Carter Braxton (September 10, 1736 – October 10, 1797)[1] was a Founding Father of the United States, signer of the Declaration of Independence, merchant, and Virginia planter.

[6] His paternal grandfather, George Braxton, Sr. by 1704 (before western lands were opened to European settlement) had also become one of the 100 largest landowners in Virginia's Northern Neck.

Speaker Robinson and neighbor Humphrey Hill served as guardians for Carter and his slightly (3 year) elder brother George (who inherited Newington and various land in King and Queen and Essex County).

[8] 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.

Upon returning to the colonies in 1760, Braxton bought Chericoke plantation (near Elsing Green, where he had lived with Judith and would ultimately die), to which he moved, married again and built a manor house in 1767.

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.

[19] 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.

When Peyton Randolph died unexpectedly in Philadelphia in October 1775, fellow Virginia legislators elected Braxton to take his place in the Continental Congress.

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.

[23] 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.

[28] 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.

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 ("row-house") in Richmond, which (with the depreciated paper currency) allowed him to repay his own indebtedness to the Robinson estate in 1787.

[31] His widow survived until July 5, 1814, and was praised in an obituary for the assistance and comfort she had offered Braxton during his final years (during which he suffered two or more strokes during Council meetings).

For a brief time during the 1960s to the early 1980s, the Waterman Steamship Company owned a break bulk freighter, SS Carter Braxton, which was named in his honor.