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American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll
Aristocrat. Catholic. Patriot. Founder.
Before his death in 1832, Charles Carroll of Carrollton—the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence—was widely regarded as one of the most important Founders. Today, Carroll’s signal contributions to the American Founding are overlooked, but the fascinating new biography American Cicero rescues Carroll from unjust neglect.
Drawing on his considerable study of Carroll’s published and unpublished writings, historian Bradley J. Birzer masterfully captures a man of supreme intellect, imagination, integrity, and accomplishment. Born a bastard, Carroll nonetheless became the best educated (and wealthiest) Founder. The Marylander’s insight, Birzer shows, allowed him to recognize the necessity of independence from Great Britain well before most other Founders. Indeed, Carroll’s analysis of the situation in the colonies in the run-up to the Revolution was original and brilliant—yet almost all historians have ignored it. Reflecting his classical and liberal education, the man who would be called “The Last of the Romans” advocated a proper understanding of the American Revolution as deeply rooted in the Western tradition. Carroll even left his mark on the U.S. Constitution despite not assuming his elected position to the Constitutional by inspiring the creation of the U.S. Senate.
American Cicero ably demonstrates how Carroll’s Catholicism was integral to his thought. Oppressed because of his faith—Maryland was the most anti-Catholic of the original thirteen colonies—Carroll became the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped legitimize Catholicism in the young American republic.
What’s more, Birzer brilliantly reassesses the most controversial aspects of Charles his aristocratic position and his critiques of democracy. As Birzer shows, Carroll’s fears of extreme democracy had ancient and noble roots, and his arguments about the dangers of democracy influenced Alexis de Tocqueville’s magisterial work Democracy in America .
American Cicero reveals why Founders such as John Adams assumed that Charles Carroll would one day be considered among the greats—and also why history has largely forgotten him.
Before his death in 1832, Charles Carroll of Carrollton—the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence—was widely regarded as one of the most important Founders. Today, Carroll’s signal contributions to the American Founding are overlooked, but the fascinating new biography American Cicero rescues Carroll from unjust neglect.
Drawing on his considerable study of Carroll’s published and unpublished writings, historian Bradley J. Birzer masterfully captures a man of supreme intellect, imagination, integrity, and accomplishment. Born a bastard, Carroll nonetheless became the best educated (and wealthiest) Founder. The Marylander’s insight, Birzer shows, allowed him to recognize the necessity of independence from Great Britain well before most other Founders. Indeed, Carroll’s analysis of the situation in the colonies in the run-up to the Revolution was original and brilliant—yet almost all historians have ignored it. Reflecting his classical and liberal education, the man who would be called “The Last of the Romans” advocated a proper understanding of the American Revolution as deeply rooted in the Western tradition. Carroll even left his mark on the U.S. Constitution despite not assuming his elected position to the Constitutional by inspiring the creation of the U.S. Senate.
American Cicero ably demonstrates how Carroll’s Catholicism was integral to his thought. Oppressed because of his faith—Maryland was the most anti-Catholic of the original thirteen colonies—Carroll became the only Roman Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence and helped legitimize Catholicism in the young American republic.
What’s more, Birzer brilliantly reassesses the most controversial aspects of Charles his aristocratic position and his critiques of democracy. As Birzer shows, Carroll’s fears of extreme democracy had ancient and noble roots, and his arguments about the dangers of democracy influenced Alexis de Tocqueville’s magisterial work Democracy in America .
American Cicero reveals why Founders such as John Adams assumed that Charles Carroll would one day be considered among the greats—and also why history has largely forgotten him.
230 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2010
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217 people want to read
About the author
Bradley J. Birzer
31 books64 followersBradley J. Birzer is an American historian. He is a history professor and the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies at Hillsdale College, the author of five books and the co-founder of The Imaginative Conservative. He is known also as a J.R.R. Tolkien scholar.
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December 11, 2023
American Cicero has lots of potential for a biography on one of the lesser known Founders of the Revolutionary War era. Unfortunately, the author chooses to focus solely on the writings, career, and political thoughts of quite a distinguished personality, rather than dive into the full life of the man from Carrollton. While he could have been born into a wealthy inheritance, we find Charles brought up instead as a bastard by his father whom chose not to marry early on—a bold and rather scandalous move for the times. This was a fascinating taste of what could be a great start. It moves to some brief snippets of his boyhood involving his Catholic upbringing and education abroad in France, all of which are enticing. From there, Birzer chooses to speed on through to the beginnings of the Colonists’ discontent, with Carroll taking the Whig approach and authoring several pieces on the right of Parliamentary and Crown power in the Colonies.
The most interesting part of the book would be that of his relationship with his father, whom both share similar leanings on the injustice of mob rule, as well as the excess of taxation. Theirs is a compassionate bond, and while there are clear riffs throughout, both the father and son set a fine example of letting bygones be as they stay very close until the elderly Carroll’s death. The same cannot be said for those friendships Charles creates both before and during Independence, as they slowly drift and divide as the Early Republic of the United States forms and he begins campaigning on the Federalist need for a stronger central government:
The envy and malice of Mr. Carroll and his party I despise. His friendship I never desire to regain. No one will ever be benefited from it. I broke off my connection with him because he opposed the test act; and became the advocate of the disaffected, tories, and refugees...
Birzer reveals that Charles Carroll is indeed a complex character to write about and understand intimately, with each of the more familiar Founders such as John Adams noting his qualities and education, as well as the constant reminder of being a “Papist” through and through. While it is an excellent and quick read, it does leave the reader always wanting more on the overall day to day life and history of Charles Carroll—not just his thoughts and beliefs. The book unfortunately lacks any illustrations, although an appendix is given offering various essays and articles that Carroll authored.
The most interesting part of the book would be that of his relationship with his father, whom both share similar leanings on the injustice of mob rule, as well as the excess of taxation. Theirs is a compassionate bond, and while there are clear riffs throughout, both the father and son set a fine example of letting bygones be as they stay very close until the elderly Carroll’s death. The same cannot be said for those friendships Charles creates both before and during Independence, as they slowly drift and divide as the Early Republic of the United States forms and he begins campaigning on the Federalist need for a stronger central government:
The envy and malice of Mr. Carroll and his party I despise. His friendship I never desire to regain. No one will ever be benefited from it. I broke off my connection with him because he opposed the test act; and became the advocate of the disaffected, tories, and refugees...
Birzer reveals that Charles Carroll is indeed a complex character to write about and understand intimately, with each of the more familiar Founders such as John Adams noting his qualities and education, as well as the constant reminder of being a “Papist” through and through. While it is an excellent and quick read, it does leave the reader always wanting more on the overall day to day life and history of Charles Carroll—not just his thoughts and beliefs. The book unfortunately lacks any illustrations, although an appendix is given offering various essays and articles that Carroll authored.
April 11, 2018
Charles Carroll, once famous as the only Catholic signatory of the Declaration of Independence and the last signatory to die, is no longer much in the public consciousness. If asked to name a signatory, most people would say “John Hancock,” since he wrote his name in big letters. Thomas Jefferson would also come to mind; perhaps also John Adams, Samuel Adams and Ben Franklin, especially for those who watched the John Adams miniseries on HBO a few years back. Not that long ago, though, Charles Carroll would also have sprung to mind, and Bradley Birzer’s goal is to, if not restore Carroll, at least clear away some of the dust that has covered his memory.
That memory is of particular interest now, as our form of government faces turmoil. Today, focus on the Founders tends to view the primary structural debate as between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians—basically, advocates of a strong federal government against those who wanted a weaker federal government. Side issues sometimes appear, such as the exact meaning of religious tolerance or the role and purpose of the militia, and the main issue manifests itself in different specifics, such as economic protectionism or federal monetary power. But what was the first and really the most important question of all for the Founders, how much democracy the new country should have, is no longer a question that is often addressed. The constituency for an emphasis on aristocratic power at the expense of an expansive franchise is pretty small nowadays. That’s too bad, because it’s quite obvious now that the nearly pure democracy we have ended up with, as a result of mistakes such as ratifying the Seventeenth Amendment and permitting the illegitimate distortion of the Constitution by the federal judiciary, is leading us over a cliff—as any third-rate thinker in Ancient Greece could have told us it would. And of the Founders, Charles Carroll was the main proponent of aristocratic governance in opposition to pure democracy. Which is doubtless, at least in part, why his reputation has been eclipsed, while those of partisans of aggressive democracy such as Tom Paine have retained their luster.
Birzer, a professor of history at Hillsdale College, is the author of several other books, including the definitive biography of Russell Kirk. He is also the author of a short post on his personal blog that never fails to reduce me to tears, about the 2007 death of his daughter Cecilia Rose in childbirth, and his hopes to be reunited with her. For some reason, I return to that post when I run across Birzer’s name in other contexts, even though I do not know Birzer and have been spared any such tragedy. I think it is because it exemplifies and personalizes my strong belief, following David Bentley Hart, that God does not and will not offer us a final synthesis showing why, for example, Birzer’s daughter had to die to accomplish God’s plans, but instead a renewal of all things.
No doubt Charles Carroll would have agreed, but he was an aristocrat first, a politician second, and not a theologian at all, though he was very devout (and he was cousin to John Carroll, the first bishop in the United States). Nor, really, do we learn much of his inner life or thoughts in this book. Instead, we get a clear exposition of his public life and works. He was born in 1737, the son of the richest man in Maryland. Actually, he was the bastard son, not because his father knocked up the housemaid like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but because marriage would apparently have complicated family inheritances—or at least that is one theory, though nobody seems to be exactly sure. His parents did get married in 1757, however, regularizing their relationship and, not incidentally, ensuring Charles Carroll’s inheritance and therefore his position as one of the richest men in the colonies, and later in the new United States.
One thing I never knew until I read this book was that, although Maryland was founded in the early 1600s as a destination for persecuted English Catholics, by 1650, the Puritans had suppressed the Catholics (who were always a small minority), and after 1688, Catholicism was illegal in the colony, with Catholics suffering various disabilities, such as forms of double taxation and inability to vote or participate in political life. It was into this milieu that Charles Carroll was born, and it was only after the War of Independence that tolerance across Christian denominations became the norm in Maryland (and the rest of the colonies). So, perhaps, Maryland’s reputation for religious tolerance based on the circumstances of its founding is unjustified, something that seems to have escaped generations of schoolboys such as me (though now, for the most part, they don’t teach anything at all about America’s founding, or at least anything that’s not lying propaganda in the service of “social justice”).
Most of Carroll’s education, though, was not in the colonies. From 1748 until 1765, he lived and studied abroad, in part because of the limitations and disabilities placed on Catholics in Maryland. He studied first in France in Jesuit schools, including St. Omer, and then in London for a law degree. At St. Omer, an institution dedicated to the re-conversion of England, heavy emphasis was laid on Jesuit thinkers such as Robert Bellarmine, Juan de Mariana, and Francisco Suárez, “neo-Thomist” theologians who followed Aquinas in advocating that, in extreme circumstances, a tyrannical king could be overthrown, not by the Church, but by secular leaders. According to Birzer, these Jesuits put forth a type of social contract theory, long prior to Hobbes, though one focused on ascertaining and implementing divine intent. And, critically, they were more willing than Aquinas to contemplate rebellion against a king. Birzer ascribes this, along with study of, especially, Montesquieu, as the main drivers of Carroll’s political thought as it related to the War of Independence.
When Carroll returned to the colonies, his mother had died. But his father was still alive—he lived until 1782, and father and son were always extremely close and, though they had some political disagreements, seem to have exemplified an ideal father-son relationship. (Carroll himself had bad luck with his children—of seven, four died in infancy, and his only surviving son was a shiftless alcoholic.) He wanted to enter public life, but was debarred from both politics and law by his faith. Still, he began to take an informal political role, starting with private exchanges of views, and escalating to newspaper exchanges with political opponents, which were pseudonymous in the style of the times, even though everyone knew who the authors were. The most significant controversy revolved around whether the Maryland proprietor (in effect, the royal governor) had the power to levy certain fees that were disguised taxes, without the authorization of the Maryland legislature. Carroll took the position that the proprietor lacked this power, in a series of exchanges starting in 1773, which escalated beyond the narrow immediate question to broader questions of the power of the king under the English constitution, and under what circumstances his deposition (as of James II in 1688) was legitimate. Threading the needle, so as not to be considered a Jacobite, Carroll’s position was that James II was legitimately deposed, but William and Mary were not necessarily the correct substitution. Carroll advocated separation of powers as critical for good government, following Montesquieu, as well as adherence to the organic English constitution. He saw both as violated by the proprietor’s levying of fees. In these exchanges, Carroll was repeatedly attacked for his Catholicism (in part because the fees being levied were for the support of Anglican clergy) but was widely considered the clear winner, which raised his profile immensely, although it also increased the opprobrium directed at him by many members of his social class.
In the next few years, until the Declaration, Carroll became heavily involved in the various spontaneous legislative bodies that gradually displaced the proprietary government of Maryland, the “Maryland Conventions.” These were the types of bodies, throughout the colonies, in which the political theories that underlay the American Founding were hammered out, and Carroll was among the most vocal. Not deviating from his former principles, he was all for independence, by violence if necessary, but strongly opposed to giving too much power to the demos. Abstract reason, of the Tom Paine sort, was the antithesis of what would create good government. Basically, what Carroll offered was not dissimilar to Edmund Burke, but on the other side of the divide that encouraged violence to effectuate justified rebellion. The aim of rebellion, critically, was not to achieve the abstract rights of man, but to reform the corrupted English constitution, the product of long experience and wisdom, based on natural rights and exemplified by the common law. Carroll never trusted democracy, holding (correctly) that it necessarily led to both mediocrity and excess. He would be appalled by the modern worship of direct democracy, and even more appalled by the exaltation of unfettered personal autonomy as the highest good. Thus, Carroll held that the locus of most real power should be the upper house of the legislature, aristocratic and life-tenured, embedded in a divided government with the traditional three branches found in England.
After all these conventions, and a stint as ambassador to Canada (where he was unable to convince the French Canadians to join the Americans), Carroll was elected to represent Maryland in the first Continental Congress, and he signed the Declaration of Independence. He then returned to Maryland. In Maryland, though, he was disturbed by an accelerated slide toward “extreme populism and democracy.” But he kept working, and he was the major author of the Maryland Declaration of Rights, passed on November 3, 1776. That Declaration, which is similar to other contemporaneous declarations, as well as the later federal Bill of Rights, says “elections ought to be free and frequent, and every man, having property in, a common interest with, and an attachment to the community, ought to have a right of suffrage.” We could use a good strong dose of this attitude today, and a radical re-restriction of the franchise on these principles. Structurally, Carroll continued to focus on organizing the Maryland Senate to embody his vision of a dominant aristocratic upper house of the legislature, a model James Madison specifically endorsed in Federalist 63. He himself served in the Maryland Senate until 1800 (along with a two-year term in the first federal Senate, starting in 1789, which he left when Maryland forbade serving in both the state and federal senates).
During the war, Carroll was involved in various political controversies. He supported the “legal-tender law,” which allowed paper fiat money to replace coin (a matter over which he split politically with his father); generally opposed confiscating the property of British citizens in Maryland; and strongly supported George Washington as supreme military commander and in his efforts to establish the Confederation. In the debates over ratifying the Constitution, Carroll was a leading Federalist (but he did not attend the Constitutional Convention, being preoccupied with state political matters of critical importance, or what seemed like critical importance at the time). And, after leaving the Maryland Senate, Carroll lived another thirty-two years, maintaining an aristocratic lifestyle (in part based on his thousand slaves, while at the same time calling slavery a “great evil” and chairing the American Colonization Society, the chief anti-slavery body until superseded by William Garrison’s advocacy of immediate abolition). He entertained many visitors, including Tocqueville, and lived to see an entirely new America, strong and confident.
He also saw an American system that was largely in keeping with his aristocratic vision for American governance. As I say, it was probably predictable, due to changes in that system, that we would come to the pass we are now at, where the ignorant masses are allowed to set standards and to impose the dominance of demagogues and fools, while voting themselves money. But what to do about that is a topic for another day, and one can read this biography of Charles Carroll with profit without getting hung up on the sad state we have reached 230 years later.
That memory is of particular interest now, as our form of government faces turmoil. Today, focus on the Founders tends to view the primary structural debate as between Hamiltonians and Jeffersonians—basically, advocates of a strong federal government against those who wanted a weaker federal government. Side issues sometimes appear, such as the exact meaning of religious tolerance or the role and purpose of the militia, and the main issue manifests itself in different specifics, such as economic protectionism or federal monetary power. But what was the first and really the most important question of all for the Founders, how much democracy the new country should have, is no longer a question that is often addressed. The constituency for an emphasis on aristocratic power at the expense of an expansive franchise is pretty small nowadays. That’s too bad, because it’s quite obvious now that the nearly pure democracy we have ended up with, as a result of mistakes such as ratifying the Seventeenth Amendment and permitting the illegitimate distortion of the Constitution by the federal judiciary, is leading us over a cliff—as any third-rate thinker in Ancient Greece could have told us it would. And of the Founders, Charles Carroll was the main proponent of aristocratic governance in opposition to pure democracy. Which is doubtless, at least in part, why his reputation has been eclipsed, while those of partisans of aggressive democracy such as Tom Paine have retained their luster.
Birzer, a professor of history at Hillsdale College, is the author of several other books, including the definitive biography of Russell Kirk. He is also the author of a short post on his personal blog that never fails to reduce me to tears, about the 2007 death of his daughter Cecilia Rose in childbirth, and his hopes to be reunited with her. For some reason, I return to that post when I run across Birzer’s name in other contexts, even though I do not know Birzer and have been spared any such tragedy. I think it is because it exemplifies and personalizes my strong belief, following David Bentley Hart, that God does not and will not offer us a final synthesis showing why, for example, Birzer’s daughter had to die to accomplish God’s plans, but instead a renewal of all things.
No doubt Charles Carroll would have agreed, but he was an aristocrat first, a politician second, and not a theologian at all, though he was very devout (and he was cousin to John Carroll, the first bishop in the United States). Nor, really, do we learn much of his inner life or thoughts in this book. Instead, we get a clear exposition of his public life and works. He was born in 1737, the son of the richest man in Maryland. Actually, he was the bastard son, not because his father knocked up the housemaid like Arnold Schwarzenegger, but because marriage would apparently have complicated family inheritances—or at least that is one theory, though nobody seems to be exactly sure. His parents did get married in 1757, however, regularizing their relationship and, not incidentally, ensuring Charles Carroll’s inheritance and therefore his position as one of the richest men in the colonies, and later in the new United States.
One thing I never knew until I read this book was that, although Maryland was founded in the early 1600s as a destination for persecuted English Catholics, by 1650, the Puritans had suppressed the Catholics (who were always a small minority), and after 1688, Catholicism was illegal in the colony, with Catholics suffering various disabilities, such as forms of double taxation and inability to vote or participate in political life. It was into this milieu that Charles Carroll was born, and it was only after the War of Independence that tolerance across Christian denominations became the norm in Maryland (and the rest of the colonies). So, perhaps, Maryland’s reputation for religious tolerance based on the circumstances of its founding is unjustified, something that seems to have escaped generations of schoolboys such as me (though now, for the most part, they don’t teach anything at all about America’s founding, or at least anything that’s not lying propaganda in the service of “social justice”).
Most of Carroll’s education, though, was not in the colonies. From 1748 until 1765, he lived and studied abroad, in part because of the limitations and disabilities placed on Catholics in Maryland. He studied first in France in Jesuit schools, including St. Omer, and then in London for a law degree. At St. Omer, an institution dedicated to the re-conversion of England, heavy emphasis was laid on Jesuit thinkers such as Robert Bellarmine, Juan de Mariana, and Francisco Suárez, “neo-Thomist” theologians who followed Aquinas in advocating that, in extreme circumstances, a tyrannical king could be overthrown, not by the Church, but by secular leaders. According to Birzer, these Jesuits put forth a type of social contract theory, long prior to Hobbes, though one focused on ascertaining and implementing divine intent. And, critically, they were more willing than Aquinas to contemplate rebellion against a king. Birzer ascribes this, along with study of, especially, Montesquieu, as the main drivers of Carroll’s political thought as it related to the War of Independence.
When Carroll returned to the colonies, his mother had died. But his father was still alive—he lived until 1782, and father and son were always extremely close and, though they had some political disagreements, seem to have exemplified an ideal father-son relationship. (Carroll himself had bad luck with his children—of seven, four died in infancy, and his only surviving son was a shiftless alcoholic.) He wanted to enter public life, but was debarred from both politics and law by his faith. Still, he began to take an informal political role, starting with private exchanges of views, and escalating to newspaper exchanges with political opponents, which were pseudonymous in the style of the times, even though everyone knew who the authors were. The most significant controversy revolved around whether the Maryland proprietor (in effect, the royal governor) had the power to levy certain fees that were disguised taxes, without the authorization of the Maryland legislature. Carroll took the position that the proprietor lacked this power, in a series of exchanges starting in 1773, which escalated beyond the narrow immediate question to broader questions of the power of the king under the English constitution, and under what circumstances his deposition (as of James II in 1688) was legitimate. Threading the needle, so as not to be considered a Jacobite, Carroll’s position was that James II was legitimately deposed, but William and Mary were not necessarily the correct substitution. Carroll advocated separation of powers as critical for good government, following Montesquieu, as well as adherence to the organic English constitution. He saw both as violated by the proprietor’s levying of fees. In these exchanges, Carroll was repeatedly attacked for his Catholicism (in part because the fees being levied were for the support of Anglican clergy) but was widely considered the clear winner, which raised his profile immensely, although it also increased the opprobrium directed at him by many members of his social class.
In the next few years, until the Declaration, Carroll became heavily involved in the various spontaneous legislative bodies that gradually displaced the proprietary government of Maryland, the “Maryland Conventions.” These were the types of bodies, throughout the colonies, in which the political theories that underlay the American Founding were hammered out, and Carroll was among the most vocal. Not deviating from his former principles, he was all for independence, by violence if necessary, but strongly opposed to giving too much power to the demos. Abstract reason, of the Tom Paine sort, was the antithesis of what would create good government. Basically, what Carroll offered was not dissimilar to Edmund Burke, but on the other side of the divide that encouraged violence to effectuate justified rebellion. The aim of rebellion, critically, was not to achieve the abstract rights of man, but to reform the corrupted English constitution, the product of long experience and wisdom, based on natural rights and exemplified by the common law. Carroll never trusted democracy, holding (correctly) that it necessarily led to both mediocrity and excess. He would be appalled by the modern worship of direct democracy, and even more appalled by the exaltation of unfettered personal autonomy as the highest good. Thus, Carroll held that the locus of most real power should be the upper house of the legislature, aristocratic and life-tenured, embedded in a divided government with the traditional three branches found in England.
After all these conventions, and a stint as ambassador to Canada (where he was unable to convince the French Canadians to join the Americans), Carroll was elected to represent Maryland in the first Continental Congress, and he signed the Declaration of Independence. He then returned to Maryland. In Maryland, though, he was disturbed by an accelerated slide toward “extreme populism and democracy.” But he kept working, and he was the major author of the Maryland Declaration of Rights, passed on November 3, 1776. That Declaration, which is similar to other contemporaneous declarations, as well as the later federal Bill of Rights, says “elections ought to be free and frequent, and every man, having property in, a common interest with, and an attachment to the community, ought to have a right of suffrage.” We could use a good strong dose of this attitude today, and a radical re-restriction of the franchise on these principles. Structurally, Carroll continued to focus on organizing the Maryland Senate to embody his vision of a dominant aristocratic upper house of the legislature, a model James Madison specifically endorsed in Federalist 63. He himself served in the Maryland Senate until 1800 (along with a two-year term in the first federal Senate, starting in 1789, which he left when Maryland forbade serving in both the state and federal senates).
During the war, Carroll was involved in various political controversies. He supported the “legal-tender law,” which allowed paper fiat money to replace coin (a matter over which he split politically with his father); generally opposed confiscating the property of British citizens in Maryland; and strongly supported George Washington as supreme military commander and in his efforts to establish the Confederation. In the debates over ratifying the Constitution, Carroll was a leading Federalist (but he did not attend the Constitutional Convention, being preoccupied with state political matters of critical importance, or what seemed like critical importance at the time). And, after leaving the Maryland Senate, Carroll lived another thirty-two years, maintaining an aristocratic lifestyle (in part based on his thousand slaves, while at the same time calling slavery a “great evil” and chairing the American Colonization Society, the chief anti-slavery body until superseded by William Garrison’s advocacy of immediate abolition). He entertained many visitors, including Tocqueville, and lived to see an entirely new America, strong and confident.
He also saw an American system that was largely in keeping with his aristocratic vision for American governance. As I say, it was probably predictable, due to changes in that system, that we would come to the pass we are now at, where the ignorant masses are allowed to set standards and to impose the dominance of demagogues and fools, while voting themselves money. But what to do about that is a topic for another day, and one can read this biography of Charles Carroll with profit without getting hung up on the sad state we have reached 230 years later.
August 24, 2020
I must admit personally that the life and personal history of Charles Carroll was not one I was familiar with, even if I have heard of the name because of my reading about the period of the Revolutionary War. In this short book of a bit more than 200 pages, the author has done a good job at placing Carroll's life within a larger context. This context includes the immense wealth of his family, wealth that included land and slaves from a variety of different plantations and estates. This context includes the fact of Charles' illegitimacy, which was rectified when his father belatedly married his mother and recognized him as heir and provided for an education in France and England. This context also includes the fact that as Catholics, in the 18th century before the increased religious toleration of the American Republic, Carroll was barred from having a political life as a voter, despite his wealth and education, because of his faith. And yet he was upwardly mobile, like his cousin, the first American bishop of the Catholic Church, a sign of the increased respect that he had because of his political beliefs as a proud American and a sign that the religious conflicts of the English world of the 17th and 18th centuries were dying down into a greater degree of tolerance and mutual regard than had been the case previously. And that context also includes the Thomist education that Carroll had received in Europe that would equip him for the struggle over independence.
This short volume is divided into five chapters and a bit of other material as well. The book begins with an introduction that discusses Charles Carroll as an exemplar of Catholic and Republican virtue, and the author is careful to tie the two together, lest it be assumed that being a loyal Catholic meant that one was inimical to virtuous Republicanism, as has been thought by some periodically within American history. After that the author discusses the youth of Carroll as a liberally educated bastard whose education equipped him to handle the political tempests of the 1770's and 1780's with considerable aplomb (1). This leads to a discussion of Carroll's role as the "First Citizen" (a rather bold claim in light of his lack of citizenship in pre-revolutionary Maryland) in debates about a particular local Maryland issue relating to the taxation for the established Anglican church (2). The author discusses the evolution of the state and national constitutions during the course of the revolutionary years that Carroll himself took part of on the state and federal level (3), as well as the goal that Carroll had of attenuating disorder by encouraging a balanced constitution rather than one that was overly populist in nature (4). The author then discusses the goal that Carroll had of encouraging a political order in Maryland and the United States that echoed the divine order he believed in (5), after which there is a conclusion about his Roman Republican nature, an appendix that discusses his political writing, as well as notes, a selected bibliography, acknowledgements, and index.
Indeed, in reading this book I was greatly struck by the author's idea that it was Carroll's Thomist education that provided him with a means to counteract the divine right theories of rulership, or the idea that a Parliament that was not elected by any of the voters of the colonies could provide a virtual representation for American colonists anymore than Maryland's anti-Catholic pre-revolutionary assembly could provide virtual representation for a Catholic denied a political place because of his faith. In my readings about political philosophy I have seen it mentioned elsewhere that there was a strong degree of Catholic thinking provided by the Jesuits and others that was hostile to royal absolutism and that accounts for at least some of the hostility that the absolutists of the eighteenth century had towards the Jesuits even in the Catholic world. This is a subject about which I would like to know more, and hopefully there are some easily available sources that can provide some meat to this argument, one which I must admit I am not equipped to address because I have not read the anti-divine right writings of the early modern Jesuits that would have been among the teachers of Carroll in France, and part of that strain of French thinking that likely strongly influenced American thinking on the lack of legitimacy of power that was not accountable to the people. Obviously, this is a matter of contemporary relevance.
March 8, 2017
When Charles Carroll of Carrollton signed the Declaration of Independence, he was risking the biggest fortune on the American mainland. But Carroll had yearned for independence for more than a decade before he put pen to paper, before strife ever disrupted the happy relationship between British America and Parliament. Whatever the risk, if the cause was right Carroll could have taken no other course; more than any other founder, he was steeped in the classical tradition and its traditions of civic virtue. When he died in 1832, having outlived all the other founders, he was hailed as the Last of the Romans. In American Cicero, Bradley Birzer presents a study of his life, the tale of a Roman in a nation of would-be Jacobins.
Many of the founding generations were besotted with the classical world; they studied the classics not as segregated and dusty literature to be discussed in clubs with other eccentrics, but as the fount of worldly knowledge. Metaphysics, politics, natural philosophy, and even farming wisdom were the gift of Greece and Rome to the American frontier, and a study of classical political constitutions would later inform the creation of the American bedrock. Educated for fourteen years in England and France, Carroll was even more formed by the classics than his contemporaries, who all adopted Latin pen names whenever they wrote in public forums. He considered the ancients to be not only teachers, but friends – especially Cicero, whose Stoicism would undergird Carroll’s political philosophy.
Though he is little remembered today, Carroll’s early career was accomplished; after creating a reputation as a champion-patriot in furious exchange of letters, he served as an emissary to Canada; later he attended the Second Constitutional Convention and signed both it and the Articles of Confederation; still later, when the Constitution supplanted the Articles, he was elected Maryland’s first Senator. This was, Birzer writes, utterly appropriate given how much ink Carroll had spilled in the service of creating a genuine Republic, especially concerned with the role that a Senate would play in maintaining an even keel amid populist furor. If he is forgotten today, it may owe to his well-deserved reputation as a critic of mass democracy: like John Adams, he regarded pure democracy as dangerously unstable, a threat to the liberty of minorities and the right of property.
Carroll was especially conscious of the threat of mobs given his status as a Catholic in a predominately Protestant world. In a list of the signers of the Declaration, Carroll is alone in his Roman devotion. Despite Maryland’s birth as a safe haven for Catholics fleeing the persecution of the Reformation, the state was heavily settled by Protestants and actually became one of the most hostile to Catholicism. In this age, hostility toward a man’s religion didn’t mean calling him names. Seizing his land and setting him on fire were more likely. The despoiling of Catholics had happened in England, and could very well happen in America were the Rule of Law not enthroned.
Carroll feared the rage of a mob, and he had a great deal of property to lose – but he was a man who lived in hope. His faith was more cosmopolitan than most, as he believed all those followed the moral laws of Jesus would see his face regardless of their doctrinal differences with the Church. This universal stance was not sheer pragmatism on Carroll’s part, though he could not expect to live in peace with his neighbors, let alone play a part in the public sphere, were he antagonistic toward his Protestant brethren. The Stoicism of Cicero also deeply informed Carroll’s beliefs, especially the belief that each man was imbued with a divine spark, a piece of the Cosmic logos, and that this made every man and woman kin in a fundamental way, and opened the possibility of a universal republic.
A genuine Republic was possible only if people conducted themselves with virtue, however, obeying the laws of Nature and its God; let passion reign, and the fruits of civilization will be felled under a barbarian storm. Carroll’s staunch belief in the need for virtue predisposed him to favor administration by a relatively small group of men, chosen for the strength of their character and themselves limited by government that kept the inherent abuses of government to a minimum. (The choosing of an American president by Congressionally-appointed Electors reflected the value other founders saw in a moderated national democracy.) He believed in genuine aristocracy, but not the arbitrary sort. Men’s characters were to be judged by their submission to law, both divine and civic. Before the law that bound the cosmos and the republic together, no man could stand superior.
Like Marcus Aurelius, Carroll is an easier man to admire from afar than to enjoy having supper with. John Adams thought him a marvelous specimen of humanity, but Mr. Adams had a moral severity of his own. Contemporaries marveled at his intelligence and devotion to the Patriot cause, arguing as he did against the abuses of the king and Parliament with respect to the common law, but his long education and affluent upbringing seemed to deny him that charismatic common touch that so endeared the public to men like Jefferson, or later Lincoln. He was highly esteemed by his peers, and sometimes admired by the people, but when he passed away he was mostly remembered as a historical curiosity, the last living signer of the declaration. Like Dickinson, he helped to shape popular rage against taxes and government meddling into a respectable cause, and is thus worth considering even if the cause took on a more incautious nature than either man cared for.
Many of the founding generations were besotted with the classical world; they studied the classics not as segregated and dusty literature to be discussed in clubs with other eccentrics, but as the fount of worldly knowledge. Metaphysics, politics, natural philosophy, and even farming wisdom were the gift of Greece and Rome to the American frontier, and a study of classical political constitutions would later inform the creation of the American bedrock. Educated for fourteen years in England and France, Carroll was even more formed by the classics than his contemporaries, who all adopted Latin pen names whenever they wrote in public forums. He considered the ancients to be not only teachers, but friends – especially Cicero, whose Stoicism would undergird Carroll’s political philosophy.
Though he is little remembered today, Carroll’s early career was accomplished; after creating a reputation as a champion-patriot in furious exchange of letters, he served as an emissary to Canada; later he attended the Second Constitutional Convention and signed both it and the Articles of Confederation; still later, when the Constitution supplanted the Articles, he was elected Maryland’s first Senator. This was, Birzer writes, utterly appropriate given how much ink Carroll had spilled in the service of creating a genuine Republic, especially concerned with the role that a Senate would play in maintaining an even keel amid populist furor. If he is forgotten today, it may owe to his well-deserved reputation as a critic of mass democracy: like John Adams, he regarded pure democracy as dangerously unstable, a threat to the liberty of minorities and the right of property.
Carroll was especially conscious of the threat of mobs given his status as a Catholic in a predominately Protestant world. In a list of the signers of the Declaration, Carroll is alone in his Roman devotion. Despite Maryland’s birth as a safe haven for Catholics fleeing the persecution of the Reformation, the state was heavily settled by Protestants and actually became one of the most hostile to Catholicism. In this age, hostility toward a man’s religion didn’t mean calling him names. Seizing his land and setting him on fire were more likely. The despoiling of Catholics had happened in England, and could very well happen in America were the Rule of Law not enthroned.
Carroll feared the rage of a mob, and he had a great deal of property to lose – but he was a man who lived in hope. His faith was more cosmopolitan than most, as he believed all those followed the moral laws of Jesus would see his face regardless of their doctrinal differences with the Church. This universal stance was not sheer pragmatism on Carroll’s part, though he could not expect to live in peace with his neighbors, let alone play a part in the public sphere, were he antagonistic toward his Protestant brethren. The Stoicism of Cicero also deeply informed Carroll’s beliefs, especially the belief that each man was imbued with a divine spark, a piece of the Cosmic logos, and that this made every man and woman kin in a fundamental way, and opened the possibility of a universal republic.
A genuine Republic was possible only if people conducted themselves with virtue, however, obeying the laws of Nature and its God; let passion reign, and the fruits of civilization will be felled under a barbarian storm. Carroll’s staunch belief in the need for virtue predisposed him to favor administration by a relatively small group of men, chosen for the strength of their character and themselves limited by government that kept the inherent abuses of government to a minimum. (The choosing of an American president by Congressionally-appointed Electors reflected the value other founders saw in a moderated national democracy.) He believed in genuine aristocracy, but not the arbitrary sort. Men’s characters were to be judged by their submission to law, both divine and civic. Before the law that bound the cosmos and the republic together, no man could stand superior.
Like Marcus Aurelius, Carroll is an easier man to admire from afar than to enjoy having supper with. John Adams thought him a marvelous specimen of humanity, but Mr. Adams had a moral severity of his own. Contemporaries marveled at his intelligence and devotion to the Patriot cause, arguing as he did against the abuses of the king and Parliament with respect to the common law, but his long education and affluent upbringing seemed to deny him that charismatic common touch that so endeared the public to men like Jefferson, or later Lincoln. He was highly esteemed by his peers, and sometimes admired by the people, but when he passed away he was mostly remembered as a historical curiosity, the last living signer of the declaration. Like Dickinson, he helped to shape popular rage against taxes and government meddling into a respectable cause, and is thus worth considering even if the cause took on a more incautious nature than either man cared for.
October 1, 2017
Consequent to historians having limited the household names among that elite lineup known as the "Founding Fathers" to perhaps slightly over a half dozen (notably Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Hamilton and Jay), many people might be forgiven for forgetting that it took quite a few more than that to create and consolidate the American Republic. Among the “non-marbleized” figures were some very formidable men indeed, including the subject of this short bio, Charles Carroll.
Educated in France, Carroll had a highly sophisticated understanding of politics and democracy for his time. Associated with the “aristocratic” view, meaning a belief in aristocracy in its pure sense (rule by the “best”), he was not a “democrat" according to the current-day understanding of that term. He disdained the Jacobins in France, fearing rightly that their rule would lead to tyranny and mass murder. He often expressed pessimism about America, going so far as to say that—should the myriad “revolutionary committees” springing up around the time of the war of independence have any chance of becoming the de jure government—America would be better off returning to monarchy. He was surely correct. In fact, while claiming to be a staunch republican, Carroll was as deferential to the king as to the president when it came to assigning blame for abuses of power.
It was not the King of England who should be accused when tyranny arose under his reign, said Carroll. It was the monarch’s ministers. Similarly, the President of the United States should not be saddled with blame for tyranny in America’s government, but rather the members of the US Senate (of which Carroll himself was one). Little surprise, then, that Carroll (a Federalist) was strongly associated with the partisans of George Washington. He did not approve of Jefferson and worried that the third president’s affinity for the Jacobins in France threatened fundamental liberties in America. He even entertained the mild suspicion that Madison was an agent of Napoleon. Carroll's unabashed aristocratic convictions led to contempt for him among many of his contemporaries.
Carroll was an able orator who engaged in public debates on the fundamental political issues of the era, both in the press and in the Maryland legislature, which appointed him to the first US Senate after the ratification of the US Constitution. Carroll took controversial stands on his path to prominence, most notably opposing a bill to confiscate all British property in the American colonies during the war. He argued that this would have penalized all British property owners, even those who supported the American republicans or at least bore them no ill will. The American independence movement was first and foremost opposed to the excesses of the Crown government, Carroll argued, not ordinary Britons, and he noted that confiscatory policies would only lead to the tit-for-tat confiscation of American property in Great Britain. Carroll won the day, overcoming the cynicism of his peers (echoed by some historians) to the effect that—being one of the wealthiest men in America—he cared only for his personal riches, not the well-being of his compatriots. His family owned property in Britain, and Carroll was the wealthiest man in America.
Yet perhaps the most consistent tenet of Carroll’s political belief system was the sanctity of property. Property was a fundamental, God-given right, he claimed, and he never wavered from this throughout his long life. The fact that he owned many slaves (one estimate has the number at a thousand!) has generated the same kind of derision among some modern observers toward his beliefs as toward those of the more famous Founders, almost all of whom were also slave owners. But Carroll also chaired an abolitionist movement after retiring from public office, and he is on record as branding slavery as a manifest evil. John Adams, who did not own slaves, held Carroll in very high regard.
Given Carroll's intellect, sophistication and prominence, a question naturally arises: why is he not more famous among the Founding Fathers? He was, remarkably, the only founder to have personally met Edmund Burke, and while it is not known what the two men talked about, it is undeniable that Carroll admired and propagated Burke’s ideas. Carroll also knew Alexis de Tocqueville, who held the Marylander in high esteem. Carroll's exposure to Europe in his formative years should have propelled him to the highest ranks of the new leaders of America, to be memorialized throughout the republic, down through the ages.
The reason is likely well known to anyone who knows anything of Charles Carroll: he was a Catholic. And he wasn’t merely a Catholic in a formal sense; he was actively and openly Catholic. It may seem strange, then, for Carroll to have been not only so outspoken a proponent of American republicanism but also an apologist for the English Crown, both of which had hitherto shown relatively little toleration for Catholicism. The American Founders were suspicious and derisory of Catholics; the British Crown had a history of persecuting “Romans.” Yet Carroll was steadfast not only in his profession of Catholic faith but also in his belief that a constitutional American republic faithful to the “pure” liberties enshrined in the English constitution was the best way to guarantee religious liberty for Catholics. Bearing serious rhetorical abuse from Protestants in America for this opinion, he not only emerged victorious in debates but also gained a substantial public following.
Interestingly, Carroll readily obliged the formally Protestant founders of the republic in making use of his Catholicism for their political ends. Accepting appointment as the first ambassador to Canada, he attempted to convince Canadian Catholics that the American republic would be a better friend to them than the British monarchy. Although his diplomatic mission ultimately failed to make an ally of Canada against Britain (a very tall order, to be sure), it probably did no harm to future US-Canadian relations. Carroll was by all accounts a virtuous early member of America’s foreign service.
Nevertheless, the recognition Carroll received from his peers and the public at large for his intellect and fealty to principle were not enough to elevate him to the level of a Jefferson, Hamilton or Madison, and it has to be wondered whether Carroll was—additionally—excluded from contributing to the most critical debates of the times (e.g. Federalist Papers) on a par with the others precisely because of widespread suspicion generated by his religion. This book does not delve into that possibility. Taken a step further, did Carroll—in addition to enduring opposition from Protestants—encounter the enmity of Freemasons? Some might argue that the American independence movement was not simply a matter of monarchy versus republic, but also—given the adherence to Freemasonry of a significant number of the Founding Fathers—royal power versus Masonic power. Carroll would have been an outsider in both cases, since, in his time, Freemasonry and Roman Catholicism were practically incompatible.
This is a fine work that does great honor to its subject. Charles Carroll was the last signer of the Declaration of Independence left alive, and when he died in 1832 at the age of ninety-three, he was widely lauded in obituaries. He was evidently an exemplary man in his era, and this biography does a superb job of negating key fallacies put out about him by previous histories. Well done.
Educated in France, Carroll had a highly sophisticated understanding of politics and democracy for his time. Associated with the “aristocratic” view, meaning a belief in aristocracy in its pure sense (rule by the “best”), he was not a “democrat" according to the current-day understanding of that term. He disdained the Jacobins in France, fearing rightly that their rule would lead to tyranny and mass murder. He often expressed pessimism about America, going so far as to say that—should the myriad “revolutionary committees” springing up around the time of the war of independence have any chance of becoming the de jure government—America would be better off returning to monarchy. He was surely correct. In fact, while claiming to be a staunch republican, Carroll was as deferential to the king as to the president when it came to assigning blame for abuses of power.
It was not the King of England who should be accused when tyranny arose under his reign, said Carroll. It was the monarch’s ministers. Similarly, the President of the United States should not be saddled with blame for tyranny in America’s government, but rather the members of the US Senate (of which Carroll himself was one). Little surprise, then, that Carroll (a Federalist) was strongly associated with the partisans of George Washington. He did not approve of Jefferson and worried that the third president’s affinity for the Jacobins in France threatened fundamental liberties in America. He even entertained the mild suspicion that Madison was an agent of Napoleon. Carroll's unabashed aristocratic convictions led to contempt for him among many of his contemporaries.
Carroll was an able orator who engaged in public debates on the fundamental political issues of the era, both in the press and in the Maryland legislature, which appointed him to the first US Senate after the ratification of the US Constitution. Carroll took controversial stands on his path to prominence, most notably opposing a bill to confiscate all British property in the American colonies during the war. He argued that this would have penalized all British property owners, even those who supported the American republicans or at least bore them no ill will. The American independence movement was first and foremost opposed to the excesses of the Crown government, Carroll argued, not ordinary Britons, and he noted that confiscatory policies would only lead to the tit-for-tat confiscation of American property in Great Britain. Carroll won the day, overcoming the cynicism of his peers (echoed by some historians) to the effect that—being one of the wealthiest men in America—he cared only for his personal riches, not the well-being of his compatriots. His family owned property in Britain, and Carroll was the wealthiest man in America.
Yet perhaps the most consistent tenet of Carroll’s political belief system was the sanctity of property. Property was a fundamental, God-given right, he claimed, and he never wavered from this throughout his long life. The fact that he owned many slaves (one estimate has the number at a thousand!) has generated the same kind of derision among some modern observers toward his beliefs as toward those of the more famous Founders, almost all of whom were also slave owners. But Carroll also chaired an abolitionist movement after retiring from public office, and he is on record as branding slavery as a manifest evil. John Adams, who did not own slaves, held Carroll in very high regard.
Given Carroll's intellect, sophistication and prominence, a question naturally arises: why is he not more famous among the Founding Fathers? He was, remarkably, the only founder to have personally met Edmund Burke, and while it is not known what the two men talked about, it is undeniable that Carroll admired and propagated Burke’s ideas. Carroll also knew Alexis de Tocqueville, who held the Marylander in high esteem. Carroll's exposure to Europe in his formative years should have propelled him to the highest ranks of the new leaders of America, to be memorialized throughout the republic, down through the ages.
The reason is likely well known to anyone who knows anything of Charles Carroll: he was a Catholic. And he wasn’t merely a Catholic in a formal sense; he was actively and openly Catholic. It may seem strange, then, for Carroll to have been not only so outspoken a proponent of American republicanism but also an apologist for the English Crown, both of which had hitherto shown relatively little toleration for Catholicism. The American Founders were suspicious and derisory of Catholics; the British Crown had a history of persecuting “Romans.” Yet Carroll was steadfast not only in his profession of Catholic faith but also in his belief that a constitutional American republic faithful to the “pure” liberties enshrined in the English constitution was the best way to guarantee religious liberty for Catholics. Bearing serious rhetorical abuse from Protestants in America for this opinion, he not only emerged victorious in debates but also gained a substantial public following.
Interestingly, Carroll readily obliged the formally Protestant founders of the republic in making use of his Catholicism for their political ends. Accepting appointment as the first ambassador to Canada, he attempted to convince Canadian Catholics that the American republic would be a better friend to them than the British monarchy. Although his diplomatic mission ultimately failed to make an ally of Canada against Britain (a very tall order, to be sure), it probably did no harm to future US-Canadian relations. Carroll was by all accounts a virtuous early member of America’s foreign service.
Nevertheless, the recognition Carroll received from his peers and the public at large for his intellect and fealty to principle were not enough to elevate him to the level of a Jefferson, Hamilton or Madison, and it has to be wondered whether Carroll was—additionally—excluded from contributing to the most critical debates of the times (e.g. Federalist Papers) on a par with the others precisely because of widespread suspicion generated by his religion. This book does not delve into that possibility. Taken a step further, did Carroll—in addition to enduring opposition from Protestants—encounter the enmity of Freemasons? Some might argue that the American independence movement was not simply a matter of monarchy versus republic, but also—given the adherence to Freemasonry of a significant number of the Founding Fathers—royal power versus Masonic power. Carroll would have been an outsider in both cases, since, in his time, Freemasonry and Roman Catholicism were practically incompatible.
This is a fine work that does great honor to its subject. Charles Carroll was the last signer of the Declaration of Independence left alive, and when he died in 1832 at the age of ninety-three, he was widely lauded in obituaries. He was evidently an exemplary man in his era, and this biography does a superb job of negating key fallacies put out about him by previous histories. Well done.
December 8, 2017
Informative, but uneven. Birzer is so preoccupied with finding what he wants to find in Carroll (i.e., an 18th century Russell Kirk) that he never seems to let the man speak for himself. He seizes on ideas that he finds interesting but never develops them.
January 1, 2020
This is another book in the series by scholars writing under the aegis of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), a conservative organization that, nonetheless, offers some sounder stuff on many occasions than do the so-called "conservative" groups and alleged "think tanks" that are really but a front for the extreme right-wing ideologues.
What the ISI is doing is to present very readable biographies of the lesser-known Founders of the Republic. Rather than full blown biographies -- which could easily take many hundreds of pages -- these do give an overview of each Founder's life but focus on the contributions and experiences they underwent in the crucial years from the 1760s through the period around 1800-1810, surely the formative years of both the Revolution and of the new federal government.
This book treats of the life of Charles Carroll, the only Catholic among the Founders. Because of his faith, he was not allowed to hold any public office for a good part of his life in his native state of Maryland, which in the 18th century was one of the most virulently anti-Catholic of all of the colonies.
There were a couple of reasons for this bigotry towards Roman Catholics.
First, most of the European colonists were of British ancestry, and this meant that they had an ingrained prejudice and fear of Catholics. Ever since Henry VIII broke from Rome because of his wishes to divorce one wife in order to take another, England and France had been frequently in opposition for religious and nation-state reasons. All priests, for instance, were seen as being effectively "agents for and of Rome" and, thus, working to undermine both the Protestant monarchy in England and the relatively new Angllican faith.
Second, it was not under 1763 that Britain gained the dominant position in the New World with the defeat of France in what we remember as the French and Indian War. The colonists had bitter memories of the French encouraging some of the Native peoples to raid English settlers even during times of relative peace, and even though after 1763 the French had been effectively banished to the north in Canada, there was the continued suspicion that French agents -- perhaps posing as fur merchants -- were still working their mischief in the nearby frontier of the sparsely inhabited West.
Reading about Carroll, and his treatment by his neighbors and peers, is a reminder of how long old prejudices can linger even in the face of evidence to the contrary. It is also a lesson in how quickly these prejudices can actually fade when their "beliefs" are countered by factual evidence, such as Carroll's strong efforts on behalf of colonial resistance to the British acts that began shortly after the peace treaty of 1763.
Like many of the Founders, he was eloquent in speech as well as in writing, and -- again like many of the others -- he frequently published letters and essays in the press, both making his own case as well as responding to critiques from opponents.
He was an early supporter of the new Constitution, too (remember, the first national government adopted during the revolutionary war was the Confederacy established under the Articles of Confederation), and went on to become a strong Federalist.
He was a very principled man whose ethics and views were widely admired by his compatriots who are better remembered by us today, including Washington, Jefferson, and John Adams.
This book, as well as the others in this series by ISI, are also a good way to refresh our understanding of those foundational years. Looking back, we tend to think of the Revolution and the emergence of the United States as inevitable when, in fact, both were nothing of the kind. Just like today, there was a great divergence in opinion as to what should be done, first in the matter of how best to respond to and resist British efforts to raise taxes and control rebellion, and then how to form a wise and sound national government.
People of great principle could be found on both sides, and their exchanges of opinion were often pointed and personal.
Given our own contemporary dangers in maintaining the Republic they bequeathed us, I recommend that more people take some time to study these formative years. We need to recapture the hopes, ethics, and warnings about demagogues and weak democracies if we are to change the sad downward trajectory of our own day.
What the ISI is doing is to present very readable biographies of the lesser-known Founders of the Republic. Rather than full blown biographies -- which could easily take many hundreds of pages -- these do give an overview of each Founder's life but focus on the contributions and experiences they underwent in the crucial years from the 1760s through the period around 1800-1810, surely the formative years of both the Revolution and of the new federal government.
This book treats of the life of Charles Carroll, the only Catholic among the Founders. Because of his faith, he was not allowed to hold any public office for a good part of his life in his native state of Maryland, which in the 18th century was one of the most virulently anti-Catholic of all of the colonies.
There were a couple of reasons for this bigotry towards Roman Catholics.
First, most of the European colonists were of British ancestry, and this meant that they had an ingrained prejudice and fear of Catholics. Ever since Henry VIII broke from Rome because of his wishes to divorce one wife in order to take another, England and France had been frequently in opposition for religious and nation-state reasons. All priests, for instance, were seen as being effectively "agents for and of Rome" and, thus, working to undermine both the Protestant monarchy in England and the relatively new Angllican faith.
Second, it was not under 1763 that Britain gained the dominant position in the New World with the defeat of France in what we remember as the French and Indian War. The colonists had bitter memories of the French encouraging some of the Native peoples to raid English settlers even during times of relative peace, and even though after 1763 the French had been effectively banished to the north in Canada, there was the continued suspicion that French agents -- perhaps posing as fur merchants -- were still working their mischief in the nearby frontier of the sparsely inhabited West.
Reading about Carroll, and his treatment by his neighbors and peers, is a reminder of how long old prejudices can linger even in the face of evidence to the contrary. It is also a lesson in how quickly these prejudices can actually fade when their "beliefs" are countered by factual evidence, such as Carroll's strong efforts on behalf of colonial resistance to the British acts that began shortly after the peace treaty of 1763.
Like many of the Founders, he was eloquent in speech as well as in writing, and -- again like many of the others -- he frequently published letters and essays in the press, both making his own case as well as responding to critiques from opponents.
He was an early supporter of the new Constitution, too (remember, the first national government adopted during the revolutionary war was the Confederacy established under the Articles of Confederation), and went on to become a strong Federalist.
He was a very principled man whose ethics and views were widely admired by his compatriots who are better remembered by us today, including Washington, Jefferson, and John Adams.
This book, as well as the others in this series by ISI, are also a good way to refresh our understanding of those foundational years. Looking back, we tend to think of the Revolution and the emergence of the United States as inevitable when, in fact, both were nothing of the kind. Just like today, there was a great divergence in opinion as to what should be done, first in the matter of how best to respond to and resist British efforts to raise taxes and control rebellion, and then how to form a wise and sound national government.
People of great principle could be found on both sides, and their exchanges of opinion were often pointed and personal.
Given our own contemporary dangers in maintaining the Republic they bequeathed us, I recommend that more people take some time to study these formative years. We need to recapture the hopes, ethics, and warnings about demagogues and weak democracies if we are to change the sad downward trajectory of our own day.
January 6, 2023
Bradley Birzer's "American Cicero" is a notable book. Birzer has given us a short, readable biography of Charles Carroll, one of America's least remembered, and most esteemed founders.
Carroll, the bastard son of a wealthy, transplanted Irish planter, was groomed from childhood to play a prominent role in his home of Maryland, as well as on the national stage. At the age of eleven, Carroll was sent to France, to begin formal training with the Jesuit fathers at the College of St. Omer. Following six rigorous years, studying Greek, Latin, and the classics, Carroll enrolled at the College of Rheims and, eventually, the Ecole Louis-le-Grand, where he took his M.A. in philosophy. Carroll was equally conversant with the Spanish Thomists and with Montesquieu's "Spirit of the Laws."
Such academic endeavors were merely prelude. Carroll next commenced efforts to study the law. After intensive training in French civil law, Carroll repaired to England, where he spent six years reading the common law. There he became familiar with Blackstone and Hume, and made the personal acquaintance of William Graves and Edmund Burke, the great Anglo-Irish statesman.
After seventeen years abroad, Carroll returned to Maryland in 1765; he was at once recognized by his father as his heir, and he assumed the role of planter and a partner in his father's Baltimore Iron Works.
The tumult of the times did not allow Carroll serenity or quiescence. Almost immediately, the young man became embroiled in controversies surrounding the Stamp Act and the Declaratory Act. As a result, Carroll began to seriously ponder the nature of citizenship and political obligation.
By 1773, Carroll of Carrollton had adopted the nom de plume "First Citizen" and was writing a series of grounded responses in reaction to the deprivations of Maryland's proprietary government. Carroll harkened back to Anglo-Saxon precedent to question the legitimacy of the oppressive fees imposed by the Maryland court. Passions unleased by the Stamp Act did not abate, and Carroll's response was intense.
Marylanders took note of the arguments presented by the "First Citizen." Birzer cogently weaves the diverse threads of Carroll's political life into a seamless tapestry. In the wake of the troubles precipitated by the proprietary government, Carroll's civic engagement became all consuming. First, Carroll played an integral part in the extralegal Maryland Conventions; the 1774 gatherings, which some historians consider to be the seedbed of the revolution. Next, along with Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Chase, Carroll embarked on a diplomatic mission to Canada, on behalf of the nascent colonies. Finally, upon his return home, Carroll briefly sat at the Maryland Convention prior to traveling to Philadelphia to become a signatory of the Declaration of Independence.
Birzer's treatment of the revolutionary era focuses on Carroll's principled leadership at home. Carroll strived to ensure that Maryland would become a balanced republic, and not fall victim to the whims of a mob. In addition, he fought to maintain a stable currency, backed by specie. And, lastly, Carroll sought to preserve legal norms for all those residing within Maryland's borders. Along the way, Carroll remained a staunch ally of Washington, and an implacable foe of Chase.
Birzer notes that Carroll's post-revolutionary actions were constrained by his desire to remain in Maryland. Aside from his brief service as a Maryland senator under the U.S. Constitution, Carroll mostly absented himself from the national scene. He vociferously warned his fellow Americans of the dangers posed by Jacobinism, and he called for the eventual abolition of slavery. However, at heart he sought no more than to be a Maryland planter and partisan of Right Reason.
What is Carroll's Legacy? Birzer applies the appellation "Last Roman' to Charles Carroll. After the passing of Jefferson and Adams, Carroll was the lone surviving signer of the Declaration. Birzer poignantly tells us that Carroll's death was as 'stoic and meaningful' as was his life, a man divinely inspired to do good.
Carroll, the bastard son of a wealthy, transplanted Irish planter, was groomed from childhood to play a prominent role in his home of Maryland, as well as on the national stage. At the age of eleven, Carroll was sent to France, to begin formal training with the Jesuit fathers at the College of St. Omer. Following six rigorous years, studying Greek, Latin, and the classics, Carroll enrolled at the College of Rheims and, eventually, the Ecole Louis-le-Grand, where he took his M.A. in philosophy. Carroll was equally conversant with the Spanish Thomists and with Montesquieu's "Spirit of the Laws."
Such academic endeavors were merely prelude. Carroll next commenced efforts to study the law. After intensive training in French civil law, Carroll repaired to England, where he spent six years reading the common law. There he became familiar with Blackstone and Hume, and made the personal acquaintance of William Graves and Edmund Burke, the great Anglo-Irish statesman.
After seventeen years abroad, Carroll returned to Maryland in 1765; he was at once recognized by his father as his heir, and he assumed the role of planter and a partner in his father's Baltimore Iron Works.
The tumult of the times did not allow Carroll serenity or quiescence. Almost immediately, the young man became embroiled in controversies surrounding the Stamp Act and the Declaratory Act. As a result, Carroll began to seriously ponder the nature of citizenship and political obligation.
By 1773, Carroll of Carrollton had adopted the nom de plume "First Citizen" and was writing a series of grounded responses in reaction to the deprivations of Maryland's proprietary government. Carroll harkened back to Anglo-Saxon precedent to question the legitimacy of the oppressive fees imposed by the Maryland court. Passions unleased by the Stamp Act did not abate, and Carroll's response was intense.
Marylanders took note of the arguments presented by the "First Citizen." Birzer cogently weaves the diverse threads of Carroll's political life into a seamless tapestry. In the wake of the troubles precipitated by the proprietary government, Carroll's civic engagement became all consuming. First, Carroll played an integral part in the extralegal Maryland Conventions; the 1774 gatherings, which some historians consider to be the seedbed of the revolution. Next, along with Benjamin Franklin and Samuel Chase, Carroll embarked on a diplomatic mission to Canada, on behalf of the nascent colonies. Finally, upon his return home, Carroll briefly sat at the Maryland Convention prior to traveling to Philadelphia to become a signatory of the Declaration of Independence.
Birzer's treatment of the revolutionary era focuses on Carroll's principled leadership at home. Carroll strived to ensure that Maryland would become a balanced republic, and not fall victim to the whims of a mob. In addition, he fought to maintain a stable currency, backed by specie. And, lastly, Carroll sought to preserve legal norms for all those residing within Maryland's borders. Along the way, Carroll remained a staunch ally of Washington, and an implacable foe of Chase.
Birzer notes that Carroll's post-revolutionary actions were constrained by his desire to remain in Maryland. Aside from his brief service as a Maryland senator under the U.S. Constitution, Carroll mostly absented himself from the national scene. He vociferously warned his fellow Americans of the dangers posed by Jacobinism, and he called for the eventual abolition of slavery. However, at heart he sought no more than to be a Maryland planter and partisan of Right Reason.
What is Carroll's Legacy? Birzer applies the appellation "Last Roman' to Charles Carroll. After the passing of Jefferson and Adams, Carroll was the lone surviving signer of the Declaration. Birzer poignantly tells us that Carroll's death was as 'stoic and meaningful' as was his life, a man divinely inspired to do good.
June 16, 2025
As a Catholic native and resident of Carroll County, Maryland, I found this overview of Charles Carroll's life and diverse philosophical inspirations quite fascinating. I have long had an interest in the recusant experience in the British Isles and across the wider British Empire, and the Carroll family stands at the crossroads of that civilization and the rise of a new continental republican empire in America. Including his own religious and philosophical assessments, the author explores Carroll's struggle to find sure footing, as the descendent of exiled Gaelic nobles in an Anglocentric social sphere which branded him an outcast for his Catholic identity. This was a consistent thread throughout his long life, but by the end of it, though still a source of controversy, he had managed to carve out a prosperous niche for himself in a new world as one of the richest men in the country and became revered as the last of the revolutionary patriarchs. I find it interesting how his worldview held within it many paradoxes, such as his simultaneous embrace and rejection of the legacy of the Glorious Revolution, and his defense of aristocratic prerogative while disassociating himself from hereditary kingship. A complex man in complex times, for whom oaths had many caveats, he exhibited a competitive edge, revealing the intellect and instinct to make alliances with many of his contemporaries (including but not limited to George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and even the anti-Catholic John Adams) and verbally keep pace with his enemies which enabled him to rise within his colonial community and gradually overturn the religious restrictions in the newly reborn state. Though he started out as primarily a Catholic by family tradition (albeit a practicing one), Charles Carroll, like the famous Irish statesman Daniel O'Connell, grew more devoutly religious in his later years, and his Catholic faith remained something he was unwilling to part with throughout the course of his life, no matter how many other shifts of allegiance and perspective occurred and how many obstacles were placed in his path. Like his cousin Bishop John Carroll, he remains a foundational figure for American Catholics. He would no doubt have been amazed to look into the future and see an American pope!
April 13, 2018
Glad a bio of Charles Carroll exists and that it is simply enough written. Though, I wish it were less narrowly and carefully written from correspondences. Some research into the times and place for broader perspective would have been appreciated.A broader view of the influence of Carroll's public policies beyond Maryland would have been desirable. The interaction between Carroll and the other founders was minimally treated, John Adams gets two sentences, Hamilton a little more. John Carroll is sadly barely mentioned here though he indubitably played a significant part. Some topics get developed too fast, like the tender laws. A good skeleton for a second book.
May 19, 2024
When I bought this book two years ago, I didn’t think I would ever end up reading it. I bought the book purely based on the title, because I love Cicero. I read the intro the other week as I was scouring my book shelves looking for something to read; I was hooked.
The book isn’t a pure biography, focusing more on the thoughts and ideas of Carroll. His thoughts on the dangers of democracy are intriguing and its almost a shame Carroll was sidelined to the extent he was at Americas founding. All in all I was glad I read the book and it held my interest throughout.
The book isn’t a pure biography, focusing more on the thoughts and ideas of Carroll. His thoughts on the dangers of democracy are intriguing and its almost a shame Carroll was sidelined to the extent he was at Americas founding. All in all I was glad I read the book and it held my interest throughout.
April 9, 2021
It was a surprisingly quick and easy read.
March 30, 2025
For those unfamiliar, it's more of a review of the thinking and opinions of Charles Carroll than a biography.
May 26, 2015
In extremely readable yet intelligent fashion, Birzer outlines the life, philosophies, and motivations of a somewhat-forgotten Founding Father, Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Carroll, the cousin of America's first bishop, John Carroll, was the only Catholic signatory of the Declaration of Independence as well as the longest-surviving, having died in 1832.
Birzer covers Carroll's whole life, from his youth in Maryland to his sixteen years in France and England receiving his education from the Jesuits, to his time as an ideas-man in Maryland in pre-Revolution times through his service in the Continental Congress, to his later years out of public service. The book is brisk, covering a 95-year-long life in just over 200 pages, but Birzer does a wonderful job covering the important details but also telling a fascinating narrative.
In the book, Carroll comes across as a learned man, dedicated to the Republic, desiring virtuous action from his home country. Advocating independence as early as 1765, Carroll loved America even though, as a Catholic, he was severely disenfranchised. Unable to vote pre-1776, Carroll engaged in public newspaper debates, usually winning and causing his opponent to resort to nasty ad hominem attacks.
Charles Carroll provides a model for civic engagement for Catholics in the United States today. Both now and then, faithful Catholics are looked on with suspicion and are pushed toward the fringes of public debate. Carroll's patriotism and dedication to his cause through diligent, intelligent, and passionate engagement in tradition and virtue show a path people can follow today. I recommend this biography for anyone interested in Western culture, the American Revolution, Catholics in the United States, or civic engagement.
Birzer covers Carroll's whole life, from his youth in Maryland to his sixteen years in France and England receiving his education from the Jesuits, to his time as an ideas-man in Maryland in pre-Revolution times through his service in the Continental Congress, to his later years out of public service. The book is brisk, covering a 95-year-long life in just over 200 pages, but Birzer does a wonderful job covering the important details but also telling a fascinating narrative.
In the book, Carroll comes across as a learned man, dedicated to the Republic, desiring virtuous action from his home country. Advocating independence as early as 1765, Carroll loved America even though, as a Catholic, he was severely disenfranchised. Unable to vote pre-1776, Carroll engaged in public newspaper debates, usually winning and causing his opponent to resort to nasty ad hominem attacks.
Charles Carroll provides a model for civic engagement for Catholics in the United States today. Both now and then, faithful Catholics are looked on with suspicion and are pushed toward the fringes of public debate. Carroll's patriotism and dedication to his cause through diligent, intelligent, and passionate engagement in tradition and virtue show a path people can follow today. I recommend this biography for anyone interested in Western culture, the American Revolution, Catholics in the United States, or civic engagement.
Currently reading
April 20, 2010Early into the story of one of the Declaration of Independence signers. So far not sure how interesting his life will be but the overall period is indeed fascinating. Stay tuned.
Read
May 30, 2012side by side w/ a Dulaney bio, any recc?
January 27, 2015
love the book want to continue series
April 25, 2017
Overall, a good read on Carroll's political philosophy. There were some stylistic things I really didn't like (for example, referring to the book's subject by his first name), but minor. It was a well-researched look into the last surviving signer of the Declaration and an important, but forgotten, founder.
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