Kusaimamekirai’s Reviews > The First Emancipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter, the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves > Status Update

"When Samson Robinson asked permission to rent an entire plantation in the Shenandoah Valley on behalf of his family and several other liberated slaves, Carter provided a “positive Grant,” despite the misgivings of Christopher Collins, who told Carter, “I deemed it rather inexpedient to Rent it to them, and found . . . it gave considerable dissatisfaction to the . . . Neighbors around.”"
I bet it did! :)

"While he lowered rents in order to honor requests from freed blacks, he refused all such petitions when they came from white tenants who believed that the value of their leased farms had declined as the slaves attached to those farms were emancipated: “It is not expected that the Diminution of the Negroes,” Carter told Thomas Stowers, on May 3, 1793, “will Operate so as to lessen the Yearly Rent.”

"If Carter is the anti-Jefferson, the man who did not lack the will to free his own slaves but who did lack the vision and clarity to make his love of freedom eloquent, then the Deed of Gift is the anti–Declaration of Independence, a document that makes liberty look dull but which is so absent of loopholes and contradictions that no result but liberty could prevail."

"Entranced by the same egalitarian implications of the French Revolution that enraptured Jefferson, he began to tell correspondents to address him not as “Councillor,” nor as “Honorable,” but as “Citizen Robert Carter”: “I apprehend, ‘Honorable,’ does not appertain to Robt Carter—” he claimed."

“Frances gave birth to Julia in 1783, the seventeenth Carter child, when she was forty-five years old and more or less permanently bedridden”
There is a lot to like and admire about Robert Carter but he seriously needed to give his wife some space

“Morattico (the Baptist church) was shrinking, and it’s poor and enslaved members were either being excommunicated, or being compelled to defer to the landed and wealthy”
Took about five years for the Baptists in Virginia to go from being progressive to that.

Wasn’t aware that most who supported the revolution were also virulently anti-Baptist and that being Baptist at the time was quite the taboo, often dangerous as well, as it meant you were sympathetic to blacks and the poor. I’m no Baptist (at least not the current iteration of what a Baptist is) but respect to Carter for following his heart and his sense of justice for joining them.

“There were white boys like him throughout Virginia, who preferred the music of slaves to the music of European composers. There were men as well: Thomas Jefferson’s brother Randolph often ran off to the slave cabins to ‘play the fiddle and dance half the night’ as one Monticello slave recalled”