By Jon Brown, Christian Post Reporter
When Charles Carroll arrived in Philadelphia to represent Maryland in the Continental Congress, John Hancock asked the 38-year-old delegate if he was ready to sign the Declaration of Independence.
“Most willingly,” Charles replied, to which a bystander reportedly remarked, “There go a few millions.”
The anecdote, which first appeared in an early 19th-century biography of the Declaration’s signers, is likely apocryphal, but gained traction as a believable assessment of the risk Charles Carroll of Carrollton assumed by inking his name on the parchment.
Though largely forgotten by history, Charles Carroll was the longest-living signer and had perhaps the most to lose of the 56 men who pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor to the cause of independence. Boasting wealth equivalent to approximately $325 million today, he was reputedly the richest man in the colonies when they broke from Great Britain.
As the only Roman Catholic signer, Carroll also had much to gain for himself and his posterity by advocating the importance of religious liberty in the new American republic.
‘Anywhere so long as there be freedom’
Born Sept. 19, 1737, in Annapolis, Charles Carroll of Carrollton bore the name of both his father, Charles Carroll of Annapolis, and his grandfather, Charles Carroll the Settler, who immigrated to Maryland in 1688 to escape English persecution against Roman Catholics in Ireland after the Glorious Revolution.
Though originally founded by the Catholic Calvert family as a haven of religious toleration, Maryland became one of the least tolerant colonies for Catholics after its so-called Protestant Revolution overthrew the Catholic proprietary government in 1689.
Anti-Catholic “penal laws” followed, stripping Catholics of the right to vote, hold office, practice law, worship publicly, or educate their children in their faith. They faced double taxation on land and were reduced to conducting Mass in secret. Within months of arriving to serve as Maryland’s attorney general, Charles’ grandfather was stripped of his title and imprisoned for refusing to renounce his Catholic faith.