Carroll added the words "of Carrollton" to his signature — his estate, his address, his full identity — so that no one could claim they did not know which Charles Carroll had signed. He made himself unmistakably identifiable. The law he lived under had spent seventy years trying to make people like him invisible.
Maryland was founded in 1634 as a refuge for English Catholics. The Calvert family — Catholic proprietors — established it under a charter from Charles I. In 1649, the Maryland Assembly passed the Act Concerning Religion — the first law in North America to guarantee religious tolerance for Christians and the first public document in America to use the phrase "free exercise" of religion. Catholics and Protestants worshipped openly alongside each other in the colony's early decades.
Then the political ground shifted. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 removed the Catholic King James II and installed the Protestant William and Mary. Within two years, Maryland was seized from the Calverts and made a royal colony. In 1692, Anglicanism was established as the official religion — funded by colonial taxes that Catholics were required to pay. The legal dismantling of Catholic civil life in Maryland followed in stages.
This is the legal world Charles Carroll of Carrollton was born into in 1737. His family was wealthy — among the wealthiest in the colonies — but wealth could not purchase the civil rights that Protestant neighbors held automatically. His father sent him to Europe for his education: first to Jesuit colleges in French Flanders, then to the College Louis-le-Grand in Paris, then to study law at the Middle Temple in London. He spent seventeen years abroad. When he returned to Maryland in 1764, he could not practice the law he had studied. He could not vote. He could not hold office. The law he had come home to was the law that had been built specifically to exclude him.
In 1773 the Maryland governor issued a proclamation fixing the fees that public officials could charge — doing so without the consent of the Maryland Assembly. It was, in miniature, exactly the argument the colonies were having with Parliament: taxation and fee-setting without consent. A high-ranking Maryland official named Daniel Dulany defended the governor's action in a series of articles in the Maryland Gazette. Someone needed to respond.
Carroll wrote a response under the pseudonym "First Citizen." He could not write under his own name — a Catholic arguing in public for the rights of Maryland's people was a political provocation on two fronts simultaneously. Dulany challenged him on both. The argument went back and forth in the Gazette through the spring and summer of 1773. When Dulany's arguments faltered, he attacked Carroll's standing as a Catholic to participate in public affairs at all. Carroll's response was to keep arguing, on the merits, and win.
In a land of freedom, this arbitrary exertion of prerogative will not, must not, be endured.
Carroll won the public argument. He could not vote in the election that followed — but the anti-proprietary candidates he had supported swept Maryland. His identity as "First Citizen" became known. He was appointed to the Annapolis Committee of Correspondence and the Maryland Council of Safety. A Catholic who could not legally hold public office was being given public responsibilities because his community trusted him. The law and the practice had diverged.
In February 1776, the Continental Congress sent a delegation to Canada. The mission: persuade French Canadian Catholics — an estimated 150,000 people, vastly outnumbering the Protestant population of the former French colony — to join the Revolutionary cause or at least remain neutral. Congress chose Charles Carroll for this mission specifically because he was Catholic, spoke French, and was known to the Catholic community. His cousin Father John Carroll, a Jesuit priest, accompanied the delegation.
In February 1776, the Continental Congress selected Charles Carroll for a diplomatic mission because of his Catholic faith. In Maryland, that same Catholic faith legally barred him from holding any public office. Congress found his religion useful abroad while the law he was working to change made him a second-class subject at home. Both facts are documented in the primary record.
There was a second complication. The First Continental Congress in 1774 had explicitly complained about the Quebec Act — Parliament's extension of religious tolerance to French Canadian Catholics — as an act of tyranny. The Declaration and Resolves of October 1774, at Yale Avalon, names it directly among Parliament's grievances. The colonies had protested Catholic religious tolerance in Canada as dangerous. Now they were sending a Catholic to appeal to those same Canadian Catholics for support. The mission failed. French Canadian Catholics were not persuaded. Carroll and the delegation returned empty-handed.
Also the act passed in the same session for establishing the Roman Catholic religion, in the province of Quebec, abolishing the equitable system of English laws, and erecting a tyranny there, to the great danger, from so total a dissimilarity of religion, law, and government, of the neighbouring British colonies.
Carroll was elected to the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776 — the same day the Declaration was adopted. He took his seat on July 18. On August 2, when the engrossed parchment copy was presented for signature, he signed. He was not present for the July 4 vote — he signed when the formal signing took place, as most delegates did.
He added "of Carrollton" to his signature. There were other men named Charles Carroll in Maryland — his father, for instance. By adding his estate's name and location, he made his identity unambiguous. He was the wealthiest man in the colonies — his fortune estimated at £200,000. He had more property to confiscate, more wealth to lose, more material stake in the outcome than almost any other signer. He later wrote that he had signed "most willingly," that it was his long-held intention "to defend the liberties of my country, or die with them."
CHARLES CARROLL of Carrollton.
Carroll served simultaneously on the Maryland constitutional convention in 1776 — drafting the framework of government for the state whose laws had excluded him for his entire adult life. The Maryland Constitution of 1776, adopted November 11, contains Article XXXIII of the Declaration of Rights: "all persons, professing the Christian religion, are equally entitled to protection in their religious liberty." The full text is at Yale Avalon.
This provision ended seventy-two years of formal Catholic exclusion from Maryland civil life. It did not create complete equality — Jews and non-Christians remained excluded from the guarantee. But for the Catholic community Carroll had grown up in, it was the legal reversal of everything the 1704 and 1716 acts had imposed. He had argued for it as "First Citizen" when he had no standing to argue. He had helped draft it when he finally had a seat at the table.
Charles Carroll of Carrollton held enslaved people throughout his life at Doughoregan Manor in Howard County, Maryland. The Maryland State Archives updated its biographical entry on Carroll to address what it described as "a major gap in the Archives's original entry" — explicitly documenting his enslavement of persons. The wealthiest man in colonial America built that wealth on the labor of enslaved people. Both facts — the religious persecution he overcame, and the enslaved labor that funded his wealth and his activism — are in the primary record.
Carroll went on to serve as one of Maryland's first two United States Senators after ratification. He retired from public life in 1800 after twenty-three years in the Maryland Senate. John Adams died July 4, 1826. Thomas Jefferson died July 4, 1826. When they died — both of them on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration — Charles Carroll of Carrollton became the last surviving signer. He lived another six years, dying November 14, 1832, at age ninety-five.
He had signed a document declaring that all men are created equal. He had done so while holding people in bondage. He had done so as a man the law had spent his entire life treating as less than equal. The archive holds all of it.
Maryland was founded by Catholics as a refuge for Catholics. The law spent seventy years dismantling that refuge. Carroll argued for colonial rights in 1773 as a man who had none. Congress used his religion as a diplomatic asset in 1776 while the law denied him office because of it. He signed the Declaration as the wealthiest man in the colonies. He helped draft the Maryland Constitution's religious liberty clause that ended the exclusion he had lived under. He held enslaved people throughout.
He was the only Catholic signer. He was the last surviving signer. He lived ninety-five years and watched the country he helped found become something the law of his youth had said people like him could not be trusted to help build. The primary sources document what he did and what was done to people like him. Every source is linked below. The archive is open.