The Deed That Named Them — Robert Carter III

A clerk at the Northumberland District Court in Virginia opens a long document and begins to copy it into the record. The date is September 5, 1791. The pages list hundreds of names, one at a time, people the law of Virginia calls property.

It is 1791.

He does not just inherit one of the largest fortunes in Virginia. He works enslaved people across his land the way the men of his rank always have.

He does not just sit on the Governor’s Council. He moves through one faith and then another, the Baptists and then the Swedenborgians, and arrives somewhere the other planters of his wealth do not.

He does not just free one man as a favor. He signs a single deed that names 452 human beings and sets a date by which each one will be free.

His Spark of Liberty was the deed. The plain legal act of writing down, by name, the people the law had refused to count, and binding himself to let them go.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life”

On August 1, 1791, he signed a Deed of Gift and had it entered at the Northumberland District Court that September. It freed his enslaved people in yearly groups, the adults first, the young when they came of age. It remains, within its limits, the largest private manumission by a single enslaver in the history of the United States. The work of it ran on long after his death. His family fought it. His neighbors fought it. The courts dragged. Many of the people named in the deed waited years for the freedom it promised, and families were broken apart by the slow schedule of it. The deed did not solve their lives. He died in Baltimore on March 10, 1804.

His name was Robert Carter III.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

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