Never Pleasing to the World

by Peggy Patterson Garland

Title: The powerful story of a privileged eighteenth-century plantation owner who emancipates hundreds of slaves after a religious conversion. Blurb: Born into the richest Colonial planter family in the Northern Neck of the eighteenth-century South, Robert Carter III is seemingly destined for a life as a privileged plantation owner and slaveholder. But as he grows up and becomes best friends with his personal slave who enlightens him about his less than ideal existence, Carter has no idea that his path will eventually be shaped by constitutional and biblical truths. After a stint in London where he encounters the Enlightenment, twenty-three-year-old Carter returns home to Tidewater, Virginia, to take over his eighteen plantations and live a productive life. But everything changes for Carter when the Declaration of Independence is drafted, stating that all men are created equal. As a chain of events prompts him to reject traditional plantation life, undergo a religious conversion, and join the Baptist Church, Carter shocks and alienates his class and family as he embarks on a courageous and determined quest to emancipate hundreds of enslaved African Americans. In this historical novel, a child of privilege, influenced by slaves long before the Civil War, rejects his purported destiny to create a community of freed slaves in the most powerful state in the South.