Robert Carter III

This man in the golden suit is the Founding Father you’ve probably never heard of. While he rubbed shoulders with the Washingtons, the Lees, the Jeffersons, and the Masons, it’s unlikely that the name Robert Carter III rings a bell. Our bet? It probably should. Prior to the mid 1860s, slavery ran rampant throughout the southern states. Virginia has a particularly difficult past with the peculiar institution, as Old Point Comfort, now Fort Monroe, was the site where the first captured Africans arrived on American soil in 1619. Given Virginia’s tumultuous past, it might come as a surprise that the commonwealth was also the site of the largest manumission by a single person prior to Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. That’s where the guy in the golden suit comes in. According to Andrew Levy’s “The First Emancipator,” published in 2005, Carter’s grandfather gifted him with a slave girl when he was just three months old. At age 21 in 1749, he inherited more than 100 slaves and 65,000 acres. By the start of the Revolutionary War, Carter “owned” more than 450 slaves. And on September 5, 1791, he filed a plan to free more than 500. Though faced with resistance from neighbors and family, Carter gradually freed the slaves on his multiple Virginia plantations trough a “Deed of Gift,” starting with a group of 29 in 1792. The process took decades, as children could not be freed and had to wait until they reached adulthood. A historical marker in Heathsville states that Carter wrote: “To retain them in slavery is contrary to the true principles of religion and justice.”