Charles Carroll and His Role

Charles Carroll and His Role in the Declaration of Independence Charles Carroll was born into a wealthy Roman Catholic family in Annapolis Maryland on September 19, 1737. Charles Carroll was sent to school at the Jesuits at Bohemia on Harmon's Manor in Maryland at the age of 10 years. One of his fellow students was his cousin, John Carroll, who was later Archbishop of Baltimore. The following year, 1748, they both crossed the ocean to the Jesuit College at St.-Omer in French Flanders, where Charles remained for 6 years.

After a year at the college of the Jesuits at Reims, Carroll entered the College Louis le Grand at Paris. In 1753, Carroll went to Bourges to study civil law where he remained for a year and then returned to Paris until 1757. In this year he took apartments in the Temple, London, where he studied law for several years. In later days he spoke in highest praise of the training he received at St.-Omer and the College Louis le Grand.

To the former he owed his deep conviction of religious truth, and to the latter his critical ability, his literary style, and the basis for the breadth of knowledge, which made him an invaluable citizen (Hanley 145). Upon his return to America, in 1765, the estate of Carrollton in Frederick County, Maryland, was given him and later he became known as Charles Carroll of Carrollton, to distinguish him from his father Charles Carroll of Annapolis. On June 5, 1768, Charles Carroll married his cousin Mary Darnall, who died in 1782.

They had seven children, four of whom died in youth. One of his daughters married Richard Caton, an Englishman, and another married the distinguished statesman from South Carolina, Robert Goodloe Harper. In the difficulties with the mother country, Carroll aggressively defended the position taken by the colonies. In 1770, Governor Eden imposed certain fees upon the colonists. As fees were treated as taxes, this was vigorously opposed as violating the right of the people to tax themselves.

The jurist Daniel Dulaney defended the position of the Government in a series of articles in the "Maryland Gazette" under the signature Antillon. Carroll took up the debate as a champion of popular rights, maintaining that fees were taxes and that taxes should not be levied upon the people except by the consent of their representatives. He wrote four articles and the popular sentiment was decidedly with him. This controversy established Carroll's reputation as a debater and a scholar.

In 1774, Carroll was elected with six others by the citizens of Anne Arundel County and of Annapolis, with full power to represent them in the provincial convention. Catholics had been disfranchised and declared ineligible to a seat in the Assembly, but by this act the prejudice against them was swept away. Carroll was from this time for a period of 27 years called to important public service in behalf of the colony and for the general government.

In December of this year, he was appointed a member of a Provincial Committee of Correspondence. He was a member of the Maryland Convention of 1775, which adopted the "Association of the Freemen of Maryland" and became the charter of the colony until the adoption of the Maryland constitution in 1776. The Association was pledged to an armed resistance to Great Britain. He was appointed by the convention one of a committee of nine to consider the ways and means to put the province in the best state of defense (McDermott 28).

On September 12, 1775, the citizens of Anne Arundel County and the city of Annapolis appointed a Committee of Observation for the town and county of which Carroll was a member. At this meeting, he was elected one of the deputies to represent the county in the State Convention for 1 year, and he was selected with six others to license suits in the county for the same period.

The Colonial Convention on October 13 appointed Charles Carroll chairman of a committee of five to devise ways and means to promote the manufacture of saltpetre. On January 11, 1776, the Maryland Convention instructed the Maryland delegates to the Continental Congress to disavow all design in the colonies for independence. This position was strenuously opposed by Carroll, who at this time advocated independence (Hanley 152). On July 19, Carroll was appointed on the Board of War, which had charge of all the executive duties of the military department, subject to the direction of Congress.

In the fall of 1777, the Board of War was enlarged and some of Washington's enemies were made members. Out of this new membership the Conway Cabal developed, the objects of which were defeated by Carroll, Morris, and Duer. Charles Carroll was appointed one of two delegates from Annapolis to the Colonial Convention, which was to adopt a constitution for Maryland. Carroll was selected as one of the seven members to draw up a constitution. He was responsible for the distinctive part of the constitution, the method of choosing senators.

The senate was to be composed of 15 members, who were to be selected by a body of 40 electors, 2 from each county, and 1 each from Baltimore and Annapolis. In the fall of 1778, Carroll resigned his seat in Congress and returned to Maryland to become a.