By Blood and By Faith

One of them is related to me by blood and the other by faith. Their names are written together, one directly above the other, on the most important document of the United States of America: the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Stone - the third name directly below that of John Hancock - is reportedly related to me on my mother’s side. However, it is the man directly under Stone whom I want to say a few words about.

If you look at all the signers of the Declaration there is only one who says where he is from: Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Why is this? In his book Render Unto Caesar, Charles J. Chaput quotes that the signers risked “their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor”, but when Hancock asked Carroll to sign it was an even bigger gamble for the Maryland resident but he “Most willingly” did it. By doing so Carroll broke Maryland’s law. It was illegal for him to be politically active or earn a living in his profession as an attorney. He could not even vote for those who could run for office. Carroll was a second-class citizen in the colony of his birth.

        

When Maryland was first founded by adherents of Carroll’s Church fleeing persecution in England, Christians could worship as they saw fit. However, within a few years this all changed when new immigrants arrived and established Anglicanism as the colony’s religion. Due to Old World animosities, laws were established to stifle the growth and influence of Carroll’s religion.

By advertising where he lived on the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll was leaving no doubt as to where to find him if the American experiment failed. He was not only declaring independence from British rule, but also from religious intolerance in Maryland. Even if the colonists succeeded, he might still have failed to secure his own religious freedom within America. It was a gamble all the way around, but one that paid off for the only Catholic signer of the Declaration of Independence, who was willing to prove with his blood to suspicious colleagues that loyalty to his faith and to the American cause were not in opposition. To the contrary, when Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in America 55 years later he concluded that, “…American Catholics are both the most obedient of the faithful and the most independent citizens.” As it turned out, Catholicism did not oppose American democracy but instead strengthened it.

        

After John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, the only man to announce where he lived and whose loyalty was undoubtedly held under the most suspicion by his colleagues lived on as the last signer of the Declaration of Independence.