Daniel Carroll was born on July 22, 1730. Among the immigrant Carrolls of the sixteenth century were two descendants of a common ancestor, one of whom, Charles Carroll, established the line which was to find its greatest representative in Charles Carroll of Carrollton, and the other, Kean Carroll, was the father of Daniel Carroll of Upper Marlboro.
In 1742 Daniel was sent for his education to Flanders where he remained for six years.
Of Carroll's activities between the years 1753 and 1781 very little has been recorded. Upon the death of his father he probably fell heir to a large share of a considerable estate for he is spoken of much later as "a man of large fortune and influence in his state" (Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States, selected and arranged by Charles C. Tansill, 1927, p. 104). In 1781 he was elected a delegate to the Continental Congress, signing the Articles of Confederation on March 1 of that year, and from that time until his death he was an active participant in the leading events. On May 26, 1787, he was appointed a delegate to the Constitutional Convention. In company with all the great property-holders of that assembly he worked for a strongly centralized government.
During the struggle for ratification he wrote a judicious and persuasive letter to the Maryland Journal in answer to a letter written by Samuel Chase who had advised his countryment to delay ratification (P. L. Ford, editor, Essays on the Constitution of the United States, 1892, pp. 325-36). Carroll was elected senator from Maryland to the First Congress of the United States and voted for the assumption bill and the bill to locate the District of Columbia on the banks of the Potomac. His residence at what is now Forest Glen, Md. , near the District, and his friendship with Washington probably induced the latter on January 22, 1791, to name him one of the three commissioners to survey and limit a part of the territory of the ten-mile square. The fact that he was an uncle of Daniel Carroll of Duddington who owned considerable property in the area affected, and that he himself owned tracts near-by may have been partly responsible for the embarrassing complications which finally resulted in the resignation of L'Enfant. Carroll served as commissioner until May 1795 when his age and feeble health caused him to resign. He died at his home at Rock Creek, in the present village of Forest Glen, Maryland either May 6 or 7, 1796.
He was one of the very few Roman Catholics among the Founders.
He supported the American Revolution, served in the Confederation Congress, was a delegate to the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 which wrote the Constitution, and was a U. S. Representative in the First Congress. Daniel Carroll was one of five men to sign both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution.
Quotations: Opposing the payment of members of Congress by the states he declared, "The dependence of both Houses on the State Legislatures would be compleat. The new government in this form is nothing more than a second edition of Congress in two volumes, instead of one, and perhaps with very few amendments".
Carroll married Elizabeth Carroll of Duddington, probably a first cousin of Charles Carroll of Carrollton
