Uncovering the first emanicpator
Rattling through the countryside of the northern neck of Virginia in the pickup truck of a man who impersonated George Washington’s brother, Andrew Levy realized he was a long way from Indianapolis. He was there, far away from his job as an English professor at Butler, on a wing and a prayer, searching for clues on one of the Revolutionary Era’s forgotten mysteries. Why had Robert Carter III, the inheritor of one of the great Virginian aristocratic family names and fortunes, decided to free his slaves in the largest act of private emancipation in American history? And why has nobody ever heard of him?
Levy had run into the impersonator, Dall Mallory, in a park service gift shop. Mallory helps families find the resting places of their ancestors. He is, in Levy’s words, “the one who plumbs the depths to see where the bodies are.” The pair eventually wound up at the unmarked grave of Carter.
“When I saw this grass, when I saw nothing,” Levy says, “I knew I had to do something. I felt like I had to pull Carter out of that grave.”
And with The First Emancipator, a book based on his research in Virginia that’s turning heads in history departments across the country, he seems to have succeeded. The book follows the rise of the Carter family’s fortunes and the birth of the stiffly patrician yet ideologically idiosyncratic Robert Carter III. He was born into a landholding Anglican family whose patriarch, Robert Carter I, was called King Carter. His grandson ran in the same crowd as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, yet there was something different about him.
It was in 1777, during a fever brought on by a smallpox inoculation, that Carter experienced a religious revelation that spurred him to change the way he looked at the world. He became the first major planter in his county to sign up for the charter of a nascent Baptist church, and he started to question out loud the morality of slavery, which formed the basis for Virginia’s economic system.
Carter’s personal changes were happening against the backdrop of an America that was being radically transformed by the Revolutionary War. Carter held on to many of the trappings of his aristocratic upbringing, but he subscribed to the spirit of egalitarianism by taking communion with his slaves. In what Levy calls “one of the most dramatic moments in this book,” he even refused to let his sons return to their mother’s funeral from college in the North, fearing the taint of slaveholding society.
“There was an intensity to the man you cannot measure,” Levy says.
Eventually, Carter decided to do something truly astonishing: to free every one of his more than 400 slaves.
Before Levy’s book, the story was little more than a historical footnote, and often not even that. But now, Levy is making some historians rethink the possibility that the Founding Fathers may have been able to free their slaves much more easily than previously thought.
One of Levy’s motivations for the book was a desire for more racial reconciliation, but he also admits to more personal reasons, including a love for the musty documents of history.
“The very last thing I did was to go through Westmoreland County documents ... there’s nothing between you and history at that point. You’re going through documents that maybe two or three other people have leafed through in the last 200 years.”
Levy takes the long view over responses to the book. He says the final test of his book “will come 20 years from now: Will people know who Robert Carter was?”