Ronald Hoffman (in collaboration with Sally D. Mason), Princes of Ireland, Planters of Maryland: A Carroll Saga, 1500-1782. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. xxvi + 429 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8078-2556-5.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Evan Haefeli, Department of History, Princeton University.

This meticulous reconstruction of the rise of the Carroll family fortune has the material elements of a great Jane Austen novel. But Ronald Hoffman, the Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and professor of history at the College of William and Mary, and Sally D. Mason, the associate editor of the Charles Carroll of Carrollton Papers, are sober scholars, unwilling to reach far beyond the evidence (primarily the rich correspondence and accounts of the Carroll patriarchs). They keep their story tightly focused on the efforts of several generations of Carrolls to accumulate and preserve what was, by the time of the Revolution, one of the great North American fortunes. Their story has the stuff of sensationalism: fierce and proud Irish Jacobites defying the irresistible winds of Whiggish change; a vast fortune built on the brutal exploitation of other humans as slaves; a planter living out of wedlock with the mother of his son; an opium-addicted wife; a flirtatious husband and (as befits the Chesapeake) a regular round of morbidity. But the scandals and controversy do not overwhelm this Carroll saga anymore than it did the Carrolls themselves.

The book ably reconstructs the business and political aspirations of three generations of Carroll men named Charles: "The Settler," "Papa," and "Charley." The Settler was an unreconstructed Jacobite who fled to Maryland in the dark days following the Glorious Revolution. Because of his unrelenting adherence to the Catholic religion, his son was deprived of the active social and political life he had once known. Instead, Papa focused obsessively and quite successfully on maximizing the economic opportunities available to a wealthy Chesapeake planter in order to pass on to his son, Charley, the greatest possible estate. Charley, educated in France and England, returned to Maryland full of Whiggish political ideas and Enlightenment philosophy. Neither prompted him to give up his Catholic beliefs, which the Carrolls had stubbornly clung to for centuries. But both equipped him to take on a leading role in challenging British Imperial rule as a Maryland Senator and signer of the Declaration of Independence (the only Catholic one to boot).

Given Catholicism's powerful role in Carroll family history, it seems almost ironic that Charley's revolutionary activism had nothing to do with the religion of his ancestors. The Carrolls, like all other Maryland Catholics, had been excluded from the halls of power ever since Maryland's proprietors disavowed Catholics and Catholicism in the early eighteenth century. But the extraordinary circumstances of the revolution rendered their religion irrelevant if not a downright asset for negotiating with French allies. Highly sympathetic to the Carrolls' perspective, the bulk of the book thus confines itself to the world as they knew it: tending their fields, marketing their tobacco, lending money, investing in an ironworks, and passing on the legacy to the next heir. The Carrolls' marginal status led Papa to develop a planter's Platonic ideal: a self-sufficient system of interlocking plantations and investment projects designed to generate profit from a diversity of sources while providing insulation from the vagaries of markets and politics. He succeeded admirably. One walks away from the book with much the same impression as John Adams, when he first met Charley at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia in 1774: "a very sensible Gentleman, a Roman catholic, and of the first Fortune in America" (p. 353).

There is more to this story than the steady and determined growth of the Carroll family fortune. The author dissects the long and passionate relationship between Papa and Charley with a perceptive analysis of its psychological dynamics. Their roles as employers of overseers, as landlords over tenants, as slaveholders and as husbands all receive attention. The Carroll case illustrates the easy compatibility of diverse forms of exploitation in colonial America. Slaves, indentured artisans, and tenants are shown to coexist quite efficiently under the stern eye of their Carroll masters. But therein lies the limitation of this expansive book. It reproduces the Carroll point of view so effectively that merchants, tenants, slaves, wives, ironworkers, overseers, even the American Revolution appear primarily as threats to or challenges for the Carroll estate. One could imagine using the Carrolls as a unique device (as disenfranchised but successful planters) for getting at a broader context, of the Atlantic system, for example. But that is not what the book sets out to do. In scope impressive, in depth astounding, A Carroll Family Saga is an exemplary study of an ancient preoccupation: the preservation of family and fortune in the face of adversity.

Evan Haefeli is a Lecturer in Princeton University's History Department. His dissertation is a study of the politics of religious toleration in the middle colonies.