The Founder Who Actually Freed All Slaves

As America prepares to mark its 250th anniversary, Colonial Williamsburg is bringing new attention to Robert Carter III, a Virginia planter who acted on the Declaration of Independence more fully than many of the men who wrote it.

On Sept. 5, 1791, Carter filed a legal document in Northumberland County that began the largest known manumission by one person in the United States before the Civil War.

Carter had inherited 16 plantations and more than 450 enslaved people from one of Virginia’s wealthiest families. But after a religious conversion in the late 1770s, he reached a different conclusion about slavery.

In his Deed of Gift, Carter wrote that keeping people enslaved was “contrary to the true principles of Religion & justice.” He then began the careful legal work of freeing more than 500 people.

The decision cost him dearly. His family opposed him. His son-in-law challenged the manumissions in court. Neighboring planters resisted him. Carter eventually left Virginia for Baltimore, where he spent his final years quietly attending church alongside Black neighbors who had once been enslaved.

Carter died in 1804 and asked to be buried in an unmarked grave.

His Virginia neighbors included George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. None freed enslaved people on the scale Carter did during their lifetimes.

Carter’s story is uncomfortable, powerful, and deeply American. He took the founding promise seriously: if all men are created equal, then no person can rightly own another.