You may come up a long straight aisle of locust trees, or you may wind through Gothic arches of elms along a skilfully engineered road which picks its way through the estate for a half-mile or more. Either course will bring you before a wide low house of yellow brick, with green blinds and white woodwork and English ivy. Directly ahead of you, across the circle of the driveway, the square main section of the house, capped by a tower, rises above a bright portico. To left and right the house throws out long extensions of even height, terminating in wings set endwise to you, like double-faces in the game of dominoes. Your first impression will be one of unusual size, your next of flatly rectangular simplicity. Your eye will be caught momentarily by a cross-tipped bell-tower of the right wing, where Charles Carroll built the only private chapel in America because England would not let him worship in peace. You will know that you have never seen such a house in America, and you will probably not suspect that it is a monument to several great Americans.
A lad of four or five is playing on the grass circle of the driveway before the great house. The undulating Maryland countryside is not half as absorbing as the game in hand, though his great-grandfather was governor of all those miles. If you were to ask him the way to Annapolis he would probably indicate the double file of venerable trees which stand sentinel along the tapering avenue, smile courteously if you thanked him, and then scurry off on an important engagement. He wouldn’t tell you that in his grandfather’s great-grandfather’s day Annapolis was the national capital, nor that that gentleman was one of the bold spirits who made a national capital possible.
There is no reason why he should know of it, or be interested. If, with your heavy wisdom, and your rhapsodies on the pride of race, and your generally affable tourist behavior you succeed in alarming the lad until he retreats to the shelter of the portico, know, stranger, that you have aroused the suspicions of Charles Carroll, the Ninth in America, and the seventh heir of that name to Doughoregan Manor.
Ancestors can be lived up to or lived down, and there is no particular point or prowess in bragging about them. To me there is glorious romance in the fact that this youngster of five is romping on the ground that was granted to his ancestor by a King of England. Perhaps it is glorious and romantic because it is fact, but I prefer to believe that the real reason may be found in a verse in the book of Exodus, which reads:
“Honor thy father and thy mother.”
They were worth honoring; they have been duly honored even unto the eighth and ninth generations.
Charles Carroll the First, like many another Irishman since, went west. He came to Baltimore in 1688 with the ink hardly sanded on his commission as attorney-general of Maryland. As a Roman Catholic he found the commission suddenly nullified by revolution in England, and it was four years before a Royal government was set up in the colony restoring and protecting its proprietary rights. His wife had died childless during that period, and he married again. Of ten children of his second wife, the eldest died on the voyage home from school in Europe. Back at St. Omer’s in French Flanders he left a younger brother, Charles Carroll the Second, and presently the plodding ships bore back to him the news of Henry’s death and the heritage of responsibility and affection which devolved upon him. In 1723 he came back to his own people, married in his turn, and in 1737 Mistress Elizabeth Brooke Carroll bore him a son. The precedent for the name Charles was already strong, Charles was a good name, and so was christened Charles Carroll the Third.
In the archives of the State Department at Washington you will find his signature. It is hidden from the light, but reproductions of it and the pledge to which it is attached have already made it familiar to every American. The story runs that in the congress at Philadelphia when the Declaration of Independence was presented, John Hancock turned to Carroll and offering him a quill, asked “Will you sign?”
“Most willingly,” was the reply. And he signed, in an easy clear hand, with less flourish, perhaps, than Franklin’s or Hancock’s, but no less sincerity—and Carroll, the richest man in America, had more to lose than either.
“There goes two millions with the dash of a pen!” a bystander remarked. “Oh, Carroll, you will get off,” said another. “There are so many Charles Carrolls.” At which Charles Carroll Third took the pen and jabbed “of Carrollton” under his signature, that George Third of England might make no mistake and punish any other of the same name. There is some cherry-tree flavor in the story, and precious historians maintain that he invariably signed his full title; but, if it can accomplish by example what the cherry-tree fable has accomplished, let it stand.
What circumstances carried this patriot, whom we left a moment ago as a baby, to the front rank of his country’s champions? The best of schooling then was to be had abroad. An ardent father and mother put aside their fierce attachment to their only child in order that he might become a proper heir to the estate which Charles Carroll the Second was accumulating. Just as the young Pinckneys and Rutledges and Middletons of Charleston in pre-Revolutionary days went to the mother country for their cultural training, so the youths of the middle states whose families could afford the excursion were dispatched to France, or England, or Flanders. One day in 1748 saw Charles Carroll, a boy of eleven, take ship with his cousin John for Europe. What pangs his mother experienced at the loss of her only chick are faintly reflected in a passage from the correspondence between the two: “You are always at heart my dear Charley and I have never tired of asking your papa questions about you. I daily pray to God to grant you his grace above all things, and to take you under his protection.” “With your mother,” his father wrote in 1753, “I shall be glad to have your likeness in the compass of 15 inches by 12”—and directed him to have the specified portrait done by a good painter. But the mother was not well, and in 1761, when the baby who had sailed away was a grown man, a student of Law in the Temple in London, and nearly ready to return to the warmth of his mother’s adoration, she died.
Such a beau as he would have made her! Heredity gave him an active mind and bearing of real charm, and just as the Manor house back in Maryland took on through the years extensions and embellishments which multiply its effect of useful luxury, so each addition to Charles Carroll’s intellect only seemed to make him more companionable and genuinely attractive. Even during his student period his sensitive spirit was not altogether proof against affairs of the heart, and if it had not been for her meddlesome sister, Miss Louisa Baker would have gone back to Maryland as his bride, as mistress over 68,000 acres. Instead, the catch of the commonwealth returned at twenty-nine under a cloak of melancholy from the shelter of which he wrote, dourly, “Matrimony is at present but little the subject of my thoughts.”
Persons familiar with the laws of gravity and more particularly with the physics of the rebounding heart will not be surprised to learn that within a few months he was again engaged to be married, this time to Miss Rachel Cooke. He wrote to London for her trousseau—such intimate finery as he hardly dared describe, things to turn even the Babylonian fiancée of today as green with envy as the Doughoregan meadows. But the Brussels lace was not for her, for Rachel Cooke fell ill of a fever, and died, and her miniature and a lock of her tresses were hidden away in a secret partition of Charles Carroll’s writing desk.
Undiscouraged, he found serious distraction in the fermenting affairs of the colonies. From provincial grievances such as his father had related from time to time in his letters dwelling on the oppression of the rights of Catholics, the problems of the colonists had overflowed greater areas. Like a flood swelling over the landscape, the minor swirls of flow and eddy were merged into a common misfortune of drab color and threatening proportions. It was Charles Carroll’s first chance for constructive citizenship. At the writing-desk where Rachel’s miniature lay hidden he wrote a program of letters which may be said to constitute the brief for independence. And by the time his heart had healed, and he had fallen in love with Miss Mary Darnell, whom he preferred, he said, “to all the women I have ever seen, even to Louisa,” and had married her, he was caught in the flood himself. There was no turning back even if he wanted to—and he did not want to turn back.
His town house at Annapolis and the manor of Doughoregan (it is pronounced Dooráygan, and it means the house of the king, because a thousand years or so ago the O’Carrolls were Irish kings) opened their doors with special welcome to those who were prepared to resist the oppression of a king. “A warm, firm, zealous supporter of the rights of America, in whose cause he has hazarded his all,” wrote John Adams, Carroll’s “all” at that time yielding an income of some ten thousand pounds a year. When, in 1773, an outraged importer set fire to his cargo of taxed tea in Annapolis, Charles Carroll was his chief legal counsel. When the Continental Congress met in Philadelphia the next year, he was a member. When the Congress sent a delegation to Canada to enlist support for the Revolution, it seized upon his French training as an asset in Charles Carroll, as it chose Benjamin Franklin for his practical judgment, Father John Carroll (later the first Archbishop of Baltimore) for his ecclesiastical influence, and Samuel Chase for his legal ability. The mission failed; Canada would not help; we must work alone. So to indicate that he welcomed the opportunity Charles Carroll signed the Declaration of Independence.
Years later he wrote this summary of his career:
“On the breaking out of the Revolution I took a decided part in the support of the rights of this country; was elected a member of the Committee of Safety established by the Legislature; was a member of the Convention which formed the Constitution of the State. The Journals of Congress show how long I was a member of that body during the Revolution. With Dr. Franklin and Mr. Samuel Chase I was appointed a Commissioner to Canada. I was elected a member of the Senate at the first session of Congress under the present Confederation.... The mode of choosing the Senate was suggested by me....”
That was all he found to write. It ought to be enough to qualify him for the emphasis which, in the eminent line of Charles Carrolls, we have placed upon him. But if, after you have followed him through the Revolution, you inquire just what connection the details of his career have with Doughoregan Manor, listen to a short recital of what he was too modest to write.
In 1780 his father, Charles the Second, was standing on the veranda of his Annapolis house and peering through a spy-glass at a sail in the Bay. He made a misstep, pitched heavily from the porch, and was killed. Mary Darnell Carroll, his daughter-in-law, saw him fall. Her health, already taxed by her devotion to Mrs. Carroll II during her last illness, gave way at “Breakneck” Carroll’s tragic death, and she died within a fortnight, leaving to her husband a son and two daughters. The son, of course, was Charles Carroll the Fourth. The Signer saw him go to Liége to school, return, as his father had returned before him, the idol of a gay countryside, court Nellie Custis at Mount Vernon, marry Harriet Chew of Cliveden, and rejoice with pride at the advent in 1801 of Charles Carroll the Fifth.
Charles the Fourth, of Homewood, has been described by a contemporary as follows: “Nothing in Greek art surpasses the perfect symmetry of his figure.” No less a person than Washington had asked Harriet Chew to remain in his presence while he sat for his portrait to Gilbert Stuart in order that his own face might “wear its most agreeable expression.” Therefore if the baby Charles the Fifth was not handsome it was neither the fault of his parents nor of the distinguished grandfather who immediately became his devoted slave.
The concerns of the estate, and the larger questions of the nation, had the Signer’s first attention. His avocations were to ride his lanes and woodland, to read Greek and Latin in the original—he was reading Cicero’s “De Senectute” at ninety-three; to preside over a growing flock of grandchildren at Homewood with his son, at Brooklandwood, where Mary Carroll Caton was bringing up the three stunning daughters whom society called the “American Graces”; and to spend much time in the company of his daughter Kitty’s husband, Robert Goodloe Harper. From time to time he was called upon to step into his earlier character as Signer. In 1824 he was invited, with Jefferson and Madison, the only survivors of that great company who fixed their names to the Declaration, to attend the anniversary of the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. His age forced him to decline, but he compromised by meeting Lafayette at Fort McHenry and lunching with him in a tent which had been Washington’s, and by attending a ball given in Lafayette’s honor at Colonel Howard’s “Belvedere.”
Few men of eighty-seven have shown such activity as was his; most men of his years would have given way to the misfortunes which now trooped out of the shadows. Charles Carroll the Fourth died; General Harper, the beloved son-in-law, followed. In the next year John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, and it was the sad duty of Charles the Third to mourn at their funeral. He was now the last of the Signers. At eighty-nine he signed a copy of the Declaration which is now held in the New York Public Library—and signed it in a handwriting as firm as it had been fifty years before; at ninety he laid the foundation stone of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad; at ninety-three the cornerstone of St. Charles’ College, near Doughoregan Manor. And by this time the patriarch had seen born into his grandson’s family a sixth Charles Carroll.
There are three ghosts at Doughoregan Manor. One is the shade of an ancient housekeeper, whose quiet tread may be heard in the corridors, and whose keys tinkle faintly when the house is still. Another is the spectral coach—its wheels grind on the driveway when death rides to claim a member of the household—the coach which swung up to the door on a still November day in 1832 when the Signer went to join his fathers. It is hardly dignified to call the third a ghost. A warm, lively, pervading spirit it is—that of the Signer himself, smiling down from his portrait on the walls. It beamed on Charles the Sixth through a long and active life until it beckoned to him in 1895. To the son of Charles Carroll VI, John Lee Carroll, it nodded: “Well done, my boy,” when he became Governor of Maryland, and to the seventh Charles it told again all that its cumulative history could convey of the philosophical guidance and binding parental attachment that has made Doughoregan Manor something more than a home. Charles Bancroft Carroll, the Eighth, “carries on” and injects typical enthusiasm into farming twenty-four hundred acres of the grant you will see in the hall on a map the first Charles Carroll drew.
You will feel the spirit strongly as you contemplate the Signer’s place of burial in the chapel where the countryside gathers each Sunday for services. You will sense the alliance between devotion to God and to profoundly national ideals, and recall the sympathetic correspondence between the Signer and his father, as you enter the Cardinal’s room, a gorgeous chamber decorated in red, containing a great mahogany bed where Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop John Carroll, and the Marquis de Lafayette have slept. In a mellow library are the books he read. Trophies over the door of a panelled dining-room, cups won at yachting, a friendly hound from the present master’s hunting pack at your feet—remember that the Signer believed that a clear mind was most likely to be found in a sound body. We may fairly conceive that when the house was to be renovated, as it has been four times in its history, the Signer laid a gentle hand upon the sleeve of the workmen and cautioned them so: “Paint, if you like. Replace, where the old has given all its service. But remember, sirs, this is and must be a home.” And in the fullest connotation of the word, it is a home, with old chairs to fit you, bright cretonnes at the windows, and friendly things about you to rest your eyes upon—the sort of a home that a lad like Charles Carroll the Ninth, who isn’t much interested in ancestors, likes to take refuge in when strangers grow inquisitive.