Dear Papa, Dear Charley: The Peregrinations of a Revolutionary Aristocrat, as Told by Charles Carroll of Carrollton and His Father, Charles Carroll of Annapolis, with Sundry Observations on Bastardy, Child-Rearing, Romance, Matrimony, Commerce, Tobacco, Slavery, and the Politics of Revolutionary America.

Volumes I, II, and III. Edited by Ronald Hoffman, Sally D. Mason, and Eleanor S. Darcy. (Chapel Hill and London: Published by the University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture; the Maryland Historical Society; and the Maryland State Archives, c. 2001. Pp. [lviii], 464; [xxii], 465-1149; [xx], 1151-651. $100.00 set, ISBN 0-8078-2649-9.)

Charles Carroll (later, of Carrollton) (1737-1832) was not quite eleven years old when his father Charles Carroll of Annapolis (1702-1782) sent him into exile from Maryland to France for his education. The boy, addressing his parents as "Dear Papa and Mama," reported on his progress and problems; replies from his father were addressed "Dear Charley"--hence, the title of this meticulously edited, extensively annotated collection, which includes letters between them and other family members, comments from major public figures of their day, related newspaper articles, and other relevant material on the lives of this significant but lesser-known family during the eighteenth century.

The Carroll family of Maryland were descendants of an Irish-Catholic immigrant who, with a commission from the proprietor as attorney general of the province, arrived in 1688. Shortly afterward, with the conversion of the colony to Royal status and the establishment of the Anglican Church, Catholics lost all political rights. Nonetheless, Charles Carroll the Settler successfully acquired and maintained a fortune in land and slaves. The family's economic status was further improved by "Papa" Charles Carroll of Annapolis. By the time of the Revolution the Carrolls were among the wealthiest people in the province, but their insecure status was worsened by the increasing anti-Catholic sentiment in the colony during the French and Indian War. Their choice for revolution and the danger to their fortune that came with that decision illuminates a peculiar aspect of the shift in allegiances by wealthy plantation owners in the South. For the Carrolls, revolution offered potential release from the discrimination they suffered because of their Catholicism. They had to balance the possibility of independence--which they hoped would free them from legal and social disabilities--against the threat to their property if the war were lost. The rocky path of negotiation between those conflicting imperatives gradually unfolds in the correspondence between father and son during the war years.

The letters are arranged chronologically, beginning with Charley's sojourn in France from 1748 to 1759 and continuing during his subsequent five years in London to study law. Those early letters document the boy's growth from childhood through adolescence under the shadow of his father's effective (although long-distance) control. To some extent, that control was maintained by Charles Carroll of Annapolis's refusal to marry the boy's mother, an act that could make the son a legitimate heir to the Carroll fortune (the "bastardy" of the title). Not until 1757, after they had lived together for at least twenty years, did Carroll marry Charley's mother, Elizabeth Brooke.

The editors include several documents and letters that cast light on Carroll's reasons for choosing to marry when he did. This material supports the argument put forward by editor Ronald Hoffman in his Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500-1782 (Chapel Hill, 2000) that new threats to Catholics in Maryland in the mid-1750s and the need to put his affairs in order in the event of his death or emigration were Carroll's main motivations in legitimizing the union. Such actions on the elder Carroll's part are certainly also suggestive of his controlling personality and hint at the problems faced by the younger man in dealing with his father in later life.

The young man finally returned to Annapolis in 1765, four years after the death of the mother he had not seen since the age of ten, and the ensuing correspondence with his English friends details the problems of "adjustment" to provincial life after his sixteen-year residence in Europe. In a short time he sided with anti-British sentiment in Maryland, and as a delegate to the Continental Congress he signed the Declaration of Independence for his state. During the early war years, when "Charley" positioned himself with the revolutionaries, his role in the political arena ran counter to his father's single-minded goal of amassing and retaining the family fortune. The letters detail the metamorphosis of the younger Carroll from a supporter of his father's ultraconservative views on economic and political issues to his discreet accommodation to the necessities of war.

These three volumes, the first of a projected six-volume collection of selected letters and papers, follow the family until the death of Charles Carroll of Annapolis in 1782. The final three volumes will focus on the younger Carroll's personal life and career through his death in 1832. The documents are extensively annotated to identify persons, places, and incidents mentioned, along with full bibliographic information on the sources used and the location of the original documents. For ease of use, each set of annotations immediately follows the text. Also adding to the usefulness of the collection is an extremely detailed index.

The editors have made a special effort to make these documents accessible to the lay as well as academic public. At the end of volume III are three sets of appendixes. The first gives genealogical charts of the various branches of the Carroll family in Ireland and Maryland; the second is an annotated list of books read by the Carroll men or known to be in their possession by 1782; and a third brings together all the surviving censuses of the slaves in seven inventories taken of the Carrolls' various estates between 1773 and 1782. This last, which the editors consider "among the most unique and valuable manuscripts within the corpus of Carroll material," are exactly that, not only offering insights into the "organizational structure of a thriving Chesapeake agricultural establishment" (Vol. I, p. liv), but also providing information about the individual lives of these bondpeople that will be of use to those tracing their roots to these particular plantations. The inventories note the names of individual slaves, their ages and genealogies, their skills, and their locations within the various Carroll properties.

This long-awaited publication (it has been in the works since the early 1980s) of the Carroll family papers fulfills its promise of a scholarly edition of materials detailing the personal and public lives of a wealthy and influential Catholic family in early America.

ELAINE G. BRESLAW

University of Tennessee