The First Emancipator: the Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves.

The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves. By Andrew Levy. (New York: Random House, 2005. Pp. xviii, 310. Cloth, $25.95, ISBN 0-375-50865-1; e-book, $17.95, ISBN 978-58836-469-2.)

Andrew Levy's biography vividly recounts the life of Robert "Councillor" Carter III, the fourth-generation scion of the most powerful slaveholding family in colonial Virginia. He seeks to explain how and why this rich and powerful Virginian of the Revolutionary generation came to free all his slaves. Levy's monograph represents a valuable contribution to the literature on the role of evangelical Christianity in spreading antislavery sentiment in the late-eighteenth-century Chesapeake.

Unfortunately, Carter never wrote a definitive statement concerning his views on religion or slavery. Unlike Richard Randolph, another elite Virginia planter, whose 1796 will manumitting his slaves indicted slavery for its tyrannical violation of natural rights, Carter failed to systematically or clearly articulate his ideas. Thus, Levy must piece together Carter's thoughts and beliefs from passages in Carter's records and letters that stretch over several decades. Levy's monograph demonstrates exhaustive research toward this end. He errs, however, in portraying Carter as the "First Emancipator" and as a "Founding Father." Carter was not "one (and only one) of the wealthiest men in Virginia [who] showed no fear of free blacks" (p. 181). His great-grandfather John Carter Jr. freed slaves by will in 1669 "and provided them land, livestock, and homestead" (p. 27). After legalizing private manumissions in 1782, Virginia saw its free black population explode in just a few years. Although born into the highest rank of the Virginia gentry and counting a number of founding fathers as friends, Carter lacked formal education, demonstrated little interest in or acumen for political service at any time in his life, was at best a lukewarm supporter of the American Revolution, and did not participate in any of the key state- and nation-building exercises of the Revolutionary era.

Levy at times seems unfamiliar with the contours of eighteenth-century social life in Virginia. He sees in the Carter family's epistolary musings on death an unusual "obsession," but such florid language was actually common at the time. He has trouble imagining Carter and other slave owners as masters who in some way saw slaves as part of their family. Levy argues that in his will Francis Fauquier, a friend of Carter's, contemplated freeing his slaves. Fauquier gave his slaves "liberty to choose their own Masters" and forbade executors from separating mothers from children. Fauquier asked, however, "Can I expect mercy from an offended God if I have not myself shewn mercy to those dependant on me?" (p. 29). Fauquier was voicing a typical paternalist understanding of the master-slave relationship, not becoming a foe of slavery. Even wills that allowed slaves to choose their own masters were not uncommon in Virginia and were rarely linked to antislavery sentiment. Levy persists, often interpreting paternalist behavior as "rebellion against the peculiar institution" (p. 63).

Despite these flaws, Levy's work remains significant for its treatment of Carter's religious journey from elite Anglicanism to evangelical Christianity and beyond. It is also valuable for its privileging of dissenting Christianity in post-Revolution America's debate over slavery, and thus represents an important contribution to the literature of antislavery in America.

KIRT VON DAACKE

Lynchburg College