Anna Ella Carroll and the Historians

Anna Ella Carroll and the Historians Janet L. Coryell The legend of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland is one most students of the American Civil War run into sooner or later. Miss Carroll was a mid-nineteenth -century political pamphleteer and writer who worked for Millard Fillmore and the American, or Know-Nothing, party in the 1 850s. In 1 861 , when the war began, she wrote letters to newspapers supporting Abraham Lincoln, and eventually won an oral contract with the War Department to produce pamphlets in support of the president's actions. In November 1 86 1, she allegedly came up with the Union's strategy to invade the Confederacy in the west by going up the Tennessee River, instead of down the Mississippi River. The Tennessee and its companion river, the Cumberland , were not strongly fortified and provided the Union with a route of invasion that would drive the Confederates out ofa largely untenable position in Tennessee and relieve the Union loyalists, particularly in the eastern part of that state. Furthermore, if Union gunboats were damaged in any action on the rivers, they would float downstream, north into Union territory . The plan was good, commonsense military strategy. Determined to milk her agreement with the War Department for all it was worth (Carroll's finances were always precarious), she went to Tennessee early in the war. She talked to a riverboat pilot named Charles Scott, returned to Washington, and drew up a map of operations for the Tennessee campaign. She met with the assistant secretary of war, Thomas A. Scott, with whom she believed she had an agreement, and presented her plan. Unbeknownst to Carroll, however, plans by the military were already well underway to follow the route she suggested. General Ulysses S. Grant had captured Smithville and Paducah at the mouths of the rivers, and was awaiting gunboats to venture up the rivers into Confederate territory. By February, when Grant and Admiral Andrew Foote captured Forts Henry Civil War History, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, © 1989 by the Kent State University Press ANNA ELLA CARROLL121 and Donelson on the rivers, then drove toward the Confederate rail junction at Corinth, Mississippi, Carroll was elated. It was clear to her that the Union had used her plan—obviously so, since they had done exactly what she had told Scott to tell them to do. Convinced ofthe value ofher military strategy, Carroll presented a bill to Congress shortly after the war's end for strategical services rendered. The Congressional Committee on Military Affairs turned her down flat. Carroll was enraged at her treatment and certain of two things: she had saved the Union from destruction, and the only reason she was not being properly rewarded was because she was a woman—and a civilian. She spent much ofthe rest ofher life attempting to convince Congress that she should be paid generously for her work. Her numerous petitions and various suggestions for payment eventually reached the sum of $250,000 and an accompanying rank of major general. No shrinking violet, Carroll met each congressional rejection of her claim with a new attempt to let the rest ofthe world in on hersecret strategy. She petitioned Congress, she issued pamphlets, she wrote to newspapers. Carroll's cause appealed to large numbers ofpeople because she portrayed herselfas a lone woman fighting against a vast military bureaucracy to gain credit for her ideas which had served the military well even ifthey had come from a woman. Easily romanticized, her cause was adopted by suffragists and until the turn of the century, their organizations and periodicals supported Carroll as a prime example of man's inhumanity to woman. Leading feminists such as Sarah Ellen Blackwell, Lucinda Chandler, and Susan B. Anthony wrote on her behalf. ' After Carroll's pathetic death in 1894 (she died alone, paralyzed, and destitute), her story was left to the historians. Their work was twofold. They tried to sort out Carroll's story and its connection to the truth. And most also tried to use Carroll's history to make their own comments about history and the role ofwomen. What Carroll had done became less important than what she symbolized. The interpretation of Carroll...