Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500-1782. (Book Reviews).

Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500-1782. By Ronald Hoffman in collaboration with Sally D. Mason. (Chapel Hill and London: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, c. 2000. Pp. xxvi, 429. $39.95, ISBN 0-8078-2556-5.)

To any parochial school graduate, the name of Charles Carroll of Carrollton has an instant resonance as the only Catholic who signed the Declaration of Independence. Fewer people know that his family was the richest in Maryland or that he was the last signer of the Declaration to die. Early American specialists may know about Carroll's fierce quarrels with his father, Charles Carroll of Annapolis, over the need for sacrifice by wealthy Marylanders during the difficult early years of independence, or with Samuel Chase about the right course for the new nation. Beyond that, however, Carroll and his family have been second-tier figures.

In Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland Ronald Hoffman and Sally D. Mason present a compelling account not just of Charles the Signer but of the entire Carroll family. Their saga begins with the losing struggle of minor seventeenth-century Irish princes to retain both their deeply held Catholicism and their powerful positions. It ends with the nineteenth-century return to Ireland of the Signer's granddaughter Mary Ann, still Catholic but now vicereine. This upper-crust family's experience--which included dispossession in their country of origin, fierce efforts to gain and hold property where they settled, discrimination, and finally, political emancipation--is a story that Hoffman and Mason relate in a genuinely Atlantic context.

The authors demonstrate real insight into post-Tridentine Catholic theology, sacramentology, and ecclesiology, as well as into the mentality that belonging to a beleaguered minority brought. They probe how that mentality weighed on three successive generations of American Carrolls: Charles Carroll the Settler (1661-1720), Charles Carroll of Annapolis (1702-1782), and Charles the Signer, of Carrollton (1737-1832). Hoffman and Mason write about grand issues of transition: from medieval to early modern, from Ireland to America, and from colonial status to independence. They also write about the intimate relations between domineering fathers and sons who grew up to be like their fathers and between a cold husband and his unhappy, unhealthy, lonely, laudanum-ridden wife.

With such large topics, the result could be sprawling. What holds it together is the continuing determination of male Carrolls to hold on to identity, property, and political power. We meet them when their class of Irish country midland gentry were coming to terms with English determination to conquer and reform their country. It might have been possible to safeguard the family's entire position by becoming Protestant, if only through the transparent device of having male heirs convert while the rest of the family remained Catholic. Many did choose that route.

But Charles Carroll the Settler would not. In the aftermath of outright English military conquests, the Settler's only choice was to emigrate. Maryland, whose proprietary Calvert family were Catholics, seemed to offer haven, particularly after the Settler became the proprietor's designated attorney-general and agent. With office and land, the route to the family's reestablishment on its own terms seemed open as well. But Protestant rebellion in Maryland, the Calverts' loss of governmental rights, and the proprietors' apostasy from Rome left Catholic gentry like the Carrolls in a precarious situation. In what seemed a repetition of their Irish nightmare, they possessed wealth but lacked political rights, and they technically remained vulnerable to prosecution for following their faith. "Technical" is the operative word, however: Charles Carroll of Carrollton spent years abroad being schooled both by Jesuits at St. Omer and by barristers in the Inner Temple.

A comparison springs to mind with the young William Byrd II, who also tarried far from the Chesapeake. But whereas Byrd exemplifies the problem of abandoning English dreams, "Charley" Carroll knew he was a Marylander, however long he spent elsewhere. Byrd lost both parents during his English schooling. Carroll lost his mother while a student abroad. His relationship with his father became the most important in his life, even when they quarreled.

Charley's marriage to Mary Darnall was another matter. "Molly" came into his life as a quasi-servant, and though she bore him several children, he never treated her as remotely his equal. Once, when she had passed through a life-threatening crisis, he seemed to feel more grief over the death of a horse than worry about her. When she and his father died within weeks of each other in 1782, the loss of his father seemed to rankle Charley more. He never remarried. As with Thomas Jefferson, one is bound to wonder why--and without resorting to cheap psychoanalysis, Hoffman and Mason suggest some answers.

The saga of the Carrolls says important things about religion, wealth, social class, political awakening, and gender over two centuries. Hoffman and Mason transform a family narrative whose moment of glory was a sectarian vignette in 1776 into fully realized scenes within a wider drama of religious strife, colonization, revolution, as well as tense relations across generations and between the sexes. The Carrolls' saga is not the American story in miniature. But it is a deeply American account of transformation and conflict, one that Ronald Hoffman and Sally Mason have told very well.