Contents |
Robert Carter III, often referred to as Councillor Robert Carter, was born February 9, 1728[1], the child of Robert Carter and Priscilla Bladen Churchill. He was born into the Tidewater gentry, the highest circles of Virginia’s Colonial aristocracy.
Family details below are from http://nominihallslavelegacy.com/history-of-the-carter-family/
Robert “Councillor” Carter married Frances Ann Tasker (1720-1787) on April 2, 1745, in Annapolis Maryland by the Reverend Mr. Malcolm, the minister of St. Anne’s Parish. His wife, the daughter of the Honorable Benjamin Tasker, one of the foremost citizens of the colony of Maryland, brought to the marriage, not only family influence, but also a large dowry. The marriage also enabled her husband to secure a one fifth control of one of her father’s businesses, the Baltimore Iron Works.
Together they had seventeen children. Benjamin (1756) dying at age 23, Robert Bladen (1759), who died unmarried at age 34, Priscilla (1760-1823), all born at Nomini Hall. About 1761, Robert “Councillor” and his growing family moved to Williamsburg to a home he purchased adjacent to the Governor’s Palace where the following three daughters were born. Ann Tasker (1762- ), Rebecca (1762) who died in infancy, and Frances (1764-1795), returning to Nomini Hall for the birth of his remaining children. Betty Landon (1765-1842), Mary (1767) who died at age four, Harriet Lucy (1768- ), Amelia Churchill (1769) who died in her first year, Rebecca Dulany (1770) who also died in her first year. John Tasker (1772- ), Sarah Fairfax (1773-1829), Judith (1775) who died as an infant, George (1777-1846), Sophia (1778-1832), who died without marrying and Julia Carter (1783- ). In spite of such a large family, “Frances Tasker Carter remained elegant and beautiful in a youthful way, ever cheerful and agreeable”. She managed the household with great success and carefully trained and helped educate their children.
Robert Carter, richest man in Virginia, owned 70,000 acres for producing wheat and corn to support the patriot Army. [4]
(He is listed as having 278 slaves in 1782[5])
A number of enslaved were freed by deed of manumission 2 Jan 1792, Westmoreland Co, VA Recorded 28 Feb 1792.[6]
Manumitted 24 Apr 1792, by Robert Carter of Nomony Hall, Westmoreland County, VA[7]
Robert Carter manumitted these enslaved in 1792:[8]
These enslaved over and above the age of 45 were to be emancipated in 1794.[9]
Note: Robert Carter freed 500-600 enslaved persons before he died.[10][11]
Please see The Slaves of Robert Carter page for more information about the enslaved and the plantations of Robert Carter.
See also:
WikiTree profile Carter-1808 created by Fontaine Wiatt through the import of Tribal Pages 0004.ged on 25 March 2011. See the Changes page for the details of edits.
Have you taken a DNA test? If so, login to add it. If not, see our friends at Ancestry DNA.
Robert is 24 degrees from Zendaya Coleman, 23 degrees from Sting Sumner, 16 degrees from Josh Brolin, 22 degrees from Timothée Chalamet, 18 degrees from José Ferrer, 15 degrees from Frank Herbert, 14 degrees from Richard Jordan, 20 degrees from David Lynch, 14 degrees from Virginia Madsen, 17 degrees from Charlotte Rampling, 26 degrees from Patrick Stewart and 19 degrees from Denis Villeneuve on our single family tree. Login to find your connection.
C > Carter > Robert Carter III
Categories: Governor's Council, Virginia Colony | USBH Heritage Exchange, Needs Slave Profiles | Virginia, Notables | Westmoreland County, Virginia, Slave Owners | Northern Neck, Virginia | Virginia Colonists | Patriotic Service, Virginia, American Revolution | NSDAR Patriot Ancestors | NSSAR Patriot Ancestors
THE DAY SLAVERY BOWED TO CONSCIENCE
The Washington Post By Ken Ringle, July 21, 1991
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1991/07/21/the-day-slavery-bowed-to-conscience/bcbf164c-9972-41e5-b1e4-55c47d1b62e6/
NOMINI, Va. -- In 1791, Robert Carter III was one of the richest and most powerful men in America.
His 16 vast plantations -- so many he named 12 after signs of the zodiac -- stretched from the Chesapeake Bay to the northern Shenandoah Valley. His schooners plied the Potomac and Rappahannock bearing textiles and tools from his plantation workshops and iron from his foundry in Baltimore. He had banking interests and land companies, and a mansion in Williamsburg, and his Westmoreland County estate, Nomini Hall, was a showplace of its owner's many accomplishments in music, literature, science and the arts. He even loaned money to Thomas Jefferson.
But 200 years ago on the first of August, Robert Carter [Carter-1808] did something that stunned the plantation society he seemed to typify: He freed his 500 slaves.
Sent to London for two years' schooling at age 21, he passed his time, according to one contemporary, "in idleness and gay diversions." An early portrait shows him finely attired in silk and lace, holding a mask in one hand, as if about to step out to a masquerade.
He returned to Virginia in 1751 and three years later married Frances Ann Tasker of Baltimore, who was clearly one of the great stabilizing forces in his life. Gifted, by all accounts, with a wide-ranging and inquiring mind as well as great beauty and charm, she bore him 17 children, continuing to amaze visitors all the while with her undiminished elegance, and her intellect.
Her wealth and family connections, moreover, helped Carter win appointment, at the age of 28, to the governor's council, the highest governing body of the colony of Virginia. In that role he lived with his growing family for 10 years in Williamsburg, the colonial capital.
A vestryman in the Anglican Church in his early years, Carter had become a Deist by 1776. Two years later, shaken by an evangelical experience while sick with smallpox, he shocked plantation society by joining the humble and suspect Baptist Church. By the time of his death in Baltimore in 1804 at the age of 76, he had left the Baptists to follow the views of Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg.
Precisely when Carter began nursing serious doubts about slavery is not altogether clear. He seems to have bought and sold few slaves, relying for his labor supply on the natural multiplication of the 100 his own father had been given by his grandfather.When that proved insufficient, his records show, he rented slaves from other plantations, and also purchased whites indentured for a term of years.
But by 1786 he had sent two of his sons away to school in Rhode Island to free them from the "destructive" influences of a society tainted by slavery. "By that time," Barden says, "something clearly is going on in his mind."
Laws of Emancipation
For most of the 18th century a 1723 law forbade Virginians from setting free any slave "except for some meritorious services, to be adjudged and allowed by the governor and council."
It wasn't until 1782, largely as a result of blacks' loyalty and valor during the Revolution and the nation's new spirit of social reform, that a law was passed permitting most slaves to be emancipated by the slaveholder simply filing a statement in the county court. To prevent unscrupulous owners from just unloading the young, old and infirm, however, the law specified that freed slaves must be sound in mind and body, and be between the ages of 18 and 45 if female, and 21 and 45 if male. All others, if manumitted, had to be maintained at the expense of their previous master.
In addition to fulfilling requirements of the law, wrote Carter in his 1791 deed of manumission, "I have with great care & attention endeavored to discover that mode of Manumission ... which can be effected ... with the least possible disadvantage to my fellow Citizens." To that end he provided that the 30 slaves over 45 were to be set free immediately, even though he would still be charged to support them. Those of legal age would then be set free at the rate of 15 a year, over a 10-year period, beginning with the oldest. The younger slaves were to be released as they reached their majorities.
The scheme was intended to turn loose on the state no more than 30 slaves in any one year, and since it included babies born in 1791 who couldn't be legally freed for 21 years, it was to continue until 1812, eight years after Carter's death.
Carter ordered each slave to come to court with both a first and last name with which to start his new life, and it is the list of those family names in the court records that most intrigues contemporary historians. (See accompanying story, Page F4.)
Carter tried to ease his slaves' transition to freedom by renting them land and experimenting with sharecropping.
A short-lived and abortive slave insurrection near Richmond in 1800 further heightened the fear of the growing free Negro population, eventually triggering passage of an 1806 Virginia law requiring all slaves freed after May 1 that year to leave the state. A number of Carter emancipees probably went west to Ohio as pioneers.
John Tasker Carter, one of the sons Carter had sent to Rhode Island as a youth to escape the destructive influences of slavery vowed, according to one letter, to do everything in his power to "overturn and frustrate" his father's deed of manumission, including selling whatever Carter slaves he could before their time of freedom. The other son Carter had sent off to protect, George Carter of Oatlands, bought slaves from dealers continually even as he was freeing others to settle his father's estate.
Though most people don't realize it, he says, "the overwhelming number of plantation owners in the South had only something like 10 or 20 slaves. One hundred slaves was a huge holding. There were a few really big ones with hundreds of slaves in the deep South in the 1840s but they were a tiny percentage. To find a slaveholder as big as Robert Carter at any time in this country's history you would generally have had to go to the Caribbean or Brazil."
For Family Facts
Was one of your ancestors set free by Robert Carter?
The names on his deed of manumission include Allen, Arnold, Banks, Brooke, Brutus, Burke, Burton, Cary, Colson, Conway, Cooper, Craft, Daley, Daniel, Dial, Dicher, Dickerson, Gaskins, Glascock, Greggs, Gumby, Hackney and Harris.
Also Harrison, Henry, Hollady, Hubbard, Johnson, Johnston, Jones, Kenardy, Mitchell, Newgent, Newman, Peterson, Puss, Reid, Richards, Richardson, Robinson, Single, Smith, Spence, Taylor, Thomas, Thompson, Thornton, Tosspot, Tuckson, Walker, Weldon, Wells, Wilson, Wormley and Wyatt.
These, he said, include U.S. Census records between 1790 and 1910, state and local tax records, specialized records such as the special census of free blacks that was conducted periodically in Virginia before the Civil War, military records and other community and family resources.
edited by Richard (Jordan) J
https://www.history.org/almanack/people/bios/biorcarter.cfm