I Am Not Hamlet

Finished Levy's book this morning. An interesting read if you find the Revolutionary period facsinating or the most challenging puzzles of the human heart to be simultaneously enriching and depressing. In the last chapter Levy lays out his reasons for why Carter's story is virtually unknown. Among those are the academic tendency to flatten religious experience and motivation--Carter moved from Epicopalian to Baptist to Swedenborgian in his journey to become a former slaveholder. Levy also writes: In addition to controverting pro-slavery claims that emancipation was impractical, for instance, Robert Carter's story offended nineteenth-century Northern pride as well, which was founded, as the historian Joanne Pope Melish has recently written, in the belief that Northerners stood for "liberty," Southerners stood for its abstract opposite, and during the Civil War "New Englanders had marched south to end slavery," conquering a region infected by what Geo...

This morning I finished C.S. Lewis' On Stories an uneven collection of essays about literature, some worthwhile, some only so-so. Now though I've got The First Emacipator: The Forgotten Story of Robert Carter--the Founding Father Who Freed His Slaves by Andrew Levy. I have for as long as I can remember interested in this period of history especially when the question of slavery comes up. I like to see how people, some near geniuses, dealt with the great moral evil perpetuated in their midst, much like abortion is today. On the first page Levy writes that Carter presented a "Deed of Gift" to a Virginia court. In the document was the instructions to free his 450 slaves "more American slaves than any American slaveholder had ever freed, more American slaves than any American slaveholder would ever free." Levy continues: What made Carter's act even more striking, however, were the circumstances that surrounded it. Carter lived next to the Washington...