Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Maryland Historical Society

Charles Carroll of Carrollton, planter, slaveholder, businessman, and politician, was the only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence and the last of the signers to die.

A descendant of Irish rebels, Carroll was born on September 19, 1737, in Annapolis, Maryland. The only child of Charles Carroll of Annapolis (1702-1782) and Elizabeth Brooke (1709-1761), he remained illegitimate until his parents married in 1757. Educated in Jesuit institutions on the Continent and at the Inns of Court in London, he lived abroad from his tenth until his twenty-seventh year. Upon returning to Maryland in 1765, he added "of Carrollton" to his name to distinguish himself from other Carrolls. In 1768, he married his cousin Mary Darnall (1749-1782) and with her fathered seven children. Three-two daughters and a son-lived to adulthood.

Between 1690 and the beginning of the American Revolution, Maryland's anti-Catholic laws denied adherents of that religion the right to hold office, worship publicly, maintain schools for their children, practice law, and, after 1718, the right to vote. Confined by these statutes to private life, Carroll joined his father in managing the extensive agricultural and business interests that constituted their fortune. By the 1770s, the Carrolls owned almost 40,000 acres of land, more slaves (330) than anyone else in Maryland, and a share in a profitable ironworks called the Baltimore Company. They also collected rents from some 195 tenants and were the greatest moneylenders in the colony.

Carroll gained a chance to enter politics on the eve of the American Revolution, when Maryland's colonial government began to crumble. Beginning in 1774 he served on Maryland's Committees of Correspondence and Safety, and in the spring of 1776, the Second Continental Congress sent him to Montreal, along with Samuel Chase, Benjamin Franklin, and his cousin, Father John Carroll, on a futile mission to induce the Canadians to join the American rebellion. As a member of Maryland's provisional government, Carroll persuaded his fellow delegates to vote for, rather than against, independence, and he helped draft the new state's Declaration of Rights and its highly conservative constitution.

First elected to Congress on July 4, 1776, he signed the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia on August 2. Later that month civil disorder erupted in Maryland, and he began to have second thoughts. For a time he feared that only reconciliation with Great Britain "on safe terms" could prevent anarchy and allay the threats against wealth and property spawned by the Revolution's turmoil. Once he concluded that reunion was impossible, he worked assiduously to save the American cause-and to protect the political and economic power of men like himself.

The nearly simultaneous deaths, first of his father and then of his wife, in 1782, left Carroll a widower with small children. He never remarried. Although he declined an appointment to the federal convention in 1787, he supported the Constitution as the supreme guarantor of the rights of men of property. He served continuously in the Maryland Senate 1777-1800, and in the United States Senate, 1789-1792, where he played a major role in locating the national capital on the banks of the Potomac River. Defeated in the election of 1800, he retired from public life and devoted himself to making money and to keeping his ambitious children and grandchildren from spending it all. In 1828 he laid the cornerstone of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

When John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, Carroll became the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence. Upon his death on November 14, 1832, President Andrew Jackson closed the federal government, an honor accorded only once before, to George Washington.

Hoffman, Ronald, in Collaboration with Sally D. Mason. Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500-1782. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2000.

Hoffman, Ronald, Sally D. Mason, and Eleanor S. Darcy, eds. Dear Papa, Dear Charley: The Peregrinations of a Revolutionary Aristocrat, as Told by Charles Carroll of Carrollton and His Father, Charles Carroll of Annapolis, with Sundry Observations on Bastardy, Child-Rearing, Romance, Matrimony, Commerce, Tobacco, Slavery, and the Politics of Revolutionary America, 3 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2001.

Hoffman, Ronald. "'Marylando-Hibernus': Charles Carroll the Settler, 1660-1720." William and Mary Quarterly. 3rd Ser., Vol. 45 (April 1988): 207-36.

________. A Spirit of Dissension: Economics, Politics, and the Revolution in Maryland. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973.