[4] After a suitable mourning period, Charles Hill Carter remarried, to Ann Butler, daughter of burgess Bernard Moore of Chelsea plantation in King William County.

The firstborn son inherited it under entail and primogeniture from his maternal grandfather, Edward Hill III (who died in 1726, before his grandson's birth).

According to the first Virginia tax census following the American Revolutionary War, in 1787, Charles Hill Carter owned 67 enslaved people above age 16 at Shirley Plantation.

Charles Carter began his political career by representing Lancaster County in the House of Burgesses in 1758, and continued to win re-election to every subsequent session, until Lord Dunmore suppressed the colony's legislature in 1775.

[7] During this period, future Virginia governors Benjamin Harrison (also signer of the Continental Association and the Declaration of Independence) and John Tyler Sr. (a friend and former college roommate of future Virginia governor and U.S. President Thomas Jefferson of Berkeley and Greenway plantations in Charles City County) had similar continual re-election streaks representing Charles City County.