So...Jefferson and Washington talked the talk-this man walked the walk:
It was 230 years ago Sunday that Robert Carter III, the patriarch of one of the wealthiest families in Virginia, quietly walked into a Northumberland County courthouse and delivered an airtight legal document announcing his intention to free, or manumit, more than 500 slaves.
He titled it the "deed of gift." It was, by far, experts say, the largest liberation of Black people before President Abraham Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Emancipation Act and Emancipation Proclamation more than seven decades later.
On September 5, 1791, when Carter delivered his deed, slavery was an institution, a key engine of the new country's economy. But many slaveholders -- including founding fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who knew Carter -- had begun to voice doubts.
That was the extent of their umbrage.
Chattel slavery was wrong, the men said, but they supposedly worried it was not practical to abolish the institution without societal and economic consequences.
"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," Jefferson wrote a fellow politician almost 30 years after Carter's deed of gift.
Yet Carter had provided them a blueprint, not only for freeing their slaves but for ensuring the freedmen could sustain themselves, even prosper and integrate into society. Washington freed his slaves after death. Jefferson freed only 10 people of the hundreds he enslaved.
So, how has this great manumission remained largely unknown outside of a handful of history buffs and the growing body of descendants? There are theories.
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."
Like Washington and Jefferson, he championed liberty. Unlike the founders, he freed his slaves | CNN
It was 230 years ago Sunday that Robert Carter III, the patriarch of one of the wealthiest families in Virginia, quietly walked into a Northumberland County courthouse and delivered an airtight legal document announcing his intention to free, or manumit, more than 500 slaves.
www.cnn.com
It was 230 years ago Sunday that Robert Carter III, the patriarch of one of the wealthiest families in Virginia, quietly walked into a Northumberland County courthouse and delivered an airtight legal document announcing his intention to free, or manumit, more than 500 slaves.
He titled it the "deed of gift." It was, by far, experts say, the largest liberation of Black people before President Abraham Lincoln signed the District of Columbia Emancipation Act and Emancipation Proclamation more than seven decades later.
On September 5, 1791, when Carter delivered his deed, slavery was an institution, a key engine of the new country's economy. But many slaveholders -- including founding fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who knew Carter -- had begun to voice doubts.
That was the extent of their umbrage.
Chattel slavery was wrong, the men said, but they supposedly worried it was not practical to abolish the institution without societal and economic consequences.
"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," Jefferson wrote a fellow politician almost 30 years after Carter's deed of gift.
Yet Carter had provided them a blueprint, not only for freeing their slaves but for ensuring the freedmen could sustain themselves, even prosper and integrate into society. Washington freed his slaves after death. Jefferson freed only 10 people of the hundreds he enslaved.
So, how has this great manumission remained largely unknown outside of a handful of history buffs and the growing body of descendants? There are theories.
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."