@article{308148,
      recid = {308148},
      author = {Levy, Andrew,},
      title = {The first emancipator : the forgotten story of Robert  Carter, the founding father who freed his slaves /},
      publisher = {Random House,},
      address = {New York :},
      pages = {xviii, 310 p. ;},
      year = {2005},
      abstract = {Robert Carter III was born into the highest circles of  Virginia's Colonial aristocracy, neighbor and kin to the  Washingtons and Lees and a friend and peer to Thomas  Jefferson and George Mason. But in 1791, Carter severed his  ties with this elite at the stroke of a pen. Having  gradually grown to feel that what he possessed was not  truly his, clashing repeatedly with his neighbors, his  friends, government officials, and, most poignantly, his  own family, he set free nearly five hundred slaves in the  largest single act of liberation in the history of American  slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation. How did  Carter succeed in what George Washington and Thomas  Jefferson claimed they fervently desired but were powerless  to effect? And why has his name all but vanished from the  annals of American history? In this vivid book, Andrew Levy  traces the confluence of circumstance, conviction, war, and  passion that led to Carter's extraordinary act.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/308148},
}