Few of my readers will have heard of founding father Robert Carter. Neither had I before finding The First Emancipator by Andrew Levy in my library system's catalog. Carter wanted to be forgotten. He did such a good job of it that now he is practically unknown. One thing that sets Robert Carter apart from our famous founding fathers is that Carter emancipated his slaves during his lifetime.
To 18th century Virginian Robert Carter, Thomas Jefferson was someone he knew. Jefferson wasn't a historical personage then, as he is today. Carter had been a deist like Thomas Jefferson, but he went through a process of spiritual transformation. He then became a convert to the Baptist denomination which goes back to the 17th century English separatists according to Wikipedia. Being a Baptist then could be dangerous. I read in The First Emancipator about Baptist services being attacked by armed mobs during the American revolutionary period. Yikes!
The Anglican Church, which later became known as Episcopalian, was the established religion of early America. The Baptists were among the Protestant sects that Anglicans called "dissenters". Ministers from dissenting denominations could be imprisoned for up to a year for trying to convert slaves according to a law passed by the Virginia House of Burgesses.
Currently, the U.S. is having a political crisis of legitimacy. Many wonder who has the right to speak for all Americans. I discovered in The First Emancipator that the founding fathers also wondered about that. Patrick Henry asked in 1787 how the members of the Constitutional Convention could take it upon themselves to say "We the People".
From quoting the preamble to the U.S. Constitution, I'm moving on to more topical concerns. In The First Emancipator, we learn that Carter's son died after an assault by a law enforcement officer. This tragic incident is a very unfortunate reminder of protests against police violence I've been seeing on television lately.
Author Andrew Levy tells us that Carter wrote "tarred and feathered" three times across the tops of pages in his journal. It seems to me that writing this phrase three times is very emphatic. It was unclear to Levy who had been tarred and feathered. Yet I'm pretty certain it must have been Carter who was the victim of this barbaric colonial practice. He left his family estate in Virginia very abruptly due to local animosity. I think Carter became so unpopular because he allowed former slaves to live on his property. White Virginians of that era would have been outraged. Tarring and feathering could conceivably have been their reaction to such a sin against their ethos.
Robert Carter, the wealthy 18th-19th century Virginian who freed all his slaves during his lifetime, was quite a discovery. It is too bad that other wealthy American slaveholders didn't follow his example.
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