CHARLES CARROLL
was born in Annapolis, Maryland in 1737. Carroll was the only Roman Catholic to
sign the Declaration of Independence. He added "of Carrollton" to his signature
to separate himself from the other Charleses in his sprawling family – including
his father, Charles Carroll of Annapolis. Charles was diminutive in physical
stature, he was graceful in his movements and an accomplished horseman, and he
had fine, regular features. Charles was often described as the richest man in
the country, educated in his early years by Jesuits. He spent many years in
school in Europe. He had studied law in Paris and London and was an unusually
cultivated young man.
At the age of thirty-one he married his cousin, Mary Darnall, known in the
family as Molly, and he lived the life of a landed gentlemen on Carrollton
Manor, a ten thousand acre plantation in Frederick County, Maryland which he had
received from his father. Not until he was thirty-six in 1773, did he become a
public man. He was instrumental in asking Canada to help America in the
Revolutionary War. He was elected to Maryland's first state senate in 1777. From
1776 to 1778 he was a member of the Continental Congress, where he signed the
Declaration of Independence. He was a U.S. Senator from Maryland between 1789
and 1792. He retired from politics in 1800 but lived until 1832, being the only
surviving Signer when he died at the age of ninety-four. Four years before his
death, he officially opened the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Thus, he was the
only Signer who ever saw a steam locomotive. Still regarded as the richest man
in the country, he had long been a legendary figure. He was buried at
Doughoregan Manor, near Ellicott City.
Autographed letter signed "Ch. Carroll of Carrollton" to William
Gibbons. Discusses his tenant farmers and the bad weather for the crops, though
still a good profit was made, and a mutual friend facing prosecution on a
debt. Dated April 29, 1822. - Document Courtesy of the
Stan Klos Collection
His grandfather, Charles Carroll, emigrated from England to Maryland
because of the persecution of Catholics, 1 October 1688. He obtained
considerable grants of land and was made attorney-general under the third Lord
Baltimore. The year he arrived in America, Lord Baltimore was deprived of his
rights, and Maryland was made a royal province. As Carroll was in favor with the
Baltimores, he enjoyed important political positions in the colony before and
after the restoration of their rights in 1715. Charles Carroll of Annapolis, the
father of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, was born in 1703, and died in 1783. He
was a wealthy landowner and bitterly opposed the political disabilities under
which the Catholics of Maryland suffered. The mother of Charles Carroll of
Carrollton was Elizabeth Brooke, the daughter of Clement Brooke and Jane Sewall,
and was a near relation of her husband. Charles Carroll's biographer, Rowland,
divides his life into three periods of about thirty years each; the first was a
period of preparation, the second a period of public service, and the third a
period of retirement, with scholarly observation of public events. At ten years
of age Carles Carroll was sent to school at the Jesuits at Bohemia on Harmon's
Manor in Maryland, where one of his fellow students was his cousin, John
Carroll, afterwards Archbishop of Baltimore. The following year, 1748, they both
crossed the ocean to the Jesuit college at St-Omer in French Flanders, where
Charles remained six years. After a year at the college of the Jesuits at Reims
he entered the College Louis le Grand at Paris. In 1753 Carroll went to Bourges
to study civil law. He remained there for a year and then returned to Paris
until 1757. In this year he took apartments in the Temple, London, where he
studied law for several years. In later days he spoke in highest praise of the
training he received at St-Omer and the College Louis le Grand. To the former he
owed his deep conviction of religious truth, and to the latter his critical
ability, his literary style, and the basis for the breadth of knowledge which
made him an invaluable citizen.
Upon his return to America, in 1765, the estate of Carrollton in Frederick
County, Maryland, was given him and later he became known as Charles Carroll of
Carrollton, to distinguish him from his father Charles Carroll of Annapolis. In
the difficulties with the mother country, Carroll aggressively defended the
position taken by the colonies. In 1770, by a proclamation Governor Eden imposed
certain fees upon the colonists. As fees were treated as taxes this was
vigorously opposed as violating the right of the people to tax themselves. The
jurist Daniel Dulaney defended the position of the Government in a series of
articles in the "Maryland Gazette" under the signature Antillon. Carroll took up
the debate as a champion of popular rights, maintaining the thesis that fees
were taxes and that taxes should not be levied upon the people except by the
consent of their representatives. He wrote four articles and the popular
sentiment was decidedly with him. This controversy established Carroll's
reputation as a debater and a scholar.
In 1774, Carroll was elected with six others by the citizens of Anne Arundel
County and of Annapolis, with full power to represent them in the provincial
convention. Catholics had been disfranchised and declared ineligible to a seat
in the Assembly, but by this act the prejudice against them was swept away.
Carroll was from this time for a period of twenty-seven years called to
important public service in behalf of the colony and for the general government.
In December of this year he was appointed a member of a Provincial Committee of
Correspondence. He was a member of the Maryland Convention of 1775 which adopted
the "Association of the Freemen of Maryland" which became the charter of the
colony until the adoption of the Maryland constitution in 1776. The Association
was pledged to an armed resistance to Great Britain. He was appointed by the
convention one of a committee of nine to "consider the ways and means to put
this province in the best state of defense". On 12 September, 1775, the citizens
of Anne Arundel County and the city of Annapolis appointed a Committee of
Observation for the town and county of which Carroll was a member. At this
meeting he was elected one of the deputies to represent the county in the State
Convention for one year, and he was selected with six others to license suits in
the county for the same period. The Colonial Convention on the 13th of October
appointed Charles Carroll chairman of a committee of five "to devise ways and
means to promote the manufacture of saltpetre". On the 11th of January 1776,
he Maryland Convention instructed the Maryland delegates to the Continental
Congress, "to disavow in the most solemn manner, all design in the colonies for
independence". This position was strenuously opposed by Carroll, who at this
time advocated independence. In February, 1776, the Continental congress
appointed Carroll one of a committee of three to visit Canada to secure the
alliance of the Canadians in the struggle for independence. Franklin and Samuel
Chase were the other members of the committee, and Father John, afterwards
Archbishop, Carroll accompanied them. The committee was clothed with almost
absolute power over military affairs in that country, and their failure to
accomplish their object was not due either to their want of zeal or lack of
ability. On the 28th of June, 1776, the Maryland Convention withdrew the
instructions given on previous occasions to its delegates to Congress, and
authorized them "to vote in declaring the United States free and independent
states". Principally responsible for this change of attitude by Maryland was
Charles Carroll, who was afterwards rewarded in being elected a delegate to the
Continental Congress on the 4th of July. He took his seat on the 18th of July
and signed the Declaration of Independence on the 2nd of August, when the copy
engrossed on parchment was presented for signature. Of all the signers he risked
the most. He was the wealthiest man in the colonies at the beginning of the
Revolution, his wealth being estimated at $2,000,000. On the 19th of July
Carroll was appointed on the Board of War, a very important appointment, as this
board had charge of all the executive duties of the military department, subject
to the direction of Congress. In the fall of 1777 the Board of War was enlarged
and some of Washington" enemies were made members. Out of this new membership
the Conway Cabal developed, the objects of which were defeated by Carroll,
Morris, and Duer.
Charles Carroll was appointed one of two delegates from Annapolis to the
Colonial Convention which was to adopt a constitution for Maryland. It met 14
August. Carroll was selected as one of the seven to draw up a constitution. He
was responsible for the distinctive part of the constitution, the method of
choosing senators. The senate was to be composed of fifteen members, who were to
be selected by a body of forty electors, two from each county, and one each from
Baltimore and Annapolis. In the fall of 1778, Carroll resigned his seat in
Congress and returned to Maryland to become a member of its senate. He was
placed on all its important committees. He was re-elected to Congress in 1780,
but promptly resigned from his seat. He was elected president of the Maryland
Senate, 23 May, 1783, and a second time on 23 December. Carroll was in the
Maryland Senate from 17877 to 1789, when the constitution was adopted, and
became a leader of the Federalists. He was elected to the U. S. Senate from
Maryland and took his seat in 1789. On the 19th of May, Carroll was appointed
one of a committee of three to revise the journal of the Senate for publication.
As a Federalist Carroll favored the tariff, Hamilton's funding measures, and the
strengthening of the national government. He and Lee of Virginia were the chief
advocates of placing the capital at Philadelphia for ten years, thence to be
removed to the Potomac. As a democrat he opposed all distinctions and titles.
Although favoring a centralized government he preferred to serve his state, for
when Congress at its session in 1792 passed a law making it ineligible for a
person to hold office in Congress and in a State legislature, Carroll resigned
his seat in the U.S. Senate to retain his place in the Maryland Senate. In this
capacity he served the State of Maryland till 1801. In 1799 he served on the
committee to settle the boundary disputes between Maryland and Virginia.
After the election of Jefferson to the presidency in 1800, Carroll viewed public
events with anxiety and fear. He was out of sympathy with the prosecution of a
second war with Great Britain. In later years he became more hopeful of his
nation's future. His last public act was the laying of the corner-stone of the
Baltimore and Ohio railroad on the 4th of July, 1828. After the death of Adams
and Jefferson on the 4th of July, 1826, he was the only surviving Signer of the
Declaration of Independence.
On the 5th of June, 1786, Charles Carroll married his cousin Mary Darnall, who
died in 1782. They had seven children, four of whom died in youth. One of his
daughters married Richard Caton, an Englishman, and another married the
distinguished statesman from South Carolina, Robert Goodloe Harper. He outlived
by several years his only son, Charles Carroll, Jr.
