In 1754, he married Frances Ann Tasker, daughter of former Maryland governor Benjamin Tasker. When Carter became a co-administrator of his father-in-law's estate, he delayed scheduling a sale of the slaves of Bel-Air plantation, since that would break up families, although his procrastination led to more than 18 years of litigation with his Tasker in-laws. Carter rarely whipped slaves, or allowed them to be whipped, although he did whip his own children.
Carter sold land and some slaves to pay his debts in 1758, but never purchased slaves (unlike George Washington and other neighbors), and in fact became known for his humane treatment. He had been influenced by the example of Governor Fauquier, who in his will allowed his slaves to choose their masters. His plantations had roughly double the rate of slave population increase as others in the state.
Carter concentrated his efforts on trade, including ironworks, a textile factory and a flour mill, in addition to draining swamps around Nomony and diversifying crops at all his plantations. Although publicly neutral, he honored the continental boycott against England declared in 1774. In 1777 he gave his loyalty to the new Commonwealth of Virginia and began supplying provisions and bayonets to the American cause in the Revolution.
Carter became known for his religious freethinking and support of dissenters even before the Revolution. His spiritual seeking led him to compose his own prayer for God to "have pity upon all Jews, Turks, Infidels & Hereticks," and he traveled to visit Quaker, Methodist, Presbyterian and Baptist preachers. The noted Methodist missionary and anti-slavery activist Francis Asbury also lodged at Nomony Hall. Carter scandalized neighbors by joining Morattico Baptist Church, a mixed congregation of white and black, free and slave, which brought persecution and death threats upon him. Although he believed human slavery immoral, he passed on his convictions to his children with only partial success.
During the 1780s, even the Baptist Church began to segregate its meetings, and Morattico Baptist Church ruled that only free male members could vote. Carter responded by drafting a charter for a splinter congregation, Yeocomico Church, which required egalitarian voting, and signed the charter below the signatures of several slaves. In 1790, Carter wrote British Baptist elder John Rippon, "the toleration of slavery indicates very great depravity of mind."
After manumission became legal again in 1783, Carter began a personal program of gradually freeing the slaves on his many estates. He announced his plan on August 1, 1791, recording a Deed of Gift in Northumberland County on September 5th. Fifteen slaves would be freed each January 1st over a 21-year period. Slave children would be freed at age 18 for females and 21 for males. By February of 1793, he was ahead of his own planned schedule.
Carter designed the gradual program to reduce the opposition of slave-owning white neighbors, but they shunned him. Moreover, rather than relocating freed blacks, he began offering them wages, as well as grants and tenancies, sometimes dispossessing obstreperous white tenants on his land. Perhaps victimized by mob action such as tar-and-feathers, Carter and his daughters fled by ship with Negro George and Negro Betty to Baltimore on May 8th. He never returned.
The meetinghouse used for the Yeocomico Baptist Church burned down six months after Carter left; Carter had saved an unsigned complaint letter that compared the Deed of Gift to fire destroying neighbors' houses.
Living in Baltimore, Carter spent the last decade of his life issuing manumission papers pursuant to his recorded program, writing letters in support of freed slaves whose papers had been stolen, and contemplating religious and political issues. He lent money to Baltimore to build its city hall and donated money to Haitian refugees.
Citizen Robert Carter (as he preferred to be called) died in his sleep on March 10, 1804. His son and executor, George, brought the corpse back to Nomony and buried it in the garden. The same day that George announced his father's death, he bought new slaves for Nomony to replace those his father had freed. Over the son's objection, an 1808 decision from the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld the program of manumission of the slaves illegally held in bondage, and in the end Carter's became the largest release of slaves in North America prior to the Civil War. Within his lifetime he freed 452 slaves, and more following his death.
Adapted from Wikipedia and Chase's Calendar of Events.
Photo: Robert Carter III | Wikimedia (CC)
