CARROLL, CHARLES American political leader, of Irish ancestry, was born at Annapolis, Md., on Sept. 19, 173 7. He was educated abroad in French Jesuit colleges, studied law at Bourges, Paris and London, and in Feb. 1765, returned to Maryland, where an estate known as "Carrollton," in Frederick county, was settled upon him ; he always signed his name as "Charles Carroll of Carrollton." Before and during the Revolu tionary War, he was a whig or patriot leader, and as such was natu rally a member of the various committees of correspondence, com mittees of observation, council of safety, provincial convention and Constitutional Convention (1776). From until 180o he was a member of the Maryland senate. In April– June 1776 he, with Samuel Chase and Benjamin Franklin, was a member of the commission fruitlessly sent by the Continental Congress to Canada for the purpose of persuading the Canadians to join the 13 revolting colonies. From 1776 to 1779 he sat in the Continental Congress, rendering important services as a member of the board of war, and signing on Aug. 2, the Declaration of Independence, though he had not been elected until the day on which that document was adopted. He outlived all of the other signers. He was a member of the U.S. Senate from 1789 to 1792. From 1801 until his death, at Baltimore, on Nov. 14, 1832, he lived in retirement, his last public act being the formal ceremony of starting the construction of the Baltimore and Ohio railway (July 4, 1828). In politics, after the formation of parties, he was a staunch Federalist. Of unusual ability, high character and great wealth, he exercised a powerful influence, particularly among his co-religionists of the Roman Catholic faith, and he used it to secure the independence of the colonies and to establish a stable central government.
See the Life by Kate Mason Rowland (1898) ; Lewis A. Leonard. Life of Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1918) ; and "Charles Carroll; the Catholic `Signer'," in Catholic Mind, vol. xxii., p. (1924).