What circumstances carried this patriot, whom we left a moment ago as a baby, to the front rank of his country’s champions? The best of schooling then was to be had abroad. An ardent father and mother put aside their fierce attachment to their only child in order that he might become a proper heir to the estate which Charles Carroll the Second was accumulating. Just as the young Pinckneys and Rutledges and Middletons of Charleston in pre-Revolutionary days went to the mother country for their cultural training, so the youths of the middle states whose families could afford the excursion were dispatched to France, or England, or Flanders. One day in 1748 saw Charles Carroll, a boy of eleven, take ship with his cousin John for Europe. What pangs his mother experienced at the loss of her only chick are faintly reflected in a passage from the correspondence between the two: “You are always at heart my dear Charley and I have never tired of asking your papa questions about you. I daily pray to God to grant you his grace above all things, and to take you under his protection.” “With your mother,” his father wrote in 1753, “I shall be glad to have your likeness in the compass of 15 inches by 12”—and directed him to have the specified portrait done by a good painter. But the mother was not well, and in 1761, when the baby who had sailed away was a grown man, a student of Law in the Temple in London, and nearly ready to return to the warmth of his mother’s adoration, she died.
Such a beau as he would have made her! Heredity gave him an active mind and bearing of real charm, and just as the Manor house back in Maryland took on through the years extensions and embellishments which multiply its effect of useful luxury, so each addition to Charles Carroll’s intellect only seemed to make him more companionable and genuinely attractive. Even during his student period his sensitive spirit was not altogether proof against affairs of the heart, and if it had not been for her meddlesome sister, Miss Louisa Baker would have gone back to Maryland as his bride, as mistress over 68,000 acres. Instead, the catch of the commonwealth returned at twenty-nine under a cloak of melancholy from the shelter of which he wrote, dourly, “Matrimony is at present but little the subject of my thoughts.”
Persons familiar with the laws of gravity and more particularly with the physics of the rebounding heart will not be surprised to learn that within a few months he was again engaged to be married, this time to Miss Rachel Cooke. He wrote to London for her trousseau—such intimate finery as he hardly dared describe, things to turn even the Babylonian fiancée of today as green with envy as the Doughoregan meadows. But the Brussels lace was not for her, for Rachel Cooke fell ill of a fever, and died, and her miniature and a lock of her tresses were hidden away in a secret partition of Charles Carroll’s writing desk.
Undiscouraged, he found serious distraction in the fermenting affairs of the colonies. From provincial grievances such as his father had related from time to time in his letters dwelling on the oppression of the rights of Catholics, the problems of the colonists had overflowed greater areas. Like a flood swelling over the landscape, the minor swirls of flow and eddy were merged into a common misfortune of drab color and threatening proportions. It was Charles Carroll’s first chance for constructive citizenship. At the writing-desk where Rachel’s miniature lay hidden he wrote a program of letters which may be said to constitute the brief for independence. And by the time his heart had healed, and he had fallen in love with Miss Mary Darnell, whom he preferred, he said, “to all the women I have ever seen, even to Louisa,” and had married her, he was caught in the flood himself. There was no turning back even if he wanted to—and he did not want to turn back.
His town house at Annapolis and the manor of Doughoregan (it is pronounced Dooráygan, and it means the house of the king, because a thousand years or so ago the O’Carrolls were Irish kings) opened their doors with special welcome to those who were prepared to resist the oppression of a king. “A warm, firm, zealous supporter of the rights of America, in whose cause he has hazarded his all,” wrote John Adams, Carroll’s “all” at that time yielding an income of some ten thousand pounds a year. When, in 1773, an outraged importer set fire to his cargo of taxed tea in Annapolis, Charles Carroll was his chief legal counsel. When the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia the next year, he was a member. When the Congress sent a delegation to Canada to enlist support for the Revolution, it seized upon his French training as an asset in Charles Carroll, as it chose Benjamin Franklin for his practical judgment, Father John Carroll (later the first Archbishop of Baltimore) for his ecclesiastical influence, and Samuel Chase for his legal ability. The mission failed; Canada would not help; we must work alone. So to indicate that he welcomed the opportunity Charles Carroll signed the Declaration of Independence.
Years later he wrote this summary of his career:
“On the breaking out of the Revolution I took a decided part in the support of the rights of this country; was elected a member of the Committee of Safety established by the Legislature; was a member of the Convention which formed the Constitution of the State. The Journals of Congress show how long I was a member of that body during the Revolution. With Dr. Franklin and Mr. Samuel Chase I was appointed a Commissioner to Canada. I was elected a member of the Senate at the first session of Congress under the present Confederation.... The mode of choosing the Senate was suggested by me....”
That was all he found to write. It ought to be enough to qualify him for the emphasis which, in the eminent line of Charles Carrolls, we have placed upon him. But if, after you have followed him through the Revolution, you inquire just what connection the details of his career have with Doughoregan Manor, listen to a short recital of what he was too modest to write.
In 1780 his father, Charles the Second, was standing on the veranda of his Annapolis house and peering through a spy-glass at a sail in the Bay. He made a misstep, pitched heavily from the porch, and was killed. Mary Darnell Carroll, his daughter-in-law, saw him fall. Her health, already taxed by her devotion to Mrs. Carroll II during her last illness, gave way at “Breakneck” Carroll’s tragic death, and she died within a fortnight, leaving to her husband a son and two daughters. The son, of course, was Charles Carroll the Fourth. The Signer saw him go to Liége to school, return, as his father had returned before him, the idol of a gay countryside, court Nellie Custis at Mount Vernon, marry Harriet Chew of Cliveden, and rejoice with pride at the advent in 1801 of Charles Carroll the Fifth.
Charles the Fourth, of Homewood, has been described by a contemporary as follows: “Nothing in Greek art surpasses the perfect symmetry of his figure.” No less a person than Washington had asked Harriet Chew to remain in his presence while he sat for his portrait to Gilbert Stuart in order that his own face might “wear its most agreeable expression.” Therefore if the baby Charles the Fifth was not handsome it was neither the fault of his parents nor of the distinguished grandfather who immediately became his devoted slave.