He returned to the New World as the controversy over the Stamp Act was coming into full bloom. That levy on assorted uses of paper, from playing cards to newspapers, drew ire throughout the colonies in a preview of the arguments about taxation without representation that would gain their full expression in the years ahead. In her 1942 biography "Charles Carroll of Carrollton," author Ellen Hart Smith found ample evidence that Carroll was able to articulate well the arguments against the Stamp Act and did so — but only in his private correspondence to friends and business associates in England. Publicly, he stayed out of Maryland political life, instead devoting his attentions to marrying and managing his father's massive estate (which included, it should be noted, some hundreds of slaves). He at least professed not to mind the exclusion, writing on various occasions that holding public positions would inevitably erode a man's virtue.