Daniel Carroll Jr. (July 22, 1730 – May 7, 1796) was an American politician and plantation owner from Maryland and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.

Then, after a tour of Europe, he sailed home and soon married Eleanor Carroll, apparently a first cousin, whose grandparents were Daniel O'Caroll and Dorothy Kennedy from Ireland.

As a slaveholder and large landholder, he was initially concerned that the Revolution might fail economically and bring about his family's financial ruin and mob rule.

[1] At the time, Maryland, though Catholic-founded, had (like the rest of the Thirteen Colonies) issued laws excluding Roman Catholics from holding public office.

[3] Carroll dropped his opposition only after Virginia relinquished its claims on land north of the Ohio River to Congress, and on February 2, 1781, Maryland became the thirteenth and final state to ratify the Articles.

Like his good friend James Madison of Virginia, Carroll was convinced that a strong central government was needed to regulate commerce among the states and with other nations.

He was the author of the presumption—enshrined in the Constitution as a closing article – that powers not specifically delegated to the federal government were reserved to the states or to the people.

[6] He defended the Constitution in the "Maryland Journal", most notably in his response to the arguments advanced by the well-known Anti-Federalist and Patriot delegate Samuel Chase.

Given his concern for economic and fiscal stability, he voted for the assumption of state debts accumulated during the war by the federal government to establish a new level of financial confidence of credible public debts as proposed by Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton as part of a "grand bargain" with Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, for Northerners to support locating the new national capital in the upper South, along the Potomac River.