Anna Ella Carroll did what now?
I was reading a book recently that casually referenced "Anne [sic] Carroll, who helped devise military strategies for U.S. Grant." As someone who spends a lot of time diving into nineteenth century American history, PARTICULARLY focusing on women's history, I was shocked that I had never heard of Anna Carroll. So I went looking for more information about her, which I now pass onto you.
Anna Carroll was an "an American politician, pamphleteer and lobbyist." Yes. You read that right. She was born in 1815 in Maryland. Not much of her life is known until age 35, which is amazing, because she did so many interesting things AFTER that age (yes, I am 35 and am looking for encouragement). However. While Carroll wrote scholarly and prodigiously against the enslavement of other humans and freed the people she and her family had enslaved in 1860, she also supported the Know-Nothing Party, which was pro-Union, yes, but also anti-Catholic and virulently anti-immigrant (this was around the time there were huge waves of Irish people coming into the country due to the Great Famine).
QUICK ASIDE because I'm still mad about it -- did you know that Queen Victoria handled the Great Famine so abysmally that not only did she contribute what I would call an "okay-not-great" amount to the people under her care who were literally starving to death, but: "We do have documentation that the Sultan of Turkey, who was himself a very young man at the time, offered to give £10,000 but in Constantinople, the British embassy went to his people to say that it would offend royal protocol so he reduced his donation.” (x)
"Offend royal protocol" meaning Victoria was donating £2,000 and it would make her look bad. Down! with! Queen Victoria!
Ok, back to Anna Carroll. SO. She was supporting this party, but then when Lincoln started coming up, she was with him all. the way. It's 1860. She's fighting to keep Maryland from seceding, she's fighting to keep other states from seceding. When a dipstick from Kentucky said Lincoln violated the Constitution re Fort Sumter, she wrote a pamphlet "widely circulated by the Lincoln administration" in which she "made informed legal arguments later used by Attorney General Edward Bates, stating that Lincoln had acted in accordance with the Constitution."
1861! She travels to St Louis with a SPY and gets info from a librarian that helps the Union Army plan its next steps. "Years later, Assistant Secretary of War Scott and Senator Wade testified to her critical role before Congress." She spent a lot of the post-Civil War years before her death trying to get paid for all the writing she did for the Union, but guess what? NOPE. Did not get paid.
So highlights are: critically helped with early Civil War strategy due to her excellence in the area of research and chatting up librarians. Was fully behind Lincoln. Never got paid.
To read more about Carroll, check out:
Was Anna Ella Carroll the forgotten heroine of the Civil War? by Caitlin Gibson
A Military Genius: Life of Anna Ellen Carroll of Maryland by Sarah Ellen Blackwell (written in 1891)