By Áine Cain
This month, discover the remarkable life and times of founding father Robert Carter III.
For all his wealth and familial prominence, Carter wasn’t your average Virginia gentleman. He flunked the bar, even after being educated at William & Mary grammar school and studying law in London. His contemporaries occasionally criticized his lack of social graces.
Despite his close friendships with notables including governors and professors, Carter wasn’t terribly popular with most of the Virginia gentry. He failed to be elected to the House of Burgesses and only received an invitation to serve on the governor’s Council in 1758 through the intervention of his wife’s uncle.
In 1777, Carter made a particularly scandalous announcement: He had become a Baptist. Neighbors were horrified when he began attending mixed-race church services and lodging Baptist abolitionists in his plantation, Nomony Hall. A religious nomad, Carter eventually rejected the Baptist church in favor of the teachings of Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg and joined the Church of the New Jerusalem.
Carter’s ongoing spiritual journey alienated him from his class, and led to his growing discomfort with the institution of slavery. In post-Revolution Virginia, the emancipation of slaves was a heavily restricted and discouraged enterprise. However, in the summer of 1791, Carter opted for gradual emancipation for his plantation’s 500 slaves. For Carter’s slaves, the process of obtaining freedom would be slow, but guaranteed.
While his executors managed this extensive emancipation process, Carter moved to Baltimore in 1793 to be closer to a Swedenborgian center of worship. He died there in 1804.
Carter’s greatest legacy wasn’t established through politics or won on battlefields. His greatest achievement, forged through his newfound spirituality, proved to be the largest single emancipation event before the American Civil War—a conflict which may have been avoided had more elite Southern planters followed Carter’s lead.
Meet this remarkable man on Feb. 6, 13, 20 and 27 from 1-2 p.m. in the Raleigh Tavern Apollo Room.
Áine Cain, a Colonial Williamsburg Foundation intern, is a student at The College of William & Mary.
