Biography

Anna Ella Carroll was born in Somerset County, Maryland, on August 29,1815, to Thomas King Carroll and Juliana Stevenson Carroll. Her paternal Grandfather was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and her father was Governor of Maryland in 1830-1831. She was educated by her father, and became involved socially and politically in the 1840s. She knew Presidents Taylor and Fillmore through connections in the Whig party. Carroll was a lobbyist, author, Union supporter and abolitionist. During the American Civil War she was an advisor to President Lincoln, although she never got credit for her ideas.  She published two significant books during the war: The War Powers of the General Government (1861) and The Relation of the National Government to the Revolted Citizens Defined (1862). Both were published at her own personal expense. In these books, she outlined a constitutional theory under which the secession of the Souther states and the formation of the Confederacy were illegal and invalid, which was the theory that Lincoln exercised during wartime and which he pressed against the competing claims of Congress. Carroll claimed to also have helped in military strategies, but her role is controversial. After the assassination of Lincoln, she continued to work with reconstruction efforts, but her efforts were largely ignored after Lincoln's death. She appealed to Congress for recognition and compensation for her contributions to the War effort. In the 1880s, Congress passed a bill to put Anna Carroll's name on the pension rolls and to pay her $50.00 a month for life for the, "important military service rendered by her during the late Civil War." Carroll retired and died in Washington, DC, on February 19, 1894. She is buried in the family plot in Cambridge, Maryland.