| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves. By Andrew Levy. (New York: Random House, 2005. xviii, 310 pp. $25.95, ISBN 0-375-50865-1.)
Robert Carter freed his slaves beginning in 1791. So did many other Virginians. But Robert "King" Carter's grandson freed 452 people, a significantly large number that says much about Carter and slavery in the early national United States. Andrew Levy's ambitious book—the only one whose sole subject is Carter's great emancipation—argues that Robert "Councillor" Carter's manumission of his numerous slaves morally condemns postrevolutionary American slave owners as well as us.	1
Levy explores Robert Carter's ambivalence and discomfort vis-à-vis the Old Dominion plantation world. Carter inherited enough of Robert "King" Carter's wealth to maintain a large enslaved labor force, yet he also inherited his grandfather's ambivalence toward the peculiar institution. The older Carter kept his bonds people; the grandson tried to resolve his ambivalence by manumitting all his slaves. Carter's Baptist and Swedenborgian phases encouraged "good treatment" of his human property but did not guarantee his progress toward manumission. Eventually convinced that liberating his spirit required freeing his slaves, Carter emancipated all his slaves. Freeing himself from slave ownership in 1791, Carter soon migrated to Baltimore, where he died in 1804. He left behind the people he once owned.	. . .

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