I've been thinking this over for a few days, and I tend to agree with
Linda Rowe.  It seems to me that anyone looking at the issue of slavery
and emancipation in Virginia in the last 20 years or so is bound to
come across references to Carter in the scholarly literature.   Popular
writings are another matter, but I'm afraid they don't focus enough on
the whole issue of slavery anyway.

As for why more sustained attention hasn't been devoted to Carter by
historians: I think it's largely because he is seen, correctly, as such
an exception to his class.  Not only did he free his slaves during his
lifetime--I can't recall any other member of the ruling elite who did
this, at least on anything approaching a comparable scale--but it seems
clear that his motivation, and the whole of his later life, was
grounded in something emphatically not shared by his peers: an ultimate
commitment to religious faith, first among the Baptists and later as a
Swedenborgian.   So anyone wondering "why was Carter such an exception?
  Why didn't others free their slaves likewise?" has an immediate
answer: Carter did so because he was already a true eccentric by the
standards of his class, operating outside its value system.  That may
not be a fair way to end the discussion, but it's an understandable
one.

And I must say, without taking anything away from Carter's utterly
admirable act (goodness knows, he completely transformed the lives of
the hundreds of people he once held in bondage), I do wonder whether
there wouldn't have been swiftly discovered limits to his example even
had others been more inclined to follow it.   If one looks through the
archive at Duke containing the documentation of Carter's emancipation
effort--as I have done--one is struck foremost by the extraordinary
difficulty of what he effected; the sheer amount of time and effort and
painstaking administrative arrangement it required.  It took years to
make all the arrangements, and it must have been an absolutely daunting
task, which of course makes the fact that he did it all the more
amazing.

But two other facts struck me also: first, that Carter had to make sure
he was able to emancipate his slaves without compromising his
children's economic well-being; and secondly, that the inevitable
result of his emancipation was to make it impossible for him to
continue to live as a planter in Virginia (he ended his life living
quietly in Baltimore).  I was left wondering how many other elite
patriarchs would have been able to effect the former outcome--and if
they had, how drastically that would have limited the emancipation
effort anyway, since presumably most members of the next generation
would have continued to depend on slavery--and how many would have been
willing to make the personal sacrifice entailed by the latter.  Few, if
any, one suspects.

I'm left to conclude, sadly, that historians--including Levy in his
generally excellent book--who suggest that slavery in Virginia and
throughout the South could have been ended had only more individual
slaveholders been willing to do the right thing are being, well, a bit
naive.   After all, if we've learned anything about Virginia 1776-1865
in the last several decades of historical scholarship, it's that
slavery was its economic and social foundation and its permeating,
definitive cultural force.  (Virginia was surely par excellence the
American "slave society," in Ira Berlin's very useful formulation, as
opposed to merely a "society with slaves.")

As a result, individuals such as Carter could pull away from slavery,
and it is the eternal shame of all the generations after 1776 (if not
those before) that more did not do so.  But I can't quite see how
anything other than a systematic restructuring of the entire
society--such as the Civil War and Reconstruction finally effected, and
going far beyond the constitutional and statutory adjustments of the
Revolutionary era--could have destroyed the evil at Virginia's core
once and for all.

--Jurretta Heckscher
(and if Camille Wells feels she has to apologize for the length of her
much briefer and very illuminating remarks on the Jefferson-Randolphs,
such apologies are doubly in order for me!)


On Oct 27, 2006, at 12:16 PM, Rowe, Linda wrote:

> I entirely agree this hasn't received the notice it deserves, but I'm
> not sure it's fair to say that it passed largely unnoticed in the one
> previous biography. There is a fairly detailed look at Carter's
> manumission of 500 slaves in Louis Morton's  _Robert Carter of Nomini
> Hall_ in the chapter, "Manumission." That's where I first learned of
> the
> details years ago anyway.
>
> Linda Rowe
> Historical Research
> Colonial Williamsburg
> 757-220-7443

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