CARROLL, CHARLES (1737-1832), American political leader, of Irish ancestry, was born at Annapolis, Maryland, on the 19th of September 1737. He was educated abroad in French Jesuit colleges, studied law at Bourges, Paris and London, and in February 1765 returned to Maryland, where an estate known as “Carrollton,” in Frederick county, was settled upon him; he always signed his name as “Charles Carroll of Carrollton.” Before and during the War of Independence, he was a whig or patriot leader, and as such was naturally a member of the various local and provincial extra-legal bodies—committees of correspondence, committees of observation, council of safety, provincial convention (1774-1776) and constitutional convention (1776). From 1777 until 1800 he was a member of the Maryland senate. In April-June 1776 he, with Samuel Chase and Benjamin Franklin, was a member of the commission fruitlessly sent by the continental congress to Canada for the purpose of persuading the Canadians to join the thirteen revolting colonies. From 1776 to 1779 he sat in the continental congress, rendering important services as a member of the board of war, and signing on the 2nd of August 1776 the Declaration of Independence, though he had not been elected until the day on which that document was adopted. He out-lived all of the other signers. He was a member of the United States Senate from 1789 to 1792. From 1801 until his death, at Baltimore, on the 14th of November 1832, he lived in retirement, his last public act being the formal ceremony of starting the construction of the Baltimore and Ohio railway (July 4, 1828). In politics, after the formation of parties, he was a staunch Federalist. Of unusual ability, high character and great wealth, he exercised a powerful influence, particularly among his co-religionists of the Roman Catholic faith, and he used it to secure the independence of the colonies and to establish a stable central government.
See the Life by Kate Mason Rowland (1898).
CARROLL, JOHN (1735-1815), American Roman Catholic prelate, was born at Upper Marlborough, Prince George’s county, Maryland, on the 8th of January 1735, the son of wealthy Catholic parents and a cousin of Charles Carroll “of Carrollton.” He was educated at St Omer’s in Flanders, becoming a novitiate in the Society of Jesus in 1753, and then at the Jesuit college in Liège, being ordained priest in 1769 and becoming professor of philosophy and theology. In 1771 he became a professed father of the Society of Jesus and professor at Bruges. As tutor to the son of Lord Stourton, he travelled through Europe in 1772-1773. After the papal brief of the 21st of July 1773 suppressed the Society of Jesus, he accompanied its English members then in Flanders to England. In 1774 he returned to America, and set to work at a mission at Rock Creek, Montgomery county, Maryland, where his mother lived. He shared the feeling for independence growing among the American colonists, foreseeing that it would mean greater religious freedom. In 1776, at the request of the continental congress, he accompanied Benjamin Franklin, Charles Carroll and Samuel Chase on their mission to secure the aid or neutrality of the French-Canadians, and though unsuccessful it gained for him the friendship of Franklin. In 1783 he took a prominent part in the petition to Rome to take the control of the American church away from London; and on Franklin’s recommendation, Carroll was named prefect apostolic, the American church being recognized as a distinct body in a decree issued by Cardinal Antonelli on the 9th of June 1784. In the summer of 1785 he began his visitations; in 1786 he induced the general chapter to authorize a Catholic seminary (now Georgetown University); and at the same session it was voted that the condition of the church required a bishop, accountable directly to the pope (and not to the Congregation of the Propaganda) and chosen by the American clergy. Consent to this course was given by Antonelli in a letter of the 12th of July 1788. The clergy met at Whitemarsh, Maryland, and Baltimore was adopted as the episcopal seat, Carroll being chosen as bishop; and on the 6th of November 1789 Pius VI. issued a bull to that effect, Carroll being consecrated at Lulworth Castle, England, on the 15th of August 1790.
On his return from England the bishop saw Georgetown College completed (1791), thanks to moneys he had received from English Catholics. His first synod met on the 7th of November 1791; and on the 16th he issued the “Circular on Christian Marriage,” which attacked marriage by any save “lawful pastors of our church.” In 1795 the Rev. Leonard Neale (1746-1817) was appointed his coadjutor. In 1799, after the death of Washington, Bishop Carroll bade his clergy hold the 22nd of February 1800 as a day of mourning, and on that day delivered in his pro-cathedral a memorial discourse which attracted much attention. Already in 1802 he was pressing for the creation of new sees in his diocese, and the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 gave added weight to this request; in September 1805 the Propaganda made him administrator apostolic of the diocese of New Orleans, to which he appointed John Olivier as vicar general; and in 1808 Pius VII. divided Carroll’s great diocese into four sees, Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Bardstown (Kentucky), suffragan to the metropolitanate of Baltimore, of which Carroll actually became archbishop by the assumption of the long delayed pallium on the 18th of August 1811, having consecrated three suffragans in the autumn of 1810. In 1811 ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the Danish and Dutch West Indies was bestowed upon him. Carroll was now an old man, and the shock of the war of 1812, which as a staunch Federalist he had opposed until its actual declaration, together with the action of the Holy See in appointing to the sees of Philadelphia and New York other candidates than those of his recommendation, weighed on his mind. He died in Georgetown on the 3rd of December 1815. He may well be reckoned the greatest figure in the Roman Catholic Church of the United States. His position in the church had never been easy, partly because he had been a prominent member of the Society of Jesus. The great size of his diocese had made it unwieldy; and his struggle to secure the independence of the American church had been a difficult one. As a defender of papal and episcopal authority he had, especially in Philadelphia and Baltimore, to deal with churches whose trustees insisted that they and their parishes alone could choose priests, that bishop or prefect could not object to their choice. Akin to this difficulty was the desire of Catholics of different nationalities to have separate churches, a desire often created or encouraged by intriguing and ambitious priests. Besides these and other internal annoyances, Carroll had to meet the deep-seated distrust of his church in communities settled almost exclusively by Protestants.
See John Gilmary Shea, History of the Catholic Church in the United States, vol. ii. (1763-1815), (Akron and New York, 1888); and Daniel Brent, Biographical Sketch of the Most Rev. John Carroll, First Archbishop of Baltimore, with Select Portions of His Writings, edited by John Carroll Brent (Baltimore, 1843).
CARRONADE, a piece of ordnance invented, by the application of an old principle of gun construction, to serve as a ship’s gun. The inventor was the antiquary General Robert Melville (1728-1809). He designed the piece in 1759, and called it the “smasher,” but it was not adopted in the British navy till 1779, and was then known as the “carronade,” from the Carron works on the Carron river in Stirlingshire, Scotland, where it was first cast by Mr Gascoigne. The carronade had a powder chamber like many of the earliest guns known, and was similar to a mortar. It was short, light, had a limited range, but was destructive at close quarters. Carronades were added to the existing armaments of guns proper or long guns. A 38-gun frigate carried ten carronades, and was therefore armed with 48 pieces of ordnance. As the official classifications were not changed, they were misleading guides to the real strength of British ships, which always carried more pieces than they were described as carrying. The same remark applies to French and American ships when the use of the carronade extended from the British to other navies.
CARROT. Wild carrot, Daucus carota, a member of the natural order Umbelliferae, grows wild in fields and on roadsides and sea-shores in Britain and the north temperate zone generally of the Old World. It is an annual and resembles the cultivated carrot, except in the root, which is thin and woody. It is the origin of the cultivated carrot, which can be developed from it in a few generations. M. Vilmorin succeeded in producing forms with thick fleshy roots and the biennial habit in four generations. In the cultivated carrot, during the first season of growth, the stem remains short and bears a rosette of graceful, long-stalked, branched leaves with deeply cut divisions and small, narrow ultimate segments. During this period the plant devotes its energies to storing food, chiefly sugar, in the so-called root, which consists of the upper part of the true root and the short portion of the stem between the root and the lowest leaves. A transverse section of the root shows a central core, generally yellow in colour, and an outer red or scarlet rind. The core represents the wood of an ordinary stem and the outer ring the soft outer tissue (bast and cortex). In the second season the terminal bud in the centre of the leaf-rosette grows at the expense of the stored nourishment and lengthens to form a furrowed, rather rough, branched stem, 2 or 3 ft. high, and bearing the flowers in a compound umbel. The umbel is characterized by the fact that the small leaves (bracts) which surround it, resemble the foliage leaves on a much reduced scale, and ultimately curve inwards, the whole inflorescence forming a nest-like structure. The flowers are small, the outer white, the central ones often pink or purplish. The fruit consists of two one-seeded portions, each portion bearing four rows of stiff spinous projections, which cause the fruits when dropped to cling together, and in a natural condition help to spread the seed by clinging to the fur of animals. On account of these projections the seeds cannot be sown evenly without previous rubbing with sand or dry ashes to separate them. As usual in the members of the order Umbelliferae, the wall of the fruit is penetrated lengthwise by canals containing a characteristic oil.