Reviews of Books

This complex and fascinating book, a linked study of Charles Carroll the Settler (1661–1720), his son Charles Carroll of Annapolis (1702–1782), and the early years of his grandson Charles Carroll of Carrollton (1737–1832), is the first installment of Ronald Hoffman's multivolume presentation of the Carroll dynasty in Maryland as seen through their family papers. In 2001, Hoffman and his co-editors Sally D. Mason and Eleanor S. Darcy will publish three documentary volumes of Carroll papers up to 1782 under the title 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. This editorial team is now working on the Carroll papers beyond 1782, and Hoffman is planning to produce a second narrative volume focusing on Charles Carroll of Carrollton from 1782 until his death in 1832, to be accompanied by another three documentary volumes of Carroll papers spanning the same fifty-year period. An ambitious venture, indeed, and as a documentary editor myself I applaud the striking degree of interplay between editing and interpretive analysis in this project.

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Hoffman's basic argument is that the Carrolls, who became the wealthiest family in eighteenth-century Maryland, were obsessed by their status as persecuted Catholics in an intolerant Protestant society and were galvanized by their memory of their former freedom as proud Gaelic warrior chiefs before the English stole their castles, their land, and their independence in Ireland. His 300-year narrative is shaped disproportionately, with a prologue covering two centuries of Irish background, two chapters focusing on Carroll the Settler, and nine intermixed chapters on Carroll of Annapolis and Carroll of Carrollton. The shape of the book reflects the source materials available to the author. Important as the Carrolls' memory of their Irish princely status is for Hoffman's interpretation, he can find only shadowy evidence about the actual doings of the O'Carroll clan in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Carroll the Settler comes through as a three-dimensional figure, but he too has to be viewed partially, because he left almost no personal papers. For Carroll of Annapolis and Carroll of Carrollton, by contrast, Hoffman has at his disposal a rich trove of family correspondence.

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