You may come up a long straight aisle of locust trees, or you may wind through Gothic arches of elms along a skilfully engineered road which picks its way through the estate for a half-mile or more. Either course will bring you before a wide low house of yellow brick, with green blinds and white woodwork and English ivy. Directly ahead of you, across the circle of the driveway, the square main section of the house, capped by a tower, rises above a bright portico. To left and right the house throws out long extensions of even height, terminating in wings set endwise to you, like double-faces in the game of dominoes. Your first impression will be one of unusual size, your next of flatly rectangular simplicity. Your eye will be caught momentarily by a cross-tipped bell-tower of the right wing, where Charles Carroll built the only private chapel in America because England would not let him worship in peace. You will know that you have never seen such a house in America, and you will probably not suspect that it is a monument to several great Americans.
A lad of four or five is playing on the grass circle of the driveway before the great house. The undulating Maryland countryside is not half as absorbing as the game in hand, though his great-grandfather was governor of all those miles. If you were to ask him the way to Annapolis he would probably indicate the double file of venerable trees which stand sentinel along the tapering avenue, smile courteously if you thanked him, and then scurry off on an important engagement. He wouldn’t tell you that in his grandfather’s great-grandfather’s day Annapolis was the national capital, nor that that gentleman was one of the bold spirits who made a national capital possible.
There is no reason why he should know of it, or be interested. If, with your heavy wisdom, and your rhapsodies on the pride of race, and your generally affable tourist behavior you succeed in alarming the lad until he retreats to the shelter of the portico, know, stranger, that you have aroused the suspicions of Charles Carroll, the Ninth in America, and the seventh heir of that name to Doughoregan Manor.
Ancestors can be lived up to or lived down, and there is no particular point or prowess in bragging about them. To me there is glorious romance in the fact that this youngster of five is romping on the ground that was granted to his ancestor by a King of England. Perhaps it is glorious and romantic because it is fact, but I prefer to believe that the real reason may be found in a verse in the book of Exodus, which reads:
“Honor thy father and thy mother.”
They were worth honoring; they have been duly honored even unto the eighth and ninth generations.
Charles Carroll the First, like many another Irishman since, went west. He came to Baltimore in 1688 with the ink hardly sanded on his commission as attorney-general of Maryland. As a Roman Catholic he found the commission suddenly nullified by revolution in England, and it was four years before a Royal government was set up in the colony restoring and protecting its proprietary rights. His wife had died childless during that period, and he married again. Of ten children of his second wife, the eldest died on the voyage home from school in Europe. Back at St. Omer’s in French Flanders he left a younger brother, Charles Carroll the Second, and presently the plodding ships bore back to him the news of Henry’s death and the heritage of responsibility and affection which devolved upon him. In 1723 he came back to his own people, married in his turn, and in 1737 Mistress Elizabeth Brooke Carroll bore him a son. The precedent for the name Charles was already strong, Charles was a good name, and so was christened Charles Carroll the Third.
In the archives of the State Department at Washington you will find his signature. It is hidden from the light, but reproductions of it and the pledge to which it is attached have already made it familiar to every American. The story runs that in the congress at Philadelphia when the Declaration of Independence was presented, John Hancock turned to Carroll and offering him a quill, asked “Will you sign?”
“Most willingly,” was the reply. And he signed, in an easy clear hand, with less flourish, perhaps, than Franklin’s or Hancock’s, but no less sincerity—and Carroll, the richest man in America, had more to lose than either.
“There goes two millions with the dash of a pen!” a bystander remarked. “Oh, Carroll, you will get off,” said another. “There are so many Charles Carrolls.” At which Charles Carroll Third took the pen and jabbed “of Carrollton” under his signature, that George Third of England might make no mistake and punish any other of the same name. There is some cherry-tree flavor in the story, and precious historians maintain that he invariably signed his full title; but, if it can accomplish by example what the cherry-tree fable has accomplished, let it stand.