He was the largest private slaveholder in Virginia. In 1791, he signed the papers. Virginia’s planter class erased him from the record.
This is the next installment of Courage and Consequence — a series about relatively unknown individuals in history who made courageous decisions under extraordinary pressure, and had to live with what followed.
Robert Carter III needs to be remembered.
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THE PERSON
Robert Carter III inherited an empire. His grandfather, Robert “King” Carter, had built the largest fortune in colonial Virginia. Three hundred thousand acres. Forty-seven plantations. More than seven hundred enslaved men, women, and children. 
He built Christ Church in Lancaster County out of his own pocket. He died in 1732, the same year both his son and his four-year-old grandson became, in succession, the inheritors of that estate.
Carter took possession at twenty-one. Sixty-five thousand acres. Almost three hundred enslaved people. Nomony Hall in Westmoreland County. By his middle years he had built it to sixteen plantations and more than four hundred and fifty human beings he counted as property. He named his plantations after astrological signs. Cancer. Sagittarius. Aquarius. Libra. Taurus. Scorpio. As if the chains had been chosen by the stars.
He sat on the Governor’s Council for nearly two decades. His tutor, Philip Fithian, recorded the household in 1773. Twenty-seven thousand pounds of pork in a year. Twenty head of beef. Five hundred and fifty bushels of wheat. Four hogsheads of rum. A hundred and fifty gallons of brandy. The estate consumed the labor of hundreds and called it hospitality.
THE CONTEXT
In 1777 Carter had his enslaved people inoculated against smallpox. Then he rode to Maryland and was inoculated himself. He fell into a violent fever. When he came out of it he was convinced he had died and seen God.
He sold his seat on the Council. He rode alone for days to hear sermons. He wrote to widows asking what books their husbands had owned. He moved through three creeds in a decade: the Church of England, the Baptists, the Swedenborgians. The Baptist church he funded at his Aries plantation held mixed-race congregations. Carter sat in those pews beside the men and women he legally owned. The contradiction was no longer something he could keep in a separate room of his mind.
In 1788 he wrote that “tolerating Slavery indicates great depravity.”
He sent his two youngest sons to school in Rhode Island. He forbade them to come back to Virginia. He did not want them, he said, corrupted by slavery. He would not let them return even when their mother died.
Around him, the men whose names are now on the currency were saying the same institution was wrong and acting as though nothing could be done. Jefferson called it holding “the wolf by the ear.” Madison buried antislavery petitions in committee. Washington freed his enslaved people only by his will, and only those he owned outright. Carter knew them all. He decided he would not wait for them.
THE DECISION
On August 1, 1791, in the library at Nomony Hall, he wrote out what he meant to do.
He had never kept a written list of the people he owned. Now he ordered one. Page after page of names. Mothers and the children at their hips. “Oliver son of Rose.” “Polly daughter of Eve.” “Dorcas daughter of Sarah.” Four hundred and fifty-two names in all, drawn from eighteen plantations across five Virginia counties. Only in deciding to free them did he find it necessary to count them as individuals.
The deed cited the Virginia statute of 1782 that, for the first time, permitted manumission without separate legislative approval. It declared: “I have for some time past been convinced that to retain them in Slavery is contrary to the true Principles of Religion and Justice, and that therefore it was my duty to manumit them.”
The plan was gradual. The 1782 law required freed people to be of working age and sound mind, or the former owner remained financially liable for their support. Carter built his deed inside the law. Beginning January 2, 1792, fifteen enslaved adults would be freed each year, starting with the oldest. Children would be freed as they reached adulthood. The elderly would be freed at once and allowed to farm independently on his land. No heir, no executor, no neighbor could reach into the document and pull a soul back out.
On September 5, 1791, he carried it to the Northumberland District Court and entered it on the record.
He let every person scheduled for emancipation choose a surname before their court date. Of the fifty-six family names that entered the record through the Deed of Gift, not one was Carter.
Andrew Levy, who wrote the standard biography, called the document the anti–Declaration of Independence: a paper that makes liberty look dull and is so absent of loopholes that no result but liberty can prevail.
THE AFTERMATH
The enslaved did not wait for white men to honor a schedule.
In 1792, two men named Samuel and John ran from Carter’s Sagittarius Plantation in Frederick County, all the way to Nomony Hall, and asked Carter to free them at once. Carter refused. He told them they had to go back. He sent word to the Sagittarius manager, Littlebury Apperson, to treat them gently. Apperson wrote back that Carter’s people had become uneasy, “flushed with notions of freedom.” Around the same time, an overseer at the Taurus Plantation circulated word that the county court would not hear manumission requests. Carter found out. He had Samuel and John dressed in new clothes and sent them home unaccompanied, with instructions to stop at Taurus and tell the truth.
The white world responded as expected. His son John Tasker threatened to sell inherited people somewhere they would “never hear talk of Freedom.” A son-in-law beat the Baptist preacher who carried out the manumissions in the courthouses. An anonymous letter, postmarked Frederick County in August 1796 — Carter believed it was from the Reverend Charles Mynn Thruston — compared the deed to a man setting his house on fire and not caring whose roof the flames jumped to. The Yeocomico Baptist meetinghouse he had helped charter burned to the ground.
In May 1793, Carter sailed from Virginia for Baltimore. He never came back. He locked his library and handed the key not to a Carter but to Benjamin Dawson, the Baptist preacher who would file the papers. In 1797 he sold his remaining enslaved people to Dawson outright for one dollar — a legal device to put them past his heirs’ reach.
He died in Baltimore on March 10, 1804. He had asked to be buried in an unmarked grave at Nomony Hall. His family complied. It was not respect. It was the last act of contempt his class could muster.
In 1808 the Virginia Court of Appeals confirmed the deed against his heirs’ challenges. Dawson was still freeing people in 1826. In 1852, more than sixty years after the deed was signed, Carter’s daughter Julia certified the freedom of a man named Elias Reed. Between five hundred and six hundred men, women, and children walked out of slavery by Robert Carter III’s hand.
THE MEANING
A modern accounting of founding-era estates places Carter’s property and the number of human beings he held in bondage above Washington, Jefferson, and Madison combined. He demolished, in the act of doing it, the standard excuse: that emancipation was practical only as a theory.
He freed more people in a single document than his three famous contemporaries freed in their entire lifetimes. He stood inside the planter class and proved the lock could be opened.
That is what got him erased. Andrew Levy compared Carter’s place in the historical record to a Soviet commissar fallen from grace — wiped clean. A historical highway marker was placed in Northumberland County only in 2016. Nomony Hall itself burned in 1850 and was never rebuilt as a national site. The standard story of the founding generation requires that no counterexample exist. Carter was the counterexample. The counterexample disappeared.
He paid every price the planter class could charge. His name. His class. His country. His grave. He paid them in full, and the system answered by forgetting him.
Robert Carter III is buried under no stone. The people he freed are buried under names they chose.
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This article closes this series of Courage and Consequence.— FREEDOM CLAIMS IN THEIR OWN WORDS.
The next series will reach back into history and feature — THE ANCIENT WITNESSES.
The first individual will be Sima Quin- – He Chose Shame So the Record Would Survive – – 99 BCE. The Emperor offered him death or castration. He chose castration so he could finish the book.
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Sources: “Deed of Gift, Robert Carter III’s,” Encyclopedia Virginia (Virginia Humanities); “The Enslaved People of the Carter Household,” Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; Andrew Levy, The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves (Random House, 2005); John Randolph Barden, “Flushed with Notions of Freedom”: The Growth and Emancipation of a Virginia Slave Community, 1732–1812 (Duke University doctoral dissertation, 1993); Philip Vickers Fithian, Journal and Letters of Philip Vickers Fithian, 1773–1774, Virginia Historical Society.
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Charles C. Jett is the author of the Courage and Consequence series and a Professional Certified Coach (PCC). A graduate of the United States Naval Academy and the Harvard Business School, he writes on civic education, leadership, and American history at criticalskillsblog.com and civicsage.com.