Having started this very interesting discussion (one of the few I
started on Va-Hist that turned out to BE interesting), I will now pop
back in with what I initially thought of when posing Levy's question of
why in the historical literature Robert Carter's emancipation of a very
large number of slaves occupied such an inconspicuous place.

It is certainly not forgotton or unknown among the small company of
scholars who study such things, but it is very nearly invisible to
everybody else. You would have thought that its atypicallity (to employ
a nasty sounding word) would have called it loudly to everybody's
attention, but it didn't.

I recall back in the '70s hearing somebody (I don't recall who) saying
that, of course, Robert Carter became a religious nut.

THAT I remember very well.

If you will review the pre-Rhys Isaac literature on colonial and
revolutionary Virginia, you will find that it is almost completely
devoid of serious contemplation of religion as a serious phenomenon in
Virginia and among Virginians, setting aside the chronicles of the
denominations by such partisan writers as Bishop William Meade. What is
left in the books is a population of white Virginians for whom religion
was a peripheral consideration, and if a member of one of the leading
families did something completely out of character, such as become a
Swedenborgian (which was even more bizarre than becoming a Baptist),
then anything that person did fell so far out of the interpretive
framework in which historians considered those old Virginia families
that it became inexplicable other than in terms of mental derangement.
For a Carter (no less) to become a Baptist and then a Swedenborgian was
to place himself far outside of the pale, both from the point of view of
the traditional Virginia leadership class and from the point of view of
its historians (who, I might say, seem to have donned the same
blinders).

Other emancipations, such as George Washignton's, that could be
explained by the republicanism of the American Revolution were easier
for historians to make sense of.

Were's talking here about the historians, not about the subjects. It is
most intructive that the language in which Robert Carter's emancipation
was explained to a young and ignorant me ("of course, Robert Carter
became a religious nut") used the term "religious nut," not the term
"evangelical Christian." The "of course" was by far the most important
part of the mis-explanation.

I fear that our predecessors in the study of Virginia history wrote out
of the story some very important and instructive episodes  because they
regarded them as inconsequential or outre (sorry, I don't know how to
make accents in e-mail) and therefore abnormal and consequently
inconsequential. They dismissed something that they couldn't understand
as merely the action of a "religious nut." Therefore, they didn't have
to take it seriously, and in many instances, I fear  they mislead us
(certainly me) into neglecting to think about those subjects.

Thus endeth the sermon.

Brent Tarter
The Library of Virginia
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