Alan Taylor

“Writing to his son in 1799, John Adams blamed America’s political turmoil on “a systematical dissolution of the true Family Authority. There can never be any regular Government of a Nation without a marked Subordination of Mothers and Children to the Father.” Tellingly, Adams suddenly remembered his forceful wife and urged his son to keep his patriarchal sentiments “a Secret,” for their revelation would “infallibly raise a Rebellion against me.”67 Rather”
― Alan Taylor, American Revolutions: A Continental History, 1750-1804

“The greatest liberator was Robert Carter of Nomini Hall in the Northern Neck. An eccentric great planter, he experimented in radical religion, joining a Baptist church that included twenty-nine of his own slaves. Carter’s spiritual quest led him to recognize slavery as a sin. In 1791 he began to liberate his 509 slaves, freeing about 25 a year until completing the process in 1812. His dismayed children saw much of their inheritance dissolve into freedom, and his neighbors denounced the freedmen for setting bad examples that ruined their slaves, who thereafter resented and resisted their bondage. An angry neighbor rebuked Carter, “It appears to me (witnessing the consequences) that a man has almost as good a right to set fire to his own building though his neighbor’s is to be destroyed by it, as to free his slaves.”
― Alan Taylor, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832