LIVES OF THE FOUNDERS
EDITED BY JOSIAH BUNTING III
ALSO IN SERIES
AMERICA’S FORGOTTEN FOUNDERS
Edited by Gary L. Gregg II and Mark David Hall
FORGOTTEN FOUNDER, DRUNKEN PROPHET:
THE LIFE OF LUTHER MARTIN
Bill Kauffman
AN INCAUTIOUS MAN: THE LIFE OF GOUVERNEUR MORRIS
Melanie Randolph Miller
RISE AND FIGHT AGAIN: THE LIFE OF NATHANAEL GREENE
Spencer C. Tucker
FOUNDING FEDERALIST: THE LIFE OF OLIVER ELLSWORTH
Michael C. Toth
THE COST OF LIBERTY: THE LIFE OF JOHN DICKINSON
William, Murchison
AMERICAN CICERO
THE LIFE OF CHARLES CARROLL
WILMINGTON, DELAWARE
To Dedra, who always shows me the way.
CONTENTS
Introduction:
An Exemplar of Catholic and Republican Virtue
1. Liberally Educated Bastard
2. First Citizen
3. The Constitution Evolves
4. Attenuating Disorder
5. Echoing the Divine Order
Conclusion: The Last of the Romans
Appendix
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index
INTRODUCTION
AN EXEMPLAR OF CATHOLIC
AND REPUBLICAN VIRTUE
DURING THE HOT, HUMID MARYLAND AUGUST OF 1779, BARONESS von Riedesel visited the Charles Carroll of Carrollton estate. She had met the Carrolls at a spa in Frederick, Virginia, earlier that summer, and Molly, Charles’s wife, and the baroness had become fast friends. Her description of the plantation reveals much about the aristocratic position and power of Carroll, even though diminished economically because of the politicized demands of the war effort. He was believed to be, at the time, one of the two wealthiest men in the colonies. The other man was his father, Charles Carroll of Annapolis.
After passing a “pretty” town of enslaved blacks—“each of whom had his own garden and had learned a trade”—immediately adjacent to Carroll’s plantation, the baroness received a warm joyous welcome from the entire Carroll clan. The baroness described the grand patriarch, Charles Carroll of Annapolis, as “an old gentleman in the best of health, and in the most charmingly merry mood, scrupulously clean and tidy, and on whose venerable face one saw the happiest contentment stamped.” Immediately after, she noted the “four darling grandchildren” as well as the patriarch’s beloved daughter-in-law, Molly, “our amiable hostess.” Everything about her visit at the estate, the baroness recorded, was offered with “taste,” though without “elegance.” And despite the deprivations brought about by the economic and political circumstances of the Revolution, certainly “nothing was lacking.” The Carrolls graciously included her in even the most intimate activities of the family during her visit. Everything the baroness encountered on the estate—from the slaves to the garden, and especially, the vineyard—was ordered well and properly, and much of it “was very elegant and surpassed our expectations.” From one great height on the plantation, the baroness looked down only to find an overwhelmingly sublime view, “the most beautiful sight I had ever beheld in the whole part of America I had visited.”1
Carroll’s mind and soul were as ordered as his estate. Indeed, he was a man of supreme intellect, imagination, integrity, and character. He had his flaws, to be sure, but it is very difficult for even the most objective biographer not to sympathize with this highly educated and articulate figure. He began life a bastard, sent to France by his parents at the age of eleven to receive a liberal and Jesuit education denied to him in the traditional homeland of the Carrolls, Ireland, and in his adopted home of Maryland, the most anti-Catholic of the thirteen English colonies on the North Atlantic seaboard.2 After seventeen years abroad, he returned to Maryland a gentleman of the highest order, educated in the classics, philosophy, accounting, and law. Equally important, his father had finally accepted him, legally and publicly, as his son. Though still denied access to the law, to courts, and to politics because of his Catholicism, Charles joined a number of prominent social clubs, learned the necessary skills to run the family estate, and carefully observed and analyzed the political and cultural situation in the colonies—especially in Maryland. As early as 1765, he believed independence from Great Britain a necessity and a good. When the colony reached a political impasse over two issues in the early 1770s, the government-provided salaries of Anglican clergyman and the right of the executive to impose taxes, Charles entered the public debates, ironically, as “First Citizen,” a defender of Whiggish, republican government, informed by a long tradition of classical and Roman Catholic theorists, from Marcus Cicero to Robert Bellarmlne to Baron Montesquieu. As a resounding success in the public debates in Maryland, recognized by budding patriots in and out of his own colony, and with the cultural shifts accompanying the imperial crises of 1774, Charles found himself a leader of the anti-Parliament and patriot movements in Maryland. With the anti-Catholic laws quietly removed during the revolutionary period of 1774, he assumed a prominent and effective position in the powerful and extralegal Maryland Convention of late 1774. From this new position, Charles Carroll exerted a great deal of influence in Maryland.
His own analysis of the situation, though original and brilliant, has been ignored by almost all historians of the American Revolution. However, it should no longer remain quiet, and Charles’s well-crafted views deserve a serious place in the historiography of the American Revolution and in the understanding of the American Republic, then and now. In the spring of 1776, under the pseudonym “CX,” Charles explained the American Revolution in Livyian terms. Rooted deeply in the natural law and Anglo-Saxon common-law traditions of Western civilization, Marylanders— and the Americans as a whole—consciously and unconsciously desired to assert their natural rights. When the English government failed to protect the rights and autonomy of the citizens of the colonies, the colonists responded by desiring a reformation and reinstltution of the first principles of the Western and English constitution. Just as in the decades and centuries after the successful overthrow of the Etruscans, the Romans slowly and gradually saw the organic formation of a balanced and virtuous republic with the rise of the senate and the (unplanned) rise of the Roman Assembly, so Americans were now responding to the tyranny of the British government with extralegal and revolutionary associations, committees, and conventions. For Charles, though, these extralegal institutions were necessary but ultimately dangerous, as they concentrated the executive, legislative, and judicial powers into a form of popularly approved despotism. By declaring independence from Great Britain, which Charles advocated months before Congress passed the Declaration of Independence, the republic would evolve quickly but permanently toward a new constitutional order—one that divided, balanced, and protected the autonomy of each proper branch of government: executive, legislative, and judicial. Because the tradition and history of any one particular people was different from every other people, no two governments would look or function the same. Still, Charles believed, certain principles applied to all peoples and all governments. When these principles were recognized, followed, and protected, the people prospered and enjoyed virtue and happiness. When these principles were undiscovered, ignored, or mocked, the people and the government fell into decay and ruin. The end of every state, Charles argued, was justice, and the state best promoted justice by protecting the right of property, the right from which all others flowed.
As a leader of the Maryland conventions, Charles Carroll played a vital role in the move toward independence. Not only did he almost single-handedly pressure the reluctant Maryland Convention to declare independence, but the people of Maryland also rewarded Charles by sending him as a delegate to the Continental Congress to sign the Declaration of Independence. Congress rewarded Charles, even before Maryland did, by sending him on a failed but important diplomatic mission to Canada. During the Revolution, Charles served effectively in Maryland and the Continental Congress to advance the patriot cause. Importantly, he backed his friend George Washington at every turn of the war, recognizing the virtue and quiet strength of the greatest of Virginians (and Americans). Tied up with domestic concerns in Maryland, Charles did not take his elected position at the Constitutional Convention, though he offered support to its members, during and after, serving as a leading Maryland Federalist and defender of the new constitution. Perhaps most significantly, as author of the Maryland Senate, Charles is often seen as an indirect author of the United States Senate, which—as Madison noted in Federalist 63—borrowed heavily from Charles’s Maryland model. With the new constitution securely in place, Charles served as one of the first two Maryland senators in the federal Congress, 1789–92, and continued to serve in the Maryland Senate until 1800, when the so-called Revolution of 1800 swept him from office. From 1800 forward, Charles offered a number of profoundly Whiggish and republican observations on the democratization of the American Republic, read deeply in Roman Catholic theology, strengthened his family holdings and his family life, gaily entertained guests,and kept his favorite company: Marcus Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Alexander Pope, and Joseph Addison.3 “After the Bible,” he told a priest in 1830, “and the following of Christ, give me, sir, the philosophic works of Cicero.”4 Indeed, in every observation he made, his classical and liberal education shone forth. He was, importantly, as described at the time of his death in the autumn of 1832, “the Last of the Romans,” a conduit and nexus of the past and the present, a true citizen of the American Republic, Western civilization, and Christendom.
A number of excellent biographies on Charles Carroll exist. The best have been written by Ellen Hart Smith (a wonderful read), Ronald Hoffman (excellent social and economic history), Thomas O’Brien Hanley (serious political history), and Scott McDermott (another wonderful read). Other scholars, such as the incomparable Pauline Maier, have written penetratingly on Charles as well. Each of these scholars has greatly shaped my own thoughts on Charles Carroll, but especially Hoffman and Maier.
Though these several biographers have written of Charles with great sympathy, most historians of the American Founding, if they acknowledge or mention him as a player at all, do so dismlsslvely They usually write of him as an elitist and an aristocrat who merely served to block the necessary and good democratization of the budding nation. “But these ‘popular leaders’—men like Thomas Johnson, Samuel Chase, William Paca, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton—were aristocrats by position or inclination,” Merrill Jensen, a well-known historian of the Revolutionary period, has written. Jensen’s views are not atypical. He continues, “They led the colony into the war for independence, but with the utmost reluctance, and they struggled to maintain the rule of the landed aristocracy over the new state.”5 From a factual and interpretative standpoint, this declaration is blatantly false, as Charles had advocated independence from Britain as early as 1765, and played a significant role in advocating independence inside and outside of Maryland. Another historian, Edward C. Papenfuse, writes accurately, but with obvious disapproval:
Carroll’s faith in “the People” was carefully restricted both philosophically and in terms of his practical experiences. In essence his socio-political outlook represented a fusion of his innate aristocratic sensibilities, which he once expressed during his student days in France (1749–59) as disdain for travel in the “publick coach” and his belief in the rule of reason. Carroll saw himself in the vanguard of reason within the body politic, logically fit to assume the responsibility of political leadership of “the people,” who, more inclined to passion than reason, tended to be impulsive, intemperate, and largely ignorant of what was good for them.6
Again, while much of what Papenfuse writes is true, it is written with his own disdain and with quasi-ideological (specifically, Marxian) overtones, whether intentional or not. The idea of Charles Carroll as “the vanguard” of an ideological movement is absurd, as he fought for tradition and things left behind and forgotten. Indeed, what aristocrat could see himself as the forefront of an ideological movement and remain an aristocrat? Charles did not in any way see himself as the leader of some progressive faction advocating pure reason. More often than not, Charles expressed his own disdain for those who believed all things happened because of the employment of reason. Like his friend Edmund Burke, he understood the proper and effective employment of the imagination to better one’s soul and one’s society.
None of this should suggest, however, that Charles did not have second thoughts about independence when he understood the raw power of the populist and democratic forces unleashed by the revolutionary movement in the thirteen colonies. Whether one considers Charles’s fear of democracy to be “backwards” or not is, at best, a matter of personal preference, and at worst, a form of ideological blindness and prejudice. Most historians of the twentieth century, trained and influenced by the progressives, viewed history as a “force” or “spirit” (to use Hegel’s term) moving forward toward some kind of quasi-utopian society in which some form of rather radical equality is the rule. Such a view seems little more than wishful and absurd thinking to this author. The bloody events of the twentieth century, if they prove anything, prove that humans are corrupt and vicious, ready to kill and murder for power, arrogance, false beliefs, and pagan ideologies. As Charles Carroll wisely knew, while man is endowed with natural rights and the faculties to recognize and appreciate what is true, good, and beautiful, he is also a fallen being in a fallen world. For liberty to be secured, order and virtue must reign in the individual soul and in the commonwealth. When the citizens of a republic or a civilization become merely self-interested (or equally worse, interested in nothing at all), the center fails, and chaos conquers—until a man rides in on a white horse and reestablishes an order based not on nature or on God’s will, but on his own subjective vision of the world. Then, true despotism and tyranny reign.
Charles Carroll’s aristocratic notions were never self-serving. A true aristocrat, in Charles’s vision, offered everything he possessed or commanded—his wealth, his time, and his talents—for the stability and order of the community (the res publica) and its citizens. I must admit I find nothing but nobility in Charles’s vision. Additionally, his fears and critiques of equaliarian and radical democracy have been shared by many of the greatest minds in Western civilization from Plato to Thomas Aquinas to Edmund Burke. It cannot be stressed enough how deeply Western and Catholic Charles’s vision was. A true leader, Aquinas explained in “On Kingship,” serves others, not himself. In our modern and postmodern era, this seems to be a concept relegated to the dustbin of history.
Admittedly, this biography is not comprehensive. I am most concerned with Charles’s liberal and religious education and his employment of this education in the service of the American (and Western) Republic. I give considerable weight to the various published and unpublished writings of Charles Carroll, many of which have been neglected or forgotten since first printed or delivered. Consequently, this book devotes an entire chapter to his ironically named “First Citizen” letters of 1773 and offers extensive analysis of the entire debate, demonstrating how critical it was to the community of Maryland and to the establishment of republican thought in this southern colony. Additionally, this biography views Carroll’s two “CX” letters of early 1776, seeing them as a unique and credible interpretation of the American Revolution. Further, though Charles did not attend the Constitutional Convention, as already noted, his defenses of the Constitution remain very important to his continued understanding of the nature and purpose of the American Republic, and offer an important Western perspective on the events of the 1770s and 1780s. Charles Carroll’s thought ties this book together from its beginning to its end.
This book focuses on the period leading up to the American Revolution, the Revolution itself, and the period immediately following, through the ratification of the United States Constitution. While this book does not ignore the last forty years of Carroll’s life, it does focus more heavily on the first fifty years of his life, considering, especially, his desire to reform and purify the English constitution, properly understood. It also considers the importance of Catholicism to his thought, and the desire to secure the religious and civil rights of all Christians in the American Republic. Finally, it discusses in great detail his fear of democratization as the beginning of the decay of the republic. While many writers and scholars have labeled certain Americans as a “Cicero figure,” Charles Carroll of Carrollton has every right to lay claim to the title. Not only did he consider Cicero a constant companion during his earthly journey, but he also understood and believed in Cicero’s stoic understanding of the cosmos. As Cicero wrote:
A human being was endowed by the supreme god with a grand status at the time of its creation. It alone of all types and varieties of animate creatures has a share in reason and thought, which all the others lack. What is there, not just in humans, but in all heaven and earth, more divine that reason? When it has matured and come to perfection, it is properly named wisdom… Reason forms the bond between human and god.7
And while Charles Carroll never suffered martyrdom or possessed the oratorical skills of this Roman forbear, the young American did employ every gift for the republic. He knew the fragility of a republic, and he understood the virtue necessary to birth and sustain a republic. Certainly, he gave the American Republic everything he had.
CHAPTER ONE
LIBERALLY EDUCATED BASTARD
“THE SITUATION OF OUR AFFAIRS ABSOLUTELY REQUIRE[S] MY residence in Maryland: and I can not sacrifice the future aggrandisement of our family to a woman,” Charles Carroll wrote from England to his father in Maryland in 1763, after contemplating marriage. “America is a growing country: in time it will & must be independent.”1 Immensely loyal to his family, Charles, already at the age of twenty-six, had determined the course of his life. Though a disenfranchised Roman Catholic in a Protestant colony, Charles possessed a deep patriotism for his country. Not simply the province of Maryland or the British Empire, his country—that is, his “America”—was the imagined republic of citizens who had inherited the Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman tradition and the rights and liberties of the Anglo-Saxons. Charles’s exemplar, the Roman republican Cicero, had written that the good man “is not bound by human walls as the citizen of one particular spot but a citizen of the whole world as if it were a single city.”2 For Charles Carroll, an Americana res publica might very well represent Cicero’s ideal.
A citizen of Western civilization, Charles in 1763 stood at the forefront of his generation in terms of his republicanism, his Christianity, and his virtue. Oppressed because of his Roman Catholic faith, he still saw possibilities and prepared for a life devoted to the pursuit of the humane. From the age of eleven until the age of twenty-seven, Charles received an intense education in France and England. From French Jesuits, he learned the liberal arts and the greats of the Western tradition. On July 8, 1757, at the age of nineteen, Charles successfully defended his thesis in “universal philosophy” and became a master of arts.3 With a firm grounding in the classics and liberal arts, Carroll studied civil law in France for two additional years, and in 1759, he went to London to study common law. Never very interested in the practice or details of the law, pursing studies in it only because of the wishes of his father, Charles spent much of his time in London studying various forms of math, accounting, and surveying, and toward the end of his stay, pursuing a wife and spending time with friends.
While Charles spent his formative years in various European and English circles, his father read the letters he sent home with great attention, gauging his son’s progress as a virtuous and educated man. What kind of man would continue the Carroll family name, the Carroll fortune, and the Carroll reputation? What kind of man could be a proud but disenfranchised Irish Roman Catholic aristocrat in a predominantly Anglo-Saxon Protestant society?
A LIBERAL EDUCATION
Only eleven, and legally a bastard, Charles Carroll sailed to France in the summer of 1748 and entered the College of St. Omer as a student.4 Founded in 1593 on the Aa River in the Pas de Calais, the school’s mission was engraved above its entrance, revealing its intentions without trepidation: “Jesus, Jesus, convert England, may it be, may it be.”5 Known to English Catholics as the “seminary of martyrs—the school of confessors,” the college offered the Jesuit version of the liberal arts, the ratio atque institutio studiorum Societas Jesu (“Method and system of the studies of the Society of Jesus”), or in its abbreviated form, the ratio studiorum.6 Based on the Spiritual institutes and the teachings of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus (i.e., the Jesuits), the ratio studiorum reflected the martial, humane, and rigorous spirit of the Jesuits. It offered a true Christian humanism, bridging the liberal traditions of the ancients and the medievals, through the lens of Cicero. Additionally influenced by the teachings of the Catholic Spanish humanist Luis Vives (1492–1540) and the Lutheran educational theorist John Sturm (1507–89), the ratio studiorum brilliantly combined scholastic and humanist methods, ideals, and goals.7 True to the teachings of such vital figures as St. Augustine, the ratio studiorum allowed for local options, as long as the local schools remained true to larger, universal principles as understood and propounded by the Roman Catholic Church. What Charles Carroll learned at St. Omer reflected, to a great extent, the specific beliefs of the local Catholic community, as well as those of the superior or rector of the school. In this way, personality expanded rather than diminished in the Jesuit promotion of the liberal arts, and the Jesuits avoided the latent mechanical tendencies of the martial aspects of their order. Led by a (hopefully) devoted individual tutor, a student studied literature, philosophy, and science over a six-year period. The curriculum called for frequent recitations and repetitions—through compositions, discussions, debates, and contests—on the part of the student. The ratio studiorum also promoted physical exercise, mild discipline in terms of punishments, and serious “moral training.” Students learned Greek and Latin throughout the six-year course, and the system of study encouraged the speaking of Latin even in casual conversation. Ultimately, though, the student was to aim for “the perfect mastery of Latin” and, especially “the acquisition of a Ciceronian style.” With the course, the Jesuits helped to release and harmonize “the various powers of faculties of the soul—of memory, imagination, intellect, and will.”8
Charles was certainly not the only Catholic exile educated at St. Omer. Indeed, a number of children from Maryland received their educations there, including the future first Catholic bishop in the United States, John Carroll, Charles’s first cousin. “Most of our Merylandians [sic] do very well,” Charles proudly wrote his parents in 1750, “and they are said to be as good as any, if not the best boys in the house.”9
His peers, teachers, and liberal education suited young Charles, who thrived at St. Omer. At the age of thirteen, Charles wrote his father: “I can easily see the great affection you have for Me by sending me hear [sic] to a Colege [sic], where I may not only be a learned man, but also be advanced in piety & devotion.”10 While one might cynically take this as a mere platitude, Charles seemed quite sincere with his father, whom he must have idealized, though separated by the Atlantic. Rarely does he complain about being in France or away from Maryland in his early letters. This contrasts significantly with his later letters, when Charles clearly hated the study of law and desired nothing more than to return to the family estate. “Master Charles is a very good youth & I hope he will deserve all the favours you bestow uppon [sic] him,” William Newton, one of the priests at St. Omer, assured Charles’s parents.11 A year later, a relative of the Carrolls’s who was a tutor at St. Omer, Father Anthony, evaluated Charles’s abilities in a very favorable light. “He is naturally curious,” Anthony wrote, and full of “much good sense.” His only problem “is that he is giddy.” Still, Anthony conceded, Charles always earned a position as one of the six best students in the college. “I have seldom seen him worse than 5th. which he is at present, but often better.”12 All competitions at St. Omer revolved around who achieved status as one of the six best.13 By late November 1753, as Charles graduated, he received the highest praise of all. His master, Father John Jenison, claimed him to be “the finest young man, in every respect, that ever enter’d the House.”14 Hoping not to have his words considered as exaggeration, Father John summed up his views of Charles:
’Tis very natural I should regret the loss of one who during the whole time he was under my care, never deserv’d, on any account, a single harsh word, and whose sweet temper rendered him equally agreeable both to equals and superiors, without ever making him degenerate into the mean character of a favorite which he always justly despis’d. His application to his Book and Devotions was constant and unchangeable… This short character I owe to his deserts;—prejudice, I am convince’d, has no share in it.15
Father John assured Charles’s father that the community of priests and students shared this view of the graduate. Whether exaggerated or not, these words should have made his parents justly proud, and they offer good evidence of Charles’s character, fully commensurate with his life as an adult.
The six-year course at St. Omer introduced Charles to a thorough understanding—at least as taught by the Jesuits—of the Western tradition. In addition to an intensive study of Latin and Greek, Carroll met the greats. In the letters to his father, Charles revealed a cherished familiarity with Homer, Virgil, Cicero, Horace, and Dryden.16 Charles should, his father advised him, “understand those Authors well” and “[enter] into the Spirit of them to aid your Judgment and form a taste in you.”17 Charles seems to have done this long before his father encouraged it. Indeed, this intimacy with the great minds of the Occident remained throughout Charles’s days, and he considered the best thinkers of the Western tradition as friends and conversationalists.18 This is obvious in his correspondence as well as in his public writings and speeches. The greats shaped and spoke to Carroll, and he in turn considered them ancestors worth honoring in his thoughts, words, and actions. While these greats were not Carrolls, they were equal citizens “of the whole world as if it were a single city.” Their dialogue transcended the limits of time and generation.
And yet, his father cautioned him, one should read the greats not just for conversation and continuity but also to understand virtue and its relationship to a satisfied life. “The rest of your Life will be a continued Scene of ease and Satisfaction, if you keep invariably in the Paths of Truth of Virtue,” his father explained.19 At the forefront of the faculties for understanding virtue stood Reason, an utterance of the soul that balanced the passions with the intellect. “Men of Sense do not content themselves with knowing a thing but make themselves thoroughly acquainted with the Reasons on which their knowledge is founded,” the father wrote. Consequently, even though your “Memory may fail you … an impression is made by Reason” and “it will last as long [as] you retain your Understanding.”20 A year later, Charles’s father offered another explanation of virtue and its significance to the good life. All actions should be commensurate with “probity, Honour, [and] your Duty to God and your Superiors,” as “Sight with our other Senses is bestow’d on us by Providence for Our Benefit and happiness, but it mus[t] be kept under the Dominion of Reason.”21 Virtue and knowledge stood well above the possession of even large amounts of wealth, his father believed.22 And even higher than the wisdom of the ancient pagans stood the wisdom of the Jews. The beginning of all wisdom, Charles’s father reminded him, is the fear of the Lord. “Always remember this and you will not only infallably [sic] secure happiness here and hereafter to your Self but you will be in the Comfort of Yor [sic] Parents.”23
There can be little doubt that his years at St. Omer, important years for any young person, formed Charles in a profound manner. Significantly, Charles recognized this as well. As his friend, poet and priest Charles Constantine Pise, remembered,
And often, in the retirement of his old age, in the social hours of his evening fireside, have I heard him speak in strains of the highest eulogy, and with sentiments of the most devoted attachment, and expressions of the noblest gratitude, of his ancient preceptors. To them he attributed all that he knew—to their solicitude he referred all that he valued in his acquirements; and particularly that deep and hollowed conviction of religious truth, which was the ornament of his youth, and the solace of his old age. When any one uttered a sentiment of astonishment how, in his advanced years, he could rise so early, and kneel so long—these good practices he would answer with his high tone of cheerfulness, I learned under the Jesuits, at the College of St. Omers [sic] .24
Tills was high praise indeed from a proud alumnus.
After his successful career at St. Omer, Charles enrolled in another Jesuit institution, the College of Rheims, in the autumn of 1753, at the age of sixteen. A city dating backing back to the Roman Empire, Rheims was one of the most important towns for the Franks and one of the first to convert to Christianity. It provided a romantic backdrop for Charles’s continuing studies. What Charles studied there remains somewhat unclear, but the school offered courses in some of the liberal arts and some of what would be included in today’s understanding of the social sciences, as well as courses in the fine arts.25 His father encouraged him to take fencing and dancing for a “graceful Carriage,” and math and geography. These studies, his father noted, gave more significance to the importance of knowing Greek and Latin. “Would it not be very odd for a man to know Greek and Latin and not be able to describe the Position of any Noted place or Kingdom, or to Add, Multiply, or Divide a Sum,” Charles Carroll of Annapolis asked rhetorically.26
It remains unclear how long Charles studied in Rheims, and each of his various biographers offers a slightly different timeline for his post–St. Omer’s, pre–law education.27 He seems to have shifted—at least if one follows the dates and references in his letters—between Rheims and Paris with relative frequency. In the fall of 1755, Charles was attending another Jesuit college, the Louis-le-Grand in Paris.28 Focusing on classical philosophy, but also deeply familiar with and knowledgeable of natural law theory, Charles earned a master of arts in “universall [sic] philosophy” on July 8, 1757. Charles reported to his father that the auditors of the test “seem’d to be contented” with his performance.29 At the Louis-le-Grand, Reverend Pise later eulogized, Charles
grounded himself in the critical knowledge of the ancient languages [,] became master of all the intricacies and beauties of style, as well as in his own town, as in the learned languages; stored his mind with the poets and historians, with the orators and the philosophers of Greece and Rome, and acquired that general information, that universal knowledge, which shed a charm around his conversation, and gave increased interest to the natural fascination of his manner.
While one might take this as hagiographic hyperbole, Charles’s own writings—both in style and argument—seem to prove Pise correct. Throughout Charles’s life, the greats stood as his constant companions.
It was also at Louis-le-Grand that Charles first encountered, devoured, and absorbed Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws.30 Montesquieu’s influence on the young scholar cannot be exaggerated, and one biographer has gone so far as to argue that he served as “the seminal influence on Carroll.”31 Charles was especially taken with Montesquieu’s notion of republican balance and the minimization of concentrated power in any one branch or person in government.32 Equally important, during his study at Louis-le-Grand, Charles seems to have rejected the philosophy of John Locke (for reasons that are lost to history). Rooted in the study of history—which had been recently included in the ratio studiorum—Charles might have easily rejected Locke’s ahistorical, simplistic, and anti-Catholic understanding of a state of nature at the beginning of all things.33 Charles would certainly have rejected the Lockean notion of man’s soul as a “blank slate” upon his birth and Locke’s own argument in favor of the denial of civil rights for Catholics. Whatever the case, when Charles’s father recommended that he purchase a book of Locke’s, Charles replied: “You need not buy Mr. Lock’s [sic] work [as] it will be of no great service to me.”34 Never again does Charles mention or cite Locke.
Though he read Montesquieu a full generation before the American Revolution, Charles’s intimate knowledge of the classical world is commensurate with the familiarity many of America’s Founding fathers held toward the ancient world. When a student entered college (usually at age fourteen or fifteen), he would need to prove fluency in Latin and Greek. According to historians Forrest and Ellen McDonald, he would need to “read and translate from the original Latin into English ‘the first three of [Cicero’s] Select Orations and the first three books of Virgil’s Aeneid’ and to translate the first ten chapters of the Gospel of John from Greek into Latin, as well as to be ‘expert in arithmetic’ and to have a ‘blameless moral character.’”35 The education of the Founders followed a pattern. Not only did they study the classics, but they also connected the classical tradition through the Christian tradition—Protestant and Catholic—to a mythologized view of the liberties and common law of the Anglo-Saxons. “The minds of the youth are perpetually led to the history of Greece and Rome or to Great Britain,” Noah Webster wrote, as “boys are constantly repeating the declamations of Demosthenes and Cicero or debates upon some political question in the British Parliament.”36 Those promoting the American Revolution in the 1770s and 1780s “were men of substance—propertied, educated. They read. And what they read made it easier for them to become rebels because they did not see rebels when they looked in the mirror,” historian Trevor Colbourn has written. “They saw transplanted Englishmen with the rights of expatriated men. They were determined to fight for inherited historic rights and liberties.”37 Though perhaps to an extreme extent, Charles Carroll fits nicely into the arguments of these authors and confirms their ideas and suppositions.
A JESUIT EDUCATION IN THE LIBERAL ARTS
Carroll also received a specifically Jesuit education in terms of political philosophy—one that would mesh nicely with the education he would receive in the common law and English constitution. The College of St. Omer had the reputation of promoting revolution in its Counter-reformation fervor, and its mission would contribute to the forced disbanding (and Vatican-approved repression) of the Jesuits in 1773. In addition to its stated objective of reverting England back to Catholicism, the college promoted the revised and more radical political Thomism of three vital sixteenth-century figures (all Jesuits): the Spanish philosophers Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) and Juan de Mariana (1536–1624), and the Italian cardinal Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621).38 Predating Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and extrapolated from the tamer ideas of Thomas Aquinas, these political thinkers believed that a divine duty—rather than a divine right—of kings existed.39 One could not claim the biblical Saul or David as precedents for the divine right of kings, these three Jesuits argued, as these two Old Testament figures were exceptions to the norm.40 Equally important, Aquinas had argued that the only good king was the king who would willingly sacrifice himself for his people, as had Christ. The worldly kingdom, a particular expression of the universal truth of divine monarchy, must promote the virtue of its people and, consequently, the good of the commonwealth. “This is also clearly shown by reason,” Aquinas argued. “It is implanted in the minds of all who have the use of reason that the reward of virtue is happiness.”41 The true ruler, then, seeks the good of his people, not necessarily of himself—though the two, properly understood, should be commensurate one with another. “A government becomes unjust by the fact that the ruler, paying no heed to the common good, seeks his own private good,” creating a private wealth rather than a common wealth.42 When “one man is in command, he more often keeps to governing for the sake of the common good,” though a group of rulers—in an aristocracy or a democracy—tends to be corrupted more easily, and thus the purpose of government becomes readily perverted.43
Aquinas also considered the possibility for revolution against an unjust tyrant. Such an injustice would exist only if the people had sinned against God. The suffering of the people purifies them, the Angelic Doctor argued, distributing a sanctifying grace throughout the population.44 Still, Aquinas kept open the possibility of revolution, but as coming from the representatives of the people, and not from the church. For Aquinas, the church could only condemn a king for heresy.45 Equally important, a revolution always and everywhere exposes the society to a number of unpredictable results; Pandora’s box is opened. “If there be not an excess of tyranny it is more expedient to tolerate the milder tyranny for a while than, by acting against the tyrant, to become involved in many perils more grievous than the tyranny itself.”46 Rage, faction, and civil war might very well be the results of even a “just” revolution, Aquinas feared.
To greatly varying degrees, the three neo-Thomist Jesuits bridging the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Suárez, de Mariana, and Bellarmlne—claimed that one did have the right, if not the duty, of resistance and possibly of tyrannicide, if a monarch behaved in an unrepentant and recidivously corrupt manner.47 Seizing upon Aquinas’s hesitation (“if there be not an excess of tyranny it is more expedient to tolerate the milder tyranny”), and upon his earlier flirtations with tyrannicide in the Summa Theologica, these three philosophers looked for ways to prove—and combat—an excessive tyranny. If a monarch violated the divine commandments or the natural law, or if he promoted a policy against the common good of the polity, he might very well and justly experience a violent opposition or even a “righteous” execution. Private persons, as a part of a vendetta or a power struggle, did not have the right to execute a corrupt ruler, except in legitimate self-defense of body and life, but not of property. The community as a whole might have the right to execute the leader, the three Jesuits believed, and the community certainly had the right to challenge the abuses of a corrupt ruler. While the leader ultimately derived his sovereignty from God, from the moment of his accession and throughout his reign, he derived his direct power from the will and consent of the people, broadly understood.48 If the commonwealth had the right to confer power on someone, it also had the right to demote the same person for violating the good of society.
Several generations before Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, de Mariana and Suárez each promoted a social-contract theory of society. Unsurprisingly, the theory of the Spanish Jesuits took a very different form than did that of their seventeenth-century Protestant English counterparts. Though de Mariana believed private property and contract the beginnings of civil society, Suárez believed in a “double-contract theory,” moved by divine intent. He argued that, following the divine will—as understood in the natural law—men come together voluntarily, first in families, and second as a political society, to appoint or elect a governor or governors. While nature, created by God, demands government, it does not specify which government is best for which time or which circumstance. Unlike the structure of the family, the type of government is a matter of human will and choice. Political society, consequently, is a particular expression of a universal truth, and its specific manifestation reflects the peculiarities of any culture and people.49
Deeply influenced by the earliest Scholastic teachings of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such teachings put the Jesuits—who generally disagreed with tyrannicide but agreed with the necessity of resistance against tyranny—in a dangerously awkward position with the emerging early modern states and with the Catholic Church as a whole.50 Indeed, such teachings as de Mariana’s—the most extreme of the three—ultimately contributed to the repression of the Society of Jesus in the mid- to late eighteenth century. For a while, perhaps to placate criticism of the order, the Jesuits banned de Mariana’s teachings on violent resistance.51 But while Charles Carroll was studying philosophy at the Louis-le-Grand in Paris, on the eve of the repression of the Jesuits, de Mariana was once again fully in vogue, and in their lectures to Charles, the Jesuits commented on the works and the ideas of Suárez and de Mariana frequently.52 In no small part, this led to the closing of St. Omer in the fall of 1762, while Charles was living in London.53
How much the ideas of these three Jesuits affected Carroll remains unknown, and almost certainly, unknowable. While their ideas of resistance to immoral, amoral, and unlawful government and statist authority pervaded the education of Charles, he never referenced Suárez, de Mariana, or Bellarmine directly. This is an interesting fact, as he obscured either his loves or his authorities and influences. Like many of his contemporaries, he constantly cited other voices and wrote of them with great reverence. Charles, as will be seen throughout this book, frequently cited classical and contemporary authors. Rarely did he cite by name figures from the patristic or medieval periods, though these figures unquestionably played a prominent role in Charles’s education.
Possibly Charles found the answers he needed in a contemporary, one who was accepted broadly in the non-Catholic world and who did not carry the taint of the Jesuit order. As Charles heard lectures on political society in preparation for his M.A. in philosophy—based extensively on the works of Suárez, de Mariana, and Bellarmine—he was also intently studying Montesquieu. The thought of this French eighteenth-century philosopher and legal theorist, and his notion of balance in government, might very well answer and prevent the need for de Mariana’s more extreme measures against tyrants. “Sufferance of arbitrary monarchical action must be carried quite far, in Carroll’s estimation,” the historian Thomas O’Brien Hanley wrote. “He leaves no doubt that this was the consensus of the [Jesuits].” One might turn to legitimate forms of government, one opposed to another, rather than resort to tyrannicide.54 Taken in this fashion, the ideas of Montesquieu— especially as interpreted, understood, and used by Charles Carroll—would fill the philosophical gaps in the theories of the Christiana res publica and connect the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds, one to another.
SOMEWHERE ON THE ARKANSAS RIVER
At the same time Charles was defending his mastery over universal philosophy, his father decided to reshape the history and the future of the Carroll family in two different ways.55 In 1757, Charles Carroll of Annapolis finally married his common-law wife, Elizabeth Brooke, officially named Charles his son, and declared them both beneficiaries in his will.56 No record explains fully the reasons for this otherwise devout Roman Catholic to live with a woman for years without making her his legal wife or declaring their son his heir, keeping him a bastard.57 Almost certainly, Charles Carroll the elder hoped to avoid penalties as detailed—though rarely enforced—by the anti-Cathollc statutes of the Province of Maryland. The Maryland Assembly began passing anti-Cathollc laws in earnest immediately following a Protestant coup in the province in 1689. Undoing the Act of Toleration of 1649 and its reaffirmation and restoration in 1658 (perhaps the most liberal laws in the colonies), on November 22, 1689, the assembly forbade Roman Catholic participation in military or civil matters. Three years later, the assembly disbarred all Roman Catholics. In 1704, the assembly legally closed the Church of St. Mary’s, the original Catholic chapel in the province. Additionally, over the next decades, the assembly taxed Irish Catholics more heavily than Protestants, demanded antipapist oaths from office holders, and heavily regulated the education of Catholic children.58
Importantly, the history of Maryland’s anti-Catholicism often centered around the members and the history of Carroll’s own family. Charles’s grandfather, also Charles Carroll, of King’s County, Ireland, entered King James II’s court after studying law at London’s Inner Temple. In 1688, Lord Baltimore (Charles Calvert—the third to hold the title), appointed Charles Carroll the attorney general of Maryland. Adopting the motto Ubicumque cum Libertat (“Anywhere so long as it be free”), Carroll arrived in Maryland in mid-fall 1688. Overthrown by Protestant supporters of William during the so-called Glorious Revolution within the first several months after his arrival, Charles Carroll, now former attorney general, fought back against the usurpers, spending some time in jail but always defending his Catholic religion. He also made a considerable amount of money on his extensive land holdings, from farming, and from lending money.59 In many ways, the former attorney general’s son and grandson lived under the shadow of the first Carroll to arrive on American soil, and each attempted to live up to what he had sacrificed for them.
His property already insecure, his legal status almost nonexistent, and his political weight negligible, Charles Carroll of Annapolis kept the power of his enemies at bay by holding his nonlegal wife and son at a distance. Not until Charles finished college and earned an M.A. did his father declare him his son.60 Whether this was coincidental or not remains obscure to the modern researcher.
With his familial affairs in order, Charles Carroll of Annapolis tentatively decided to replant his family estate somewhere on the Arkansas River, under the protection of the French monarchy and the French Catholic Church. For good reason, as demonstrated above, Carroll of Annapolis feared the continued and the growing anti-Catholicism in Maryland. In numerous letters, Charles’s father reminded his son of how dangerous the province was for Catholics. It was Charles’s duty, his father told him often, to remember how abusive certain laws and families had been to his own. Out of necessity, he must always take these things into account when considering his own actions in relation to his larger duties to his family, and especially, to the fate of the family over the generations.61 While Maryland had been painfully anti-Catholic since the Glorious Revolution, anti-Catholicism seemed to be on the rise in the 1750s in the American colonies. The evidence abounded. A committee in the Maryland Assembly reported its fears on May 23, 1751.
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