ISI Books, the publishing arm of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, is doing a great service by putting out the Lives of the Founders series, emphasizing “important but unjustly neglected figures of the American Founding.” Leaving aside for a moment the problems inherent in thinking about the last quarter of the 18th century as an “American Founding,” the series is giving us a fresh look at the period through the minds of (so far) a nice mix of nationalists and true federalists who, for one reason or another, have been lost to the historical consciousness of recent generations of Americans.
Bradley J. Birzer’s volume on Charles Carroll of Carrollton, the only Catholic to sign the Declaration of Independence, is a worthy addition to the series. Professor Birzer has written two other books on Catholic humanism—lives of J.R.R. Tolkien and Christopher Dawson—and this search into Carroll’s heart and mind extends that theme. Tolkien and Dawson were medievalists, representative of “sanctifying myth” and the “Augustinian mind” applied to great movements of world history. Charles Carroll, educated in Jesuit schools in France, was to Professor Birzer the first Catholic gentleman who tried to show that Catholic tradition was fully compatible with the American experience (an enterprise later taken up by such men as Orestes Brownson and Carlton J.H. Hayes, among many others in more recent years). For the most part, Birzer is quite successful.
Charles Carroll was a child of privilege, a Mary-Lander whose family was, during most of his lifetime, perhaps the richest in America. Their wealth was primarily in land (including, of course, slaves); their farms as renowned as their gracious hospitality. They also had widespread interests in manufacturing (the Baltimore Iron Works) and shipping, and toward the end of his life Charles would help to found the Baltimore & Ohio Rail Road Company. He was educated in France and England for 17 years, mostly at the Jesuit College of St. Omer and the Middle Temple. His combination of learning in the Jesuit tradition of the liberal arts and the English common law made him arguably the best educated man in America; except, perhaps, his cousin John, who became the first American Catholic bishop, and John Dickinson, like the Carrolls a wealthy man who received the best of both wide reading and formal education in England. Only about 200 Americans in the entire colonial period were so privileged.
Although Professor Birzer does not neglect Carroll’s exterior life—he devotes, for example, almost one fourth of the book to his politics—it is the close analysis of Carroll’s ideas, political and religious, at which the author excels. “Critically,” Birzer writes,
Carroll himself knew best the meaning of proper, noble, aristocratic service to the republic—whether it be the Roman republic, a Christiana Res publica, the American republic, or the heavenly republic in which the true King rules.
Put another way, Carroll was a true philosopher-statesman of the republic, and therein lay his connection to Ancient Rome, his deep love of the Church and Her traditions, his conviction that English liberty lay at the heart of the best constitutional forms, and his affection for the American patria. Carroll’s discipline for self-government and rather stoical personality lead Professor Birzer to compare him to Cicero—aptly, one might add.
In his political activity and writing during his more than a quarter-century of involvement in the separation from Britain and the making of constitutions (roughly, from his political letters in Maryland in 1772 through the Adams administration), Charles Carroll of Carrollton was a nationalist. In analyzing the content of that nationalism, Professor Birzer is at his best. Carroll was a deep and consistent thinker. He bounced back and forth between Maryland—where he wrote letters and tracts advocating independence, wrote its Declaration of Rights, helped form the state constitution, and struggled against Daniel Dulany, Samuel Chase, and the so-called Antifederalists—and the national government, where he signed the Declaration, advocated confederacy, supported but did not attend the convention of 1787, and served in the first U.S. Senate. He wavered only once in his support for independence, when he became concerned that too many Americans desired democracy over a mixed and balanced government. He never wavered in his support for George Washington or a strong national government based on sound republican principles.
Professor Birzer takes us meticulously through Carroll’s writings. Carroll was influenced by Edmund Burke (he was one of a handful of Americans who actually knew Burke), but also by Hume, Montesquieu, Joseph Addison, Blackstone, Francisco Suárez, Aquinas, Robert Bellarmine, Aristotle, and the “Anglo-Saxon myth” as popularized by Lord Bolingbroke and others. Conspicuously missing from this list is John Locke, whose tabula rasa psychology and “state of nature” contractualism would in any event be anathema to a good Catholic. Carroll advocated “mixed” government (the ancient question of the one, the few, and the many) balanced by both separation of powers and federalism, believed that property was “the first right,” thought that government could promote virtue, urged tolerance of Loyalists, and, above all, defended religious liberty.
When he first wrote letters advocating independence, the wealthiest man in Maryland could not vote. A colony founded in part as a haven for Catholics had disenfranchised them. Carroll once said that he signed the Declaration “primarily to promote religious toleration.” (An aside here, not a part of Professor Birzer’s rich analysis but something I have long suspected: The most reliable predictor of one’s position on the “Federalist-Antifederalist” spectrum was religion. That is, the “higher” the doctrine of the Church, the more likely one was to be a nationalist. Conversely, the “lower” the Church, the more likely one was to be a decentralizer. Carroll argued vigorously for a national capitol; the Presbyterian John Witherspoon didn’t even want the subject discussed. Men of “reason,” such as Unitarians and secularists, were also nationalists. Baptists like Isaac Backus of Massachusetts were opposed even to a strong state government. Religion trumps economics at the “Founding.”)
Carroll turned more and more to the contemplation of his faith after his public career ended with the election of Thomas Jefferson. This was also true of his fellow patriot and man of wealth, John Dickinson. Carroll and Dickinson were alike in many ways: Both were rich, widely read, grounded in the classics and English common law, suspicious of democracy, avid for “confederacy” and union, willing to risk their lives and fortunes for the republic. Dickinson freed his slaves after the War for Independence (the only major slaveowner to do so), and Carroll quietly manumitted many of his during the last 30 years of his life. Carroll also backed several antislavery causes and even introduced a bill for gradual manumission into the Maryland legislature. Dickinson’s ten-word declaration at the Convention in July 1787 may have been the most profound utterance that august body heard: “Experience must be our only guide. Reason may mislead us.” During the Maryland debates on the Constitution that same year, Carroll said, “In matters of Govt., experience is a better guide than Theory.” Both men were devoted to property, family, and faith, and against all schemes that might tend to disrupt good order. Dickinson, of course, did not sign the Declaration and, as a Quaker-Presbyterian-Anglican, was never as enthusiastic a nationalist as Carroll. John Adams admired Carroll and resented Dickinson, but recognized the genius both possessed. Professor Birzer suggests rather than develops this comparison, but it is one of the many small ways he offers insights and connections that have not been noticed by many observers of the age.
To this reviewer the most troubling aspect of the book (and it is not a major theme) is Professor Birzer’s uncritical acceptance of the idea of a “Founding” and, directly related to this, his failure to come to grips with Carroll on the subject of “natural rights.” On the one hand, the Catholic tradition of natural law is something quite different from natural rights; and, if Carroll seems to have rejected Locke, he could hardly have held to the usual 18th-century definition of “unalienable” rights. On the other hand, the author explicitly states that Carroll thought that the Declaration “articulated almost everything Charles had believed in and about the world.” Specifically, it “almost perfectly tied together a universal natural-rights view of the world with a very particular English common-law and inherited-rights view of the world.” Absent a precise development of Carroll’s understanding of natural rights, this leads to some confusion. I cannot imagine the Carroll whose mind jumps off these pages subscribing to a Jeffersonian or Madisonian understanding of either natural rights or a “Founding.”
Nevertheless, this is a very good book, in what is so far a very welcome series. It opens to us a man who, while honored during his lifetime, has almost disappeared from our history books. It is the loving product of an author who is reintroducing to a new generation a Catholic humanism that has produced much of what is best about Western civilization.
[American Cicero: The Life of Charles Carroll, by Bradley J. Birzer (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books) 286 pp., $25.00]
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