Carter Braxton
Carter Braxton was a Founding Father of the United States, signer of the Declaration of Independence, merchant, and Virginia planter. A grandson of Robert "King" Carter, one of the wealthiest and most powerful landowners and slaveholders in Virginia, Braxton was active in Virginia's legislature for more than 25 years, generally allied with Landon Carter, Benjamin Harrison V, Edmund Pendleton and other conservative planters.
Early life
Braxton was born on Newington Plantation in King and Queen County, Virginia, on September 10, 1736, but wrongly reported as dead along with his mother, Mary Carter Braxton, who "unhappily catching a Common Cold," died shortly after his birth.His maternal grandfather, King Carter, possibly the wealthiest man as well as the largest landowner in Virginia at the time of his death, had bequeathed £2,000 to his youngest daughter, who became betrothed to George Braxton Jr. five months after her father's death. His paternal grandfather, George Braxton, Sr. by 1704 had also become one of the 100 largest landowners in Virginia's Northern Neck. His grandfather first won election to the House of Burgesses in 1718 and was re-elected many times, in 1728 alongside John Robinson, Jr., who would become the powerful Speaker of the House of Burgesses and benefactor of the Braxton family. The elder Braxton owned at least one ship, the Braxton that traded with the West Indies and elsewhere, and was commission agent for cargoes of enslaved blacks sold to Virginia planters. He died, aged 71, when Carter was twelve; his eldest son George Jr. had succeeded him as delegate for King and Queen County in 1742 but died not long thereafter in 1749. Speaker Robinson and neighbor Humphrey Hill served as guardians for Carter and his slightly elder brother George.
Educated at the College of William & Mary like his father and brother, Braxton followed family tradition at age 19 by marrying Judith Robinson, a wealthy heiress and the Speaker's niece. However, she died giving birth to their daughter, leaving Braxton two daughters, Mary and Judith. The young widower soon journeyed to England for two years, where like his elder brother he gained a reputation for extravagance. Upon returning to the colonies in 1760, Braxton bought Chericoke plantation, to which he moved, married again and built a manor house in 1767. His second wife, Elizabeth Corbin, was the eldest daughter of Richard Corbin, deputy receiver general for his majesty's revenues in Virginia, and brought a £1000 dowry.
Career as merchant and plantation owner
Braxton's elder brother died in October 1761, so Braxton inherited the rest of his grandfather's estate, which was by then burdened with significant debts so that creditors persuaded some land to be sold, but even after doing so Braxton owned more than 12,000 acres and about 165 slaves in the 1770s. Braxton purchased a small schooner shortly after his second marriage and like his father turned his energies to trade. Braxton traded between the West Indies and American colonies, establishing relationships with Bayard & Son of New York and Willing & Morris of Philadelphia. He also urged the Brown brothers of Providence, Rhode Island, who had abandoned the slave trade during the French and Indian War, to sell him African people, but such transactions may not have completed. Whether or not Braxton's mercantile enterprises included slave trading, he and his brother were accompanied by a black slave at the College of William & Mary.Braxton later owned many more slaves on his various plantations which extended westward into those leased by tenant farmers in Amherst County. No records indicate any manumissions; nor does his will survive. At the end of the Revolutionary War, despite selling off some properties after his father's and brother's deaths and for his own debts, Braxton owned at least 12,000 acres and 165 slaves. Land poor at the conflict's end, six years later he owned about 8500 acres. Before his death, Braxton sold off or gave to his kinsmen all but 42 of his slaves and probably could only have farmed fewer than half of the remaining 3,900 acres. Braxton's racial attitudes, while common to his class, contrasted with those of another of King Carter's grandsons, Robert Carter III, and of George Mason IV, who fought against the slave trade during their legislative careers. Most persons with the name Carter Braxton since the end of the Civil War have been, and are, African-American, presumably descendants of slaves on Braxton's plantations.
Early political career
Braxton began his long career representing King William County in the Virginia House of Burgesses, taking his seat in 1761. However, his brother George died on October 3, 1761, leaving an insolvent estate, so the family lost Newington. Although both high-living Braxtons had been considered wealthy, as well as political allies of Speaker John Robinson, when the John Robinson estate scandal broke in 1766, they turned out to be among the largest beneficiaries of the late speaker's interest-free loans of redeemed paper money supposed to have been burned.In addition to his duties as a Burgess, Braxton served as sheriff of King William County, colonel of its militia, and vestryman of the troubled St. John's Church about ten miles east of his Chericoke plantation. Factional disputes within the parish grew so severe that the House of Burgesses held hearings and ultimately passed a special bill dissolving the vestry, as Braxton had wished.
Although always considered a moderate or conservative politician, Braxton signed the First Virginia Association intended to protest the Townshend duties on tea and other products, but like his ally Landon Carter, not the Second Association which set up boycott compliance mechanism, nor the Third Virginia Association pledging not to purchase various East Indian commodities. However, in 1774 Braxton returned to Williamsburg as King William County's delegate, and joined 108 others in the Fourth Virginia Association, which authorized local committees of safety as well as volunteer militia. When Lord Dunmore seized the colony's gunpowder and flintlocks for their rifles, Braxton helped negotiate a compromise between fellow legislator Patrick Henry and his own father-in-law Corbin that averted a crisis.
Reluctant revolutionary and Virginia moderate
Braxton was "a moderate politician during the Revolution—often viewed as sympathetic to the British." Although absent at some sessions, he had represented his county sixteen times between 1761 and Lord Dunmore's dissolution of the House of Burgesses; Braxton also served as the county delegate to all five sessions of the Virginia Convention. In 1774, Braxton joined the patriots' Committee of Safety in Virginia, as well as chaired the legislative committee considering legal penalties for Tories.When Peyton Randolph died unexpectedly in Philadelphia in October 1775, fellow Virginia legislators elected Braxton to take his place in the Continental Congress. He served in the Congress from February 1776 until August, when Virginia reduced its delegation to five members. In that capacity Braxton signed the Declaration of Independence, although he had previously opposed it as premature in Committee of the Whole, and explained his stance in several letters to his uncle Landon Carter. Braxton also drew revolutionaries' criticism for his pamphlet, Address to the Convention, which he had printed in reply to the proposals of John Adams's Thoughts on Government.
Afterwards Braxton returned to the House of Burgesses, which thanked him and Thomas Jefferson for their service, although King William voters failed to re-elect the absent Braxton as one of their delegates. Moreover, his house at Chericoke burned down shortly before Christmas in 1776, so Braxton moved his family to Grove House near West Point, Virginia. Through most of his legislative career, Braxton was a political opponent of the Lee family, and he also became involved in a press quarrel with anti-slavery activist and diplomat Arthur Lee, supposedly concerning Silas Deane's mercantile and diplomatic activities. Between 1776 and 1785, Braxton served in 8 of the 11 legislative assemblies and attended 14 of 21 sessions, with a special concern for debt and tax moratoriums or other relief.
Financial speculation and troubles
Braxton invested a great deal of his wealth in the American Revolution. Like Robert Morris, Braxton loaned money to the cause, as well as funded shipping and privateering. Braxton sold Virginia and Carolina tobacco and corned meat abroad, and secured arms and ammunition, as well as wheat and salt, and cloth and other trade goods. In 1780, the Continental Congress censured Braxton for his role in the Phoenix affair of 1777, in which his privateer seized a neutral Portuguese vessel from Brazil, prompting diplomatic protests. The British also destroyed some of Braxton's plantations during the war.In addition to the indebtedness incurred after the deaths of his father and brother, and through his own relatively poor agricultural business practices, Braxton accumulated war debts from the Continental Congress and also of Robert Morris, both of which proved slow to repay. In 1786 Braxton sold a plantation and rented a smaller residence in Richmond, which allowed him to repay his own indebtedness to the Robinson estate in 1787.
In 1787, Braxton sued Robert Morris in Henrico County court for £28,257, but the lawsuit continued for eight years before commissioners were appointed, then Morris appealed. Finally, Virginia's Court of Appeals led by Edmund Pendleton decided mostly in favor of Braxton before Morris was forced into bankruptcy by his own continued land speculations. In 1791, Braxton also purchased Strawberry Hill outside Richmond for his wife, and conveyed it to his sons Carter Jr. and Corbin to hold for their mother's benefit. Braxton's biographer does not believe that Braxton hid assets from his creditors by placing them in relatives' names, although his widow later attempted to recover dower rights in land and slaves that her husband sold in his last years. His sons-in-law, Robert Page and John White paid creditors more than £2,000 on Braxton's behalf.
On November 15, 1785, fellow delegates elected Braxton to the Council of State. Receiving the paid position vacated by William Nelson, Jr., Braxton moved to Richmond, which had become the capital in 1780. Ineligible for re-election for three years, Braxton was elected a second time in 1794.