August 1 · This Day in America
Robert Carter III is one of the richest men in Virginia. He owns more than five hundred human beings. On August 1, 1791, he walks into the district court records and files a Deed of Gift, a plain document that does an extraordinary thing: it sets in motion the gradual freeing of every enslaved person he holds. He writes that to keep them in slavery is "contrary to the true principles of Religion & justice," and that it is therefore his duty to free them. It is, by most accounts, the largest single act of emancipation by an American before the Civil War. Washington and Jefferson knew slavery was wrong and kept their fortunes anyway. Carter did the arithmetic differently. His neighbors raged. One threatened to burn his house. He freed them anyway, slowly, methodically, name by name, for decades. History nearly forgot him. It shouldn't have.
Source: encyclopediavirginia.org
Also on this day · 1907
Four years after Kitty Hawk, the Army Signal Corps quietly establishes an Aeronautical Division, a tiny office responsible for "all matters pertaining to military ballooning, air machines, and all kindred subjects." Its staff: one officer and two enlisted men. The Army had no airplane yet. This little desk, almost a clerical afterthought, is the lineal ancestor of the United States Air Force.
Source: www.nationalmuseum.af.mil
“to retain them in Slavery is contrary to the true principles of Religion & justice, & that therefore it was my duty to manumit them”Robert Carter III, Deed of Gift, 1791