The First Emancipator: Slavery, Religion, and the Quiet Revolution of Robert Carter

“[Andrew Levy] brings a literary sensibility to the study of history, and has written a richly complex book, one that transcends Carter’s story to consider larger questions of individual morality and national memory.”
–The New York Times Book Review

In 1791, Robert Carter III, a pillar of Virginia’s Colonial aristocracy, broke with his peers by arranging the freedom of his nearly five hundred slaves. It would be the largest single act of liberation in the history of American slavery before th...