Charles Carroll—The Only Catholic to Sign the Declaration of Independence

On this episode of Our American Stories, it may be hard to believe today, but Catholics faced widespread discrimination and persecution in colonial America. Many future states barred Catholics from holding office—some even went so far as to ban Catholics altogether. Yet Charles Carroll defied the odds. He became one of the wealthiest men in America, helped secure American independence, and became not only the last living signer of the Declaration of Independence, but also the only Catholic to sign the document. Dr. Bradley J. Birzer, author of American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll, shares the story of this overlooked and underappreciated Founding Father.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Charles Carroll might
be the most overlooked signer of the Declaration of Independence.
A devout Catholic, he overcame religious prejudice and the difficulties
of establishing a new nation, and in doing so became
one of the most respected and wealthiest men in colonial America.

(00:31):
You to tell the story of this forgotten founder is
professor of history at Hillsdale College, doctor Bradley Burser. He's
also the author of American Cicero, The Life of Charles Carroll.
Let's get into the story.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
Charles Carroll is definitely one of the more forgotten Founding fathers,
and I think that's unfortunate, because there's so much about
his story that really tells us a lot about the
greater understanding of him America. Charles Carroll of Carrollton for
no other reason. He's the only one who signs his
name with an aristocratic feel to it, right of Carrollton

(01:10):
at the end of it. But he's the only Roman
Catholic signer of the Declaration, and I think that that
speaks volumes about the nature of American Christianity at the
time of the Founding. Certainly there were very few Roman
Catholics at all, and those that did exist were distrusted

(01:31):
by the larger population, which understandably, we know that almost
all of the Englishmen who settled in the North American
colonies were coming out of the English Reformation itself, and
so they had a very deep connection to reformational theology,
and they hadn't met that many Catholics, because the Reformation

(01:53):
in England was really about those who were somewhat pro
Catholic without wanting a poe, and those who wanted to
purify the Church of its Catholicism, that is, the Puritans.
So there weren't really Catholics that were still coming along,
but there were images of Catholics that still existed, kind
of shadows of Catholics, if you will, And so Catholicism

(02:17):
could still be seen as a kind of boogeyman because
of all of these people coming out of the Reformation.
And so Charles Carroll of Carrollton really had to ride
through that distrust. He had to overcome it, and he
had to prove himself in some way, and he does
in actually a variety of ways. But there were certainly
a number of things that we can think about with

(02:38):
Charles Carroll that made him important. Not only was he
the only Roman Catholic signer of the Declaration, but he
was one of the founders of the Maryland Constitution, and
in particular, Maryland Senate that he designed was seen as
the model for the American Senate. So in Federalist Paper
number sixty three you have Madison saying our model for

(03:01):
the US Senate is the Maryland Senate, which means that
Charles Carroll was really the fountain head, the touchstone beyond
all of that. So, yeah, there are a lot of
things that we could think about that when we think
about Charles Carroll that he contributed to America. Even parts
of Washington, d c. Sit on land that was formerly his.
There's at least the one stop, the metro stop Carrollton,

(03:24):
and a lot of that property was Charles Carroll's. Charles Carroll,
because he was a Catholic, always had a disadvantage when
it came to his relations with the other founders. And
my favorite is always John Adams. John Adams loved Charles Carroll,
but every time Charles Carroll walked into a room, Adams

(03:46):
would record it in his diary. But it would always
be that papist. Charles Carroll has just walked into the room.
That papist has signed the Declaration of Independence. And I
don't think it's meant to be a jab It's just
a descriptive. He was that papist. It was always this marker,
that is Charles Carroll could never just be Charles Carroll.

(04:11):
He was always Charles Carroll the papist. I do think
George Washington didn't see him that way. I think George Washington,
who had relied on Carroll, relied on his money, saw
him as a close ally. We know that Thomas Jefferson
greatly respected Carol and used him for all kinds of
financial advice. They had a very close friendship. Alexander Hamilton

(04:34):
really liked Carroll as well. In fact, Hamilton was trying
to get Carol to run for the presidency in seventeen
ninety six, when George Washington would have completed his two terms.
And that's pretty shocking to imagine even the possibility of
a Catholic president as early as our second president of

(04:56):
the United States. Not possible, of course, but pretty amazing.
Hamilton thought that highly of him. So yeah, Carol was
really well respected at the time. Starting in seventeen seventy four,
a number of what we might call proper governmental institutions
began to fall apart. And we can see this through

(05:18):
the intolerable and the coercive acts that were being passed
by Britain. Britain was really putting the restraints on the
American colonies. And one reaction of the American colonies was
simply to create what they called extra legal governments. That is,
they would create committees or they would create their own legislatures.

(05:40):
And so one of my favorite stories of these is Maryland.
Maryland has what was called the First Convention in Annapolis,
and basically this was in seventeen seventy four. A number
of people get together. These are men who feel like
they've not been able to express their wishes in the
legitimate Maryland Assembly. So they meet as a group and

(06:03):
they begin having political discussions, and it's pretty clear by
the end of the First Convention that this is the
legitimate Maryland government. And so they meet again, and they
meet again, and they meet again, and Governor Eden realizes
after a certain amount of time that there's no sense
in him dealing with the actual legislature because all the

(06:27):
real power is in these conventions, and Charles Carroll was
very much a part of that, creating again what we
might call extra legal government. And yet if we think
about it in the larger scheme of things, it's not
that surprising. The First Continental Congress is an extra legal government,
the Second Continental Congress is an extra legal government. The
Constitutional Convention is an extra legal government. These were all

(06:52):
in some ways not quite legitimate, but not illegitimate either,
and they become legitimate nearly by the great weight that
they carry into the communities. One of my favorite stories
with Maryland is they finally decided that they didn't need
Governor Eden any longer, and so Governor Eden was trying

(07:15):
to govern from his ship out in the harbor in Annapolis,
and he would send men in with notes, and the
notes would be taken back to him, and he would
try to run the government this way, and finally the
Convention of Annapolis just sends Eden about six to eight
weeks worth of food and tells him that his services

(07:36):
are done and that they thank him for it, but
it's time for him to go back to Britain. They
no longer have use of him. And again, that's just
shocking to think about how these governments worked. Now those
could become dangerous as well, because you can imagine in
these conventions, and many states had them, you always had
a synthesis of monarchical and aristocratic and democratic powers all

(08:02):
at once. There was no real separation of government. So
Charles Carroll was not only famous for promoting the conventions
at the beginning, but then he became equally famous in
seventeen seventy six when he published a series of letters
under the name CX and he said, it's now very
much time for us to write proper constitutions and for

(08:24):
us to get rid of these constitutional conventions, because we
now run the risk of them becoming tyrannical, replacing what
was tyrannical.

Speaker 1 (08:34):
And you've been listening to doctor Bradley Burser, professor of
history at Hillsdale College, telling the story of Charles Carroll,
who maybe the most overlooked signer of the Declaration of
Independence and the only Catholic signer Christianity at the time.
By the way, in America, as doctor Burzer pointed out,
was mostly filled with folks from the Reformation movement of England,

(08:58):
and of course that left Catholics out for the most part.
And they were seen with a level of distrust in
America and discrimination. And it's a point of Carol's character
he was able to win over the trust of so
many in the colonies. When we come back more of
this remarkable story, the story of Charles Carroll, and also

(09:23):
the story of religion in America and Christianity in early America,
here on our American stories, and we returned to our

(10:16):
American stories, and with the story of Charles Carroll, the
only Catholic design the Declaration of Independence. You're again. It's
professor of history at Hillsdale College and the author of
American Cicero, doctor Bradley Burson.

Speaker 2 (10:31):
So Charles Carroll, because he was Catholic, could not be
raised properly by his family. In Maryland. It was illegal
to raise your children in a quote unquote Catholic fashion,
and if you attempted to, your child would be taken
away from you and sent to a Protestant family. In England,

(10:51):
this is one of the most draconian laws in colonial America.
So at the age of eleven, Charles Carroll was sent
to France to be educated by Jesuits. And he ends
up going over to France for seventeen years along with
his cousin John Carroll, whom I mentioned earlier, will become
the first archbishop in North America. Charlie and Jackie as

(11:15):
they were known, And so Charlie and Jackie went over
to France again for seventeen years. They earned the equivalent
at least Charles did. He earned the equivalent of an
ma in Platonic philosophy, and then he went on and
got law degrees as well. So he's actually among the
American founders by the way that we would mark what

(11:39):
degrees have been earned, he's actually one of the highest
degree earning Americans, among the founders, because of his MME
and then his law degrees. But he loved of all
the people that he studied in the Western tradition, and
he studied everyone from Socrates to Plato, to Aristotle, to Cicero,
to Saint Augustine, to Thomas Aquinas to Sir Thomas Moore.

(12:00):
Of all the figures that he had studied, he loved Cicero,
and so Cicero was always right there for him in
everything he did. Cicero not only as a model of statesmanship,
but as a model of the intellect as well, and
so I took the title American Cicero from one of

(12:21):
the last statements that Charles Carroll made. He was asked,
because he was in his nineties, if he felt lonely
because he was the last of the signers to be alive,
and he said, well, no, I've got my two best friends.
I have Jesus and I have Cicero. I talked to
them always, and they talked to me. And so I
love that idea of Charles Carroll being this great Western figure,

(12:45):
being completely in line with the liberal arts tradition of
the West, and being very Ciceronian. I think there are
probably other founders. I think of someone like Nathan Hale,
who actually gave his life for the founding, that may
qualify more as an American Cicero. But I still think
that Charles Carroll has at least some claim to the title.

(13:15):
Another thing about Charles Carroll that people have found fascinating
is his wealth. He was extremely wealthy. Some people argue
that he was the single wealthiest man in North America
along with his father and his father will pass away
in seventeen eighty two, but prior to that, his father
was also Charles Carroll, but he was Charles Carroll of

(13:36):
Annapolis rather than Charles Carroll of Carrollton. They made a
formidable team. And one of the interesting things about all
of this is that Maryland forbade Catholics from participating in
politics or participating in law. So as a Roman Catholic,

(13:57):
I would not be allowed into a law court to
represent myself, even to speak for myself. I certainly would
not have been let into a political body at all.
But the one thing that Catholics could do was they
could own property. And you find this same story with
Judaism during the Middle Ages that you find with Catholicism

(14:20):
in Maryland. The Catholics absolutely took advantage of being able
to own property, and so they bought and they sold property,
They served as banks for other property owners. So this
one restriction that didn't exist on them they took to
the fullest advantage. And again the same thing that Jews

(14:40):
did during the Middle Ages when they were forbidden from
being a part of usury and so forth, they used
this to their economic advantage. So Charles Carroll and his
father were immensely wealthy on the eve of the American Revolution,
and Carol spends a lot of his money on the

(15:00):
American Founding, supporting the American Founding, supporting George Washington. And
he loses a lot of his property during the founding
as well, so he really puts his money on the line.
In all of this, Charles Carroll represents something unusual. He
represents a lone Catholic, or one of two or three

(15:23):
Catholics in a Protestant world. But one of the things
that Charles Carroll loved to remind his fellow compatriots of
was that when they talked of natural law, when they
talked of natural rights, when they talked of the Magna Carta,
when they talked of common law, they were really all
talking about Catholic history. That is, the Magna Carta, the

(15:48):
greatest document political document signed in the Middle Ages, was
an absolutely Roman Catholic document. And so by the time
we get to the Protestants of the American Revolution, most
Protestants see themselves as really having a heritage of liberty.
But as Carol reminded us, that heritage is one that

(16:10):
they inherited from the Catholics. And so I think that's
a great reminder for all of us. Then, when we
think about those things that mean so much to us,
as Americans again, natural rights, natural law, common law, all
of these things, these are deeply rooted in our Catholic
European past, and there's just no way to get around

(16:32):
that at all. In eighteen twenty six, July fourth of
eighteen twenty six, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams passed away,
which seemed miraculous to Americans that they would die within
hours of each other on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration.

(16:54):
I mentioned too that Charles Carroll lives on until November
November fourteenth of a teen thirty two. During that time
he got to meet Alexis to Touville. I love that
that Totaukville was here on his big trip and interviewed
Charles Carroll as one of his great subjects for democracy

(17:15):
in America. But I also love that when Charles Carroll died,
there were two newspaper headlines that went out across the
United States. One is the last of the Romans has
passed into eternity, and the other was a great man
in Israel is dead. And I love that idea that

(17:39):
somehow Charles Carroll was both a Jewish prophet and a
Roman demigod in some way to me that perfectly sums
up his life and what he gave to the American experiment.

Speaker 1 (17:54):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by our own Gavin Listrof, a Hillsdale College student. And
also a special thanks to doctor Bradley Burser, a professor
of history at Hillsdale College. And we tell lots of
stories thanks to Hillsdale College. They're proud sponsors of this

(18:14):
show and we couldn't do it without them. Go to
Hillsdale dot edu to take all of their terrific and
free online courses. Their storytelling is remarkable, their teaching even better.
Learn about all the good and beautiful things in life
in American history, economics, and so much more. Go to

(18:35):
Hillsdale dot edu. And what a story. The fact that
Charles Carroll, well, it was illegal for him to be
raised as a Catholic, so he was sent off to
be educated in Paris by Jesuits for seventeen years and
as a citizen, couldn't be a member of the bar
or be in politics. But crafty as he was, he

(18:58):
learned how to amass great wealth and how to use
that wealth to fund the American Revolution and to be
a central part of America's ideas and intellectual history, and
in the founding and formation of our government. The story
of Charles Carroll, the only Catholic signer of the Declaration
of Independence. Here are now American stories