American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll (review)

In American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll, Bradley J. Birzer offers a sympathetic and engaging account of the man now best known as the only Catholic and the longest-lived among the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Birzer’s intellectual and political biography focuses on the years during and immediately after the Revolutionary War. It persuasively argues that Carroll’s contributions to revolutionary sentiment in Maryland, to the design of the Maryland and the federal Senates, and to the elevation of Catholics’ status in the Revolutionary War era deserve admiration and attention.

In clear, graceful prose, Birzer introduces the reader to the factors that shaped Carroll’s influential, if at times pained, republicanism. At the age of eleven, Carroll was sent to the College of St. Omer, a Jesuit institution in France attended by wealthy English Catholics as well as other members of Carroll’s prominent Maryland clan; after studying law, he returned to the colonies in 1765. Throughout American Cicero, Birzer attends to Carroll’s Catholicism while also exploring influences such as Enlightenment thought, great wealth, and the frustrations of colonial life. He cogently explores the neo-Thomist thought Carroll read at St. Omer, for example, and speculates that it may have bolstered Carroll’s later commitment to American independence. Yet he scrupulously notes that Carroll never cited the Jesuit authors in his critiques of British rule, turning rather to Montesquieu as he articulated a theory of balanced government. Life as a Catholic did unmistakably shape Carroll’s politics. He was moved by the vulnerability of his family in Maryland and of Catholics in England to mistrust both arbitrary governmental power and mob rule. Confiscation of property and loss of suffrage was not to him merely a theoretical proposition, and Carroll opposed each in a way that left him—as it did other founders—both a rebel and a conservative.

Birzer details Carroll’s debates with Daniel Dulany in the Maryland Gazette during the colony’s fee controversy. Carroll’s writing, Birzer argues, moved the colony closer to rebellion, and brought Carroll himself, disenfranchised as a Catholic, authority within the initially extralegal institutions of America during the Revolutionary War era. The responses of Dulany and his supporters revealed both the presence and the limits of antipopery. Virulent attacks on Carroll as a “’patriotic nursling of St. Omer’s [sic]’” (p. 57) appealed to long-held hostilities but failed to curtail Carroll’s growing influence; he helped to draft Maryland’s Declaration of Rights, was praised by John Adams, and after the war served in both Maryland’s Assembly and the U.S. Senate. Throughout the book, Birzer points to the coexistence of inflammatory anti-Catholic rhetoric and Protestant-Catholic alliances. Antipopery outlasted even Carroll, who still rode horseback in his ninetieth year. But criticism of Carroll after the Revolution focused as much on his mistrust of democratization as on his membership in a suspect faith; at his death, he was feted, in Birzer’s words, as “an Old Testament prophet, a classical demigod, and an American republican, all wrapped in one” (p. 194).

Birzer’s work is best read as a learned, lively appreciation of Carroll’s thought. As Birzer details Carroll’s writings and conflicts, he wholeheartedly praises this man whom other historians—as well as contemporaries—have often found self-interested and haughty. Carroll, Birzer writes, lived “a life seeking republican virtue and a deep Catholicism, whether one agrees with his understanding of the world or not” (p. 196).