Memorial of Anna Ella Carroll, Praying for Compensation for Services Rendered to the United States during the Civil War.

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Memorial Of Anna Ella Carroll, Of Maryland, Praying For Compensation For Services Rendered To The United States During The Late Civil War

Anna Ella Carroll (August 29, 1815 – February 19, 1894) was an American politician, pamphleteer and lobbyist. She played a significant role as an adviser to the Lincoln presidential cabinet during the American Civil War (1861-1865). She also wrote many pamphlets criticizing slavery. She died on February 19, 1894, at the age of 79.

In the fall of 1861, Carroll traveled to St. Louis to work with secret agent, Judge Lemuel Dale Evans, who had been appointed by Secretary of State William H. Seward to assess the feasibility of a Union invasion of Texas. Carroll worked on her second war powers paper at the Mercantile Library. She also gathered information from the head librarian, who was the brother of Confederate General Joe Johnston. She took military matters into her own hands when she initiated an interview with a riverboat pilot, Capt. Charles M. Scott, about the feasibility of the planned Union Mississippi River expedition. Scott told her that he and other pilots thought the advance ill-conceived because there were many defensible points on the Mississippi River that could be reinforced. It could take years just to open up the river to navigation by trying to broach those points. Carroll questioned Scott about the feasibility of using the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers for a Union invasion of the South. Scott provided Carroll with technical navigation details. Based on this information, Carroll wrote a memorandum to Assistant Secretary of War Thomas A. Scott and Attorney General Edward Bates in late November 1861, advocating that the combined army-navy forces change their invasion route from the Mississippi to the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers. Meanwhile, in St. Louis, Major General Henry W. Halleck was planning the same movement without Lincoln's knowledge. Upon learning that Confederates were possibly sending reinforcements west from Virginia, Halleck ordered Brigadier General Ulysses S. Grant and Flag Officer Andrew Hull Foote to immediately move on Fort Henry and Fort Donelson on the Tennessee and Cumberland rivers in a telegram dated January 30. Scott was dispatched to the Midwest to mobilize reinforcements for Halleck on the night of January 29. On February 6, Fort Henry fell to Foote's gunboats and on February 13, Fort Donelson fell to Grant's and Foote's combined forces. These comprised the first two "real victories" of the Civil War for the Union, as Gen. William Sherman wrote later. At the time Carroll's role in the effort was kept secret. Immediately following the war, she gave credit for the plan to Capt. Charles Scott in a letter printed in a leading Washington newspaper.[4] Years later, Assistant Secretary of War Scott and Senator Wade testified to her critical role before Congress.[citation needed] The signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by Francis Bicknell Carpenter, 1864. Showing the empty chair, believed by some to be an allusion to Carroll. During the remainder of the war, Carroll worked with Lincoln on issues pertaining to emancipation and colonization of American slaves. She and Aaron Columbus Burr lobbied him to establish a colony of freedmen in British Honduras, today Belize. Although Carroll had freed her own slaves, she lobbied Lincoln against issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. She feared that this action would cost the support of Southern Unionists and resistance to the Union would be stiffened. But, she wrote that Lincoln did have the constitutional right to free the slaves as a temporary war measure under his power as commander-in-chief, since the proclamation would help cripple the organized forces of the rebellion. Yet the measure was not a transfer of title and would have to be suspended once the war emergency ended. To free the slaves required a constitutional amendment.

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