SUMMARY Robert Carter III‘s Deed of Gift was a legal document, signed on August 1, 1791, and presented in Northumberland District Court on September 5, that set out provisions to free 452 enslaved men and woman. By the time those provisions were fulfilled, more than three decades later, between 500 and 600 were freed, probably the largest emancipation by an individual in the United States before 1860. Carter was a member of one of the wealthiest families in Virginia and inherited hundreds of slaves. Perhaps because of a religious conversion, he turned against slavery during and after the American Revolution (1775–1783). His plan to free his own slaves was carefully designed to conform to state law and to be gradual. Adults would be freed in small groups each year based on their age, children would be freed when they became adults, and the elderly would be allowed to independently farm on Carter’s Nomony Hall estate for the remainder of their lives. In 1793, Carter moved to Baltimore, leaving the process in the hands of the Baptist minister Benjamin Dawson. He later sold his remaining slaves to Dawson. After Carter’s death in 1804, Carter’s heirs sued the minister to stop the manumissions but lost an 1808 ruling by the Virginia Court of Appeals. The scholar Andrew Levy has noted that Carter’s Deed of Gift has not simply been forgotten but actively ignored. Perhaps in response to his complaint, a roadside marker dedicated to the deed was erected in Northumberland County in 2016.