Andrew Levy

Robert Carter III, the grandson of Tidewater legend Robert “King” Carter, was born into the highest circles of Virginia’s Colonial aristocracy. He was neighbor and kin to the Washingtons and Lees and a friend and peer to Thomas Jefferson and George Mason. But on September 5, 1791, Carter severed his ties with this glamorous elite at the stroke of a pen. In a document he called his Deed of Gift, Carter declared his intent to 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 the very action that 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 haunting, brilliantly original work, Andrew Levy traces the confluence of circumstance, conviction, war, and passion that led to Carter’s extraordinary act.

At the dawn of the Revolutionary War, Carter was one of the wealthiest men in America, the owner of tens of thousands of acres of land, factories, ironworks–and hundreds of slaves. But incrementally, almost unconsciously, Carter grew to feel that what he possessed was not truly his. In an era of empty Anglican piety, Carter experienced a feverish religious visionthat impelled him to help build a church where blacks and whites were equals.

In an age of publicly sanctioned sadism against blacks, he defied convention and extended new protections and privileges to his slaves. As the war ended and his fortunes declined, Carter dedicated himself even more fiercely to liberty, clashing repeatedly with his neighbors, his friends, government officials, and, most poignantly, his own family.

But Carter was not the only humane master, nor the sole partisan of freedom, in that freedom-loving age. Why did this troubled, spiritually torn man dare to do what far more visionary slave owners only dreamed of? In answering this question, Andrew Levy teases out the very texture of Carter’s life and soul–the unspoken passions that divided him from others of his class, and the religious conversion that enabled him to see his black slaves in a new light.

Drawing on years of painstaking research, written with grace and fire, The First Emancipator is a portrait of an unsung hero who has finally won his place in American history. It is an astonishing, challenging, and ultimately inspiring book.

Advance praise for The First Emancipator

“This luminous book recovers from the fog of historical amnesia a wealthy slave-owning Virginia gentleman (and neighbor of George Washington) who tried to lead the slave-bound new nation toward a better future. A gripping, important must-read that will convince many that the founding fathers could have abolished slavery.”
–GARY B. NASH, professor emeritus, UCLA, author of Red, White & Black: The Peoples of Early North America

“Robert Carter III and his emancipatory Deed of Gift ‘fell out’ of American history for the same reason that racial equality disappeared, until recent times, from the American social contract. Andrew Levy’s engrossing The First Emancipator rescues an amazing contemporary of the Founders from the void.”
–DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, author of the two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 and 2001

“Andrew Levy’s vivid biography–of a fabulously rich slaveholder who, imagining the impossible, broke all society’s rules–shatters one of our favorite historical mirrors. In the 1790s, freeing hundreds of slaves became a religious obsession for Robert Carter III. How he hammered out a working model for a radically different American future only to have it instantly and permanently forgotten redefines our past in ways that test the resiliency of the American mythos.”
–FORREST CHURCH, author of The American Creed: A Spiritual and Patriotic Primer

ANDREW LEVY was born in Mount Holly, New Jersey, in 1962. He received an M.A. from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars in 1986 and a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. Levy has published essays in Harper’s, Dissent, and The American Scholar, book reviews in the Chicago Tribune and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and has written or co-edited several books on American literature and writing. He lives in Indianapolis with his wife, Siobhan, and their son, Aedan, and is currently Cooper Chair at Butler University.

Category: History; History - United States - Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
Publisher: Random House
Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Pub Date: April 2005
Price: $25.95
ISBN: 0-375-50865-1

Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan

Jill Lepore

A gripping tale and groundbreaking investigation of a mysterious, and largely forgotten, eighteenth-century slave plot to destroy New York City.

Over a few weeks in 1741, ten fires blazed across Manhattan. With each new fire, panicked whites saw more evidence of a slave uprising. Tried and convicted before the colony's Supreme Court, thirteen black men were burned at the stake and seventeen were hanged. Four whites, the alleged ringleaders of the plot, were also hanged, and seven more were pardoned on condition that they never set foot in New York again. More than one hundred black men and women were thrown into a dungeon beneath City Hall, where many were forced to confess and name names, sending still more men to the gallows and to the stake.

In a narrative rich with period detail and vivid description, Jill Lepore pieces together the events and the thinking that led white New Yorkers to make "bonfires of the Negroes." She reconstructs the harsh past of a city that slavery built--and almost destroyed. She explores the social and political climate of the 1730s and '40s and examines the nature and tenor of the interactions between slaves and their masters. She shows too that the 1741 conspiracy can be understood only alongside a more famous episode from the city's past: the 1735 trial of the printer John Peter Zenger. And, weighing both new and old evidence, she makes clear how the threat of black rebellion made white political pluralism palatable.

Lucid, probing, captivatingly written, New York Burning is a revelatory study of the ways in which slavery both destabilized and created American politics.

Jill Lepore is Professor of History at Harvard University and the author of The Name of War: King Philip's War and the Origins of American Identity, which won both the Bancroft Prize and Phi Beta Kappa's Ralph Waldo Emerson Award. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

Women in the Struggle for America's Independence

Written by Carol Berkin

  The American Revolution was a home-front war that brought scarcity, bloodshed, and danger into the life of every American, and Carol Berkin shows us that women played a vital role throughout the struggle.

Berkin takes us into the ordinary moments of extraordinary lives. We see women boycotting British goods in the years before independence, writing propaganda that radicalized their neighbors, raising funds for the army, and helping finance the fledgling government. We see how they managed farms, plantations, and businesses while their men went into battle, and how they served as nurses and cooks in the army camps, risked their lives seeking personal freedom from slavery, and served as spies, saboteurs, and warriors.

She introduces us to sixteen-year-old Sybil Ludington, who sped through the night to rouse the militiamen needed to defend Danbury, Connecticut; to Phillis Wheatley, literary prodigy and Boston slave, who voiced the hopes of African Americans in poems; to Margaret Corbin, crippled for life when she took her husband's place beside a cannon at Fort Monmouth; to the women who gathered firewood, cooked, cleaned for the troops, nursed the wounded, and risked their lives carrying intelligence and participating in reconnaissance missions. Here, too, are Abigail Adams, Deborah Franklin, Lucy Knox, and Martha Washington, who lived with the daily knowledge that their husbands would be hanged as traitors if the revolution did not succeed. A recapturing of the experiences of ordinary women who lived in extraordinary times, and a fascinating addition to our understanding of the birth of our nation.

  Carol Berkin, professor of American history at Baruch College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, is the author of A Brilliant Solution: Inventing the American Constitution, First Generations, and Jonathan Sewall . She lives in New York City.

History - United States - Revolutionary Period (1775-1800)
Hardcover
February 2005
$24.00
1-4000-4163-5

David A. Price

A gripping narrative of one of the great survival stories of American history: the opening of the first permanent English settlement in the New World. Drawing on period letters and chronicles, and on the papers of the Virginia Company–which financed the settlement of Jamestown–David Price tells a tale of cowardice and courage, stupidity and brilliance, tragedy and costly triumph. He takes us into the day-to-day existence of the English men and women whose charge was to find gold and a route to the Orient, and who found, instead, hardship and wretched misery. Death, in fact, became the settlers’ most faithful companion, and their infighting was ceaseless.

Price offers a rare balanced view of the relationship between the settlers and the natives. He unravels the crucial role of Pocahontas, a young woman whose reality has been obscured by centuries of legend and misinformation (and, more recently, animation). He paints indelible portraits of Chief Powhatan, the aged monarch who came close to ending the colony’s existence, and Captain John Smith, the former mercenary and slave, whose disdain for class distinctions infuriated many around him–even as his resourcefulness made him essential to the colony’s success.

Love and Hate in Jamestown is a superb work of popular history, reminding us of the horrors and heroism that marked the dawning of our nation.

David Price was formerly a reporter in the Washington, D.C. bureau of Investor’s Business Daily. His articles have also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, USA Today, Forbes, and Business 2.0. He holds degrees from Harvard Law School, Cambridge University, and the College of William and Mary. He was raised in Richmond, Virginia and now lives with his wife and their two sons in Washington, D.C.

History - U.S. - Colonial Hardcover
October 2003 $25.95 0-375-41541-6

Joseph J. Ellis

ABOUT THIS BOOK

An illuminating study of the intertwined lives of the founders of the
American republic--John Adams, Aaron Burr, Benjamin Franklin,
Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and George
Washington.

During the 1790s, which Ellis calls the most decisive decade in our
nation's history, the greatest statesmen of their generation--and perhaps
any--came together to define the new republic and direct its course for
the coming centuries. Ellis focuses on six discrete moments that
exemplify the most crucial issues facing the fragile new nation: Burr
and Hamilton's deadly duel, and what may have really happened;
Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison's secret dinner, during which the seat of the permanent capital
was determined in exchange for passage of Hamilton's financial plan; Franklin's petition to end
the "peculiar institution" of slavery--his last public act--and Madison's efforts to quash it;
Washington's precedent-setting Farewell Address, announcing his retirement from public office
and offering his country some final advice; Adams's difficult term as Washington's successor
and his alleged scheme to pass the presidency on to his son; and finally, Adams and Jefferson's
renewed correspondence at the end of their lives, in which they compared their different views of
the Revolution and its legacy.

In a lively and engaging narrative, Ellis recounts the sometimes collaborative, sometimes archly
antagonistic interactions between these men, and shows us the private characters behind the
public personas: Adams, the ever-combative iconoclast, whose closest political collaborator was
his wife, Abigail; Burr, crafty, smooth, and one of the most despised public figures of his time;
Hamilton, whose audacious manner and deep economic savvy masked his humble origins;
Jefferson, renowned for his eloquence, but so reclusive and taciturn that he rarely spoke more
than a few sentences in public; Madison, small, sickly, and paralyzingly shy, yet one of the most
effective debaters of his generation; and the stiffly formal Washington, the ultimate realist,
larger-than-life, and America's only truly indispensable figure.

Ellis argues that the checks and balances that permitted the infant American republic to endure
were not primarily legal, constitutional, or institutional, but intensely personal, rooted in the
dynamic interaction of leaders with quite different visions and values. Revisiting the
old-fashioned idea that character matters, Founding Brothers informs our understanding of
American politics--then and now--and gives us a new perspective on the unpredictable forces that
shape history.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Joseph J. Ellis is the Ford Foundation Professor of History at Mount Holyoke College.
Educated at the College of William and Mary and Yale University, he served as a captain in the
army and taught at West Point before coming to Mount Holyoke in 1972. He was dean of the
faculty there for ten years. Among his previous books are Passionate Sage: The Character
and Legacy of John Adams and American Sphinx, which won the 1997 National Book
Award. He lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with his wife, Ellen, and their three sons.

History | Knopf | Hardcover | October 2000 | $26.00 | 0-375-40544-5

Fred Anderson

ABOUT THIS BOOK

In this engrossing narrative of the great military conflagration of the
mid-eighteenth century, Fred Anderson transports us into the
maelstrom of international rivalries. With the Seven Years' War, Great
Britain decisively eliminated French power north of the Caribbean --
and in the process destroyed an American diplomatic system in which
Native Americans had long played a central, balancing role --
permanently changing the political and cultural landscape of North
America.

Anderson skillfully reveals the clash of inherited perceptions the war
created when it gave thousands of American colonists their first
experience of real Englishmen and introduced them to the British cultural and class system. We
see colonists who assumed that they were partners in the empire encountering British officers
who regarded them as subordinates and who treated them accordingly. This laid the groundwork
in shared experience for a common view of the world, of the empire, and of the men who had
once been their masters. Thus, Anderson shows, the war taught George Washington and other
provincials profound emotional lessons, as well as giving them practical instruction in how to be
soldiers.

Depicting the subsequent British efforts to reform the empire and American resistance -- the
riots of the Stamp Act crisis and the nearly simultaneous pan-Indian insurrection called Pontiac's
Rebellion -- as postwar developments rather than as an anticipation of the national independence
that no one knew lay ahead (or even desired), Anderson re-creates the perspectives through
which contemporaries saw events unfold while they tried to preserve imperial relationships.

Interweaving stories of kings and imperial officers with those of Indians, traders, and the diverse
colonial peoples, Anderson brings alive a chapter of our history that was shaped as much by
individual choices and actions as by social, economic, and political forces.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Fred Anderson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is
the author of A People's Army: Massachusetts Soldiers and Society in the Seven Years'
War (1984), as well as many articles, essays, and reviews.