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Reviews of Books
Constructing Colonialism: Carrolling in the Late Colonial British World
Jack P. Greene
| 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. Edited by Ronald Hoffman, Sally D. Mason, and Eleanor S. Darcy. 3 vols. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, the Maryland Historical Society, and the Maryland State Archives. 1,768 pages. $100.00 (cloth).
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How migrants and later generations of settlers constructed and understood their activities will probably always be a subject of fascination for students of the colonial ventures of the early modern era. How these people conceived of what they were doing in America, how they evaluated the new societies in which they lived, what larger meanings they assigned to the course of their lives, how their internalization of those meanings structured their behaviors, how they related to the larger transoceanic worlds to which they continued to be attached, how they explained their encroachments on indigenous peoples and their lands, how they thought about their exploitation of the nonfree people who supplied so much of the manpower they used in their endeavors—these are just some of the prominent questions associated with this subject. Surviving records in the form of family correspondence and other papers constitute one of the principal sources for the analysis of these questions, and this handsomely published three-volume set will be of great utility to scholars interested in these questions as well as a host of related subjects. |
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In the eighteenth century, the Carroll family of Maryland began to build up an enormous family archive, much of which is housed at the Maryland Historical Society. Edited by Ronald Hoffman, Sally D. Mason, and Eleanor S. Darcy, these volumes contain a large portion of the records from the MHS and other archives in America and abroad, more than eight hundred documents. Three appendices consisting of genealogical charts, various Carroll library and book lists, and several slave inventories, the usual editorial apparatus, including a chronology and short introduction to the eight chronological chapters into which the editors have divided the material, and nineteen illustrations round out the volumes. The set lacks a general interpretive introduction. For that purpose the user is advised to read the principal editor's monograph on the Carroll family during the colonial and Revolutionary eras, Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland.1 The editors supply a brief description of their "principles of selection" (xlix), telling the reader what kinds of items they included but nothing about what, if anything, they excluded. As the title suggests, the core of the volume consists of the surviving letters exchanged by Charles Carroll of Annapolis (CCA) and his son, Charles Carroll of Carrollton (CCC), from 1748, when the younger Charles, not yet in his teens, went to France for his education, to 1782, when the elder Charles died. It also contains a few documents relating to CCC's marriages, his expense accounts while studying abroad, three wills, and a large number of letters and other papers included to situate the father-son relationship "in the wider context of late colonial and Revolutionary Maryland and the emerging United States" (l). The annotations seem ample, albeit the editors identified none of the three literary passages I quote later. |
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