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Most of the Chiltons on this list {r.e. Chilton forum} emanate from the Westmoreland County, Virginia Chiltons. I ran into this bit of information about Westmoreland that may be of interest.
(From All God’s Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence by Fox Butterfield, Avon Books, 1995.)
In 1860, almost one-quarter of the county’s 3100 African-Americans were listed as free, making Westmoreland something of an anomaly. Many of them were emancipated by Robert Carter 3d, one of the wealthiest men in Virginia, who owned 60,000 acres on 18 plantations. On August 1, 1791, he stunned his family, friends, and neighbors by filing a deed of manumission granting liberty to the more than 500 “negroes and mulatto slaves” who were his “absolute property.”
“I have for some time past been convinced,” Carter wrote, “that to retain them in Slavery is contrary to the true principles of Religion & Justice & therefore it is my duty to manumit them.” It was the largest individual act of emancipation in American history. Still, it was an unpopular move with other whites, and while decades later Southern pilgrims made their way to Robert E. Lee’s ancestral shrine and George Washington’s birthplace [both in Westmoreland], no one put up a monument to Carter.
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