Catholic and Free

We consider the establishment of our nation's independence, the shaping of its liberties and laws as a work of special Providence, its framers "building better than they knew, the Almighty's hand guiding them." And if ever the glorious fabric is subverted or impaired, it will be by men forgetful of the sacrifices of the heroes that reared it, the virtues that cemented it, and the principles on which it rests.

The Catholic bishops of the United States, Third Plenary Council of Baltimore, 1893

On October 15, 1774, the ship Peggy Stewart owned by the Annapolis mercantile company of Dick and Stewart sailed into the harbor of Annapolis in the colony of Maryland, carrying with it a cargo of tea. On arriving, the ship's owner paid the tax then applied by Britain to importations of tea to its American colonies in accordance with the Tea Act of May 1773.

This law was intended to avert bankruptcy of the East India Company which had lobbied the British Parliament to exempt it from the tea import duties which its colonial competitors were required to pay. As if this was not enough, the Company was also granted the privilege of being allowed to ship its tea directly to agents in America instead of placing its tea on open auction in Britain. The Company was thus able to undercut American merchants who were required to purchase tea by the regular process of passing through the higher-taxed British controls.

Leaving aside the inherent injustice of using state power to privilege one commercial enterprise over others, the political point of this exercise was to elicit the American colonists' implicit agreement to the British Parliament's right to tax the American colonies. This at least was how it was understood by those American colonists who were increasingly incensed at what they regarded as a pattern of repression against His Majesty's subjects in British North America.

Opposition to what many Americans viewed as the British government's latest arbitrary act was especially fierce in Maryland. Few were more outspoken in their opposition than one of its leading public figures, Charles Carroll of Carrollton. "It will not do," Carroll insisted, "to export the tea to Europe or the West Indies. Its importation is an offense for which the people will not be so easily satisfied."

Carroll was no man of violence. He was disconcerted by some of the Boston Tea Party's radical undertones and subsequently worried about the potential for anarchy and disorder that is part of any revolution. Such qualms did not, however, prevent Carroll from proposing that the owner of the Peggy Stewart, Anthony Stewart, make amends — and save his own skin — by burning not just the tea but also his ship!

Even some of Carroll's equally angry contemporaries were taken aback by the strength of Carroll's convictions on this matter. They would have been less surprised had they known that after Britain's imposition of the Stamp Act seven years earlier, Carroll had warned his English friends that "The Americans are jealous of their privileges and resolved to maintain them." And as if seeking to provoke his correspondents in the mother country, Carroll added that the Americans "are not yet corrupt enough to undervalue Liberty, they are truly sensible of its blessings, and not only talk of them as they do somewhere else, but really wish their continuance."

A Signer Unlike the Others

Though most often remembered as the last Signer of the Declaration of Independence to depart this world, Charles Carroll was also distinguished by the fact that he was its sole Roman Catholic signatory. But long before most of the other Signers and Founders, Carroll had concluded America should be free. "In time," he said in 1763, "it will and must be independent."

In signing the Declaration, Carroll arguably put more at risk, at least materially, than any other member of the Revolutionary generation. At the time, he was probably the richest man in America. As well as inheriting considerable wealth from his equally-entrepreneurial father, Carroll proved to be an extremely able businessman in his own right, increasing the family fortune several times over. A defeat of the Revolution may well have resulted in the government's confiscation of the fruits of his family's business acumen.

Nevertheless the cause of liberty meant so much to Carroll that he was willing to back what must have seemed to be a forlorn endeavor to many at the time. But Carroll had always embraced the deeper meaning of his family's motto: Ubicumque cum libertate: "Anywhere so long as There Be Freedom." This devotion to freedom — and what he was willing to put at stake — was noticed by many of Carroll's fellow revolutionaries. Speaking of Carroll, the man who would be America's second president, John Adams, remarked: "In the cause of American liberty, his zeal, fortitude and perseverance have been so conspicuous that he is said to be marked out for particular vengeance by the friends of Administration; but he continues to hazard his all, his immense fortune, the largest in America, and his life."

Unlike the other Signers, however, Carroll and his family knew in a particular way what it meant to have one's liberty violated. Until the 1770s, Carroll was formally barred from voting or holding public office in Maryland because of his Catholic faith. Carroll also knew that, unlike the other revolutionary leaders, his Catholicism made him especially suspect to the British government (and more than a few of his fellow revolutionaries). In their minds, Catholicism was still associated with papist disloyalty to a Protestant crown in an overwhelmingly Protestant British Empire.

Another feature distinguishing Carroll from his fellow patriots was his reasons for making his stand for freedom. All of Carroll's biographers affirm that his political and economic thought was influenced by his Catholicism, by what the Catholic Church's greatest minds had said about the nature and limits of government, and by the Church's long history of resisting the incursions of temporal power into its affairs. Carroll was quite aware that the Catholic Church had always insisted that the state had certain legitimate functions. Yet the same Church also maintained — and continues to do so — that there were bounds beyond which governments cannot go.

The limits of state power vis-à-vis the rights of individuals and communities were central to the events leading to and following the American Revolution. The sources to which America's Founders turned in explaining their choice to embark upon a new experiment in ordered liberty were diverse. They ranged from classical figures associated with the Roman Republic, to philosophers such as John Locke who had helped shape England's revolution of 1688. The language and ideas employed by many of these figures when discussing questions of liberty, property, and the nature of government was not, however, completely...