Robert Carter III

Carter was the grandson of Virginia land baron Robert "King" Carter of Corotoman. In 1732, both his father and grandfather died, leaving the young boy in the care of his uncles George, Charles and Landon Carter, as well as his mother. She remarried in 1735 to John Lewis of Warner Hall in Gloucester County.[2][3][4] At age 9, young Robert was sent to the College of William and Mary, beginning with preparatory classes. In 1749 he came of age and received his inheritance.[5] After crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Liverpool with Lawrence Washington, Carter travelled to London, where he and Philip Ludwell Lee started legal studies at the Inner Temple.

Carter returned to Virginia in 1751 where he was admitted to the bar. He took up residence at Nomony Hall. This was his preferred spelling for his inherited plantation on the Northern Neck.[5] Nominy or Nomini are more commonly used today, as in the highway marker noting the plantation site.[6] He unsuccessfully campaigned at least twice for a seat in the House of Burgesses, but he did secure an appointment to the Westmoreland County Court in 1752.[7][5]

Carter left Virginia again in 1754, and married Frances Ann Tasker, daughter of former Maryland governor Benjamin Tasker. They ultimately had seventeen children, of which eight daughters and four sons reached adulthood.[8][9] The successful marriage seemed to settle Carter, who began to pay attention to his vast landholdings, as well as politics.

In 1758, using his in-laws' connections with the Board of Trade, Carter secured an appointment by King George II to the Virginia Governor's Council.[10] When George III succeeded his grandfather in 1760, Carter was reappointed to the post, which served as the colony's appellate court as well as advised on executive matters. He purchased a house in Williamsburg from his cousin Robert Carter Nicholas and moved his growing family there in 1761. Carter, began reading voraciously, as well as socializing with the city's top intellectuals, including Governor Fauquier, George Wythe, William Small, John Blair and young Thomas Jefferson a classmate of Carter’s.[11]

At first loyal to his King, Carter expressed support for the Crown during the period of popular rejoicing that accompanied news of George III's repeal of the Stamp Act. But, Parliament passed additional laws obnoxious to colonial interests, and by 1772 the new Governor Dunmore exacerbated tensions. That year, Carter moved his ailing family (having lost three young daughters to unknown illnesses within 11 months)[12] back to Nomony Hall on the Northern Neck, announcing his retirement from public life. Carter never appeared in the Governor's Council minutes (other than as present) after it voted to allow slaveholders or local authorities to punish slaves without due process.[13] Moreover, rather than educate his sons at the College of William and Mary, Carter hired Philip Fithian as tutor.

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.[14] Although publicly neutral, Carter honored the continental boycott declared in 1774, and in 1775 joined Richard Corbin in expressing the council's concern about rumors of British marines being stationed at Williamsburg.[5] Carter declined to give the loyalty assurances Dunmore required, and Dunmore dissolved the council in 1776. The following summer, Carter gave a loyalty oath to the new Commonwealth of Virginia. Although Carter declined political offices mentioned by Patriot friends, he began supplying provisions and bayonets to the American cause in the Revolution, so British ships raided his plantations near the Potomac river.[15][16]

Although his great-grandfather John Carter had freed slaves in his will (as well as provided homesteads and livestock for them),[17] the colony of Virginia made individual manumission illegal in the year Carter's father and grandfather died. It was not authorized again until 1783. King Carter had greatly expanded the institution of slavery in Virginia, by purchasing many from ships to work on his plantations. He owned more than a thousand slaves upon his death.[18] King Carter gave his grandson Robert III his first slave (a girl) when the infant was three months old.[19] By the time he came of legal age in 1749, Robert Carter III owned 6,500 acres (2,600 ha) of land and 100 slaves.[20]

Although Carter sold land and some slaves to pay his debts in 1758,[21] he did not purchase more slaves (unlike George Washington and other neighbors). He became known among his neighbors for his humane treatment of the enslaved workers in this region.[22] Carter rarely whipped slaves, or allowed them to be whipped, let alone scarred them, although he whipped his own children, particularly his eldest son Robert Bladen.[23] Carter's plantations had roughly double the rate of slave population increase as others in the state.[24] Carter was particularly moved by the example of Governor Fauquier, who in his will allowed his slaves to choose their masters.[25]

When Carter became a co-administrator of his father-in-law's estate, he (with the support of Daniel Dulany) delayed scheduling a sale of the slaves of Bel-Air plantation, since that would break up families. But his delays led to more than 18 years of litigation with his Tasker in-laws.[26]

In the years after the Revolutionary War, Virginia's legislature (having barred the slave trade in 1778) passed several laws sympathetic to freeing slaves, although it did not pass a law legalizing manumission until 1782, and throttled many petitions for wider emancipation.[52] Numerous slaveholders in the Chesapeake Bay area freed their slaves, often in their wills (like Quaker John Pleasants) or deeds, and noted principles of equality and Revolutionary ideals as reason for their decisions. The number of free African Americans increased in the Upper South from less than one percent before the Revolution, to 10 percent by 1810. In Delaware, three-fourths of the slaves had been freed by 1810.[53] In the decade after the act's passage, Virginians had freed 10,000 slaves, without visible social disruptions. The price of slaves reached a 20-year low as the percentage listed as "black, tithable" (i.e. slaves) fell below 40%, the lowest point in the century. However, Virginia's courts sidestepped issuing appellate decisions ratifying emancipation until 1799,[54] and the methodology of within-life emancipation was not established.

Carter hoped Virginia's legislature would pass a gradual emancipation plan, as did New York and New Jersey.[55] His neighbor Ferdinando Fairfax published one such plan in a Philadelphia-based journal, and Quaker Warner Mifflin presented petitions to Congress to do the same, but James Madison buried the proposals in committee.[56] In early 1791, Carter refused to rent a plantation to Charles Mynn Thruston, a Revolutionary veteran and Anglican minister, with whose racial views he disagreed.[57] His Baptist friend John Leland left Virginia after a final anti-slavery sermon, which Carter copied in full into his journal.[58]

Carter nonetheless began a personal program of gradual manumission of slaves on his many plantations. He announced his plan on August 1, 1791, and began a new legal process by recording a Deed of Gift in Northumberland County on September 5, 1791.[59][60] Since the manumission law required a five shilling fee, and Carter had plantations and slaves in several Virginia counties, he corresponded with the Westmoreland County clerk (where he resided) and followed up by filing manumission papers at the Westmoreland County court sessions the following February, May, July and August. His actions were resisted by his son-in-law John Peck, and various overseers and white tenants of his estates.[61] Carter designed the gradual program to reduce the opposition of slave-owning white neighbors, but he failed to gain their support. He refused tenants' requests to relocate slave breeding women in order to circumvent the Deed of Gift. That winter Carter was shunned, although he sought help from fellow slavery opponents, including George Mason (who declined to help and cited his own age and infirmity).[62] By the filings of February 27, 1793, Carter was ahead of his own planned schedule. Moreover, he refused to relocate freed blacks, and began offering them wages to work for him. He also offered some grants and tenancies, sometimes dispossessing obstreperous white tenants.[63] Carter began investigating relocating to the District of Columbia. He leased Nomony plantation and its servants to his son J.T. on April 26, 1793 (expressly conditional to the Deed of Gift).

Then, before the next Westmoreland court session, 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 8, 1793).[64] He never returned, despite numerous entreaties from family and friends. The meetinghouse used by the Yeocomico Baptist Church burned down six months after Carter left; Carter saved an unsigned complaining letter (which he believed from Thruston) that compared the Deed of Gift to fire destroying neighbors' houses.[65]

Upon reaching Baltimore, Carter was told that his son Robert Bladen Carter had died in London, nine days after being assaulted by a city sheriff trying to collect gambling debts. Carter joined the congregation of James Jones Wilmer, an Episcopalian priest receptive to Swedenborg's views, bought a small house on Green Street, and began attending many religious meetings.[66] Before leaving Nomony Hall, Carter locked his books and papers in the library, and gave the only key not to his son J.T., but to a wandering Baptist preacher named Benjamin Dawson. Dawson proved a corrupt debt collector, but a diligent abolitionist, duly securing legal papers from Carter in Baltimore and filing them in Westmoreland and other counties to free slaves.[67] Carter made provision for his relatives, allocating them land, but not the slaves who were the subject of the Deed of Gift. On July 26, 1797, upon learning from Dawson that attorney John Wickham doubted the legal validity of the power of attorney which allowed Dawson to file further manumission papers, Carter executed an agreement selling Dawson his remaining slaves for the nominal sum of a dollar. Dawson duly filed this with the Westmoreland clerk, despite suffering a beating by Carter's son-in-law Spencer Ball.[68]

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.[69] Carter lent money to Baltimore to build its city hall, negotiated with the Bank of the United States, and donated money to refugees from Saint Domingue, who fled the Haitian Revolution.[70] Carter thought he had lived too long—mourning his daughter Anne's death in childbirth in 1798, and the deaths of Rev. Lunsford and his son-in-law John Maund in Caroline County, Virginia the following year.[71] In 1803, the year before his death, Carter wrote his daughter Harriet L. Maund, "My plans and advice have never been pleasing to the world."[72]

Citizen Robert Carter (as he preferred to be called) died in his sleep, unexpectedly, on March 10, 1804. His son and executor, George, brought the body back to Nomony and buried his father in the garden. The same day that George announced his father's death, he bought slaves for Nomony, in order to replace those his father had freed over his objection.[73]

On April 3, 1805, Rev. Thruston, acting as judge of Frederick County, Virginia, refused to allow Dawson to record the scheduled deed for emancipation for that year, perhaps because of George Carter's objection. But on March 24, 1808, the Virginia Court of Appeals upheld Dawson's objection, declared the county court had erred, and authorized liberation of the slaves illegally held in bondage.[74] Dawson continued to free sons and daughters born to Carter's slaves after 1791, as did Thomas Buck and John Rust after 1826.[75]

• Robert Carter I
• Carter's Grove
• Slavery in the United States
• George Wythe

• Levy, Robert (2005). The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father who Freed His Slaves. Random House. ISBN 978-0-3755-0865-3.
• Baptists in America in A General History of the Baptist Denomination in America, and Other Parts of the World.

• Robert Carter III at Encyclopedia Virginia
• Report of the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice
• Nomini Hall Slave Legacy Project:Chronicling the Descendants of the Slaves freed by Robert Carter III at Nomini Hall
• Guide to the Robert Carter letter books and day books, 1771-1804 and undated, Duke University