Neither Heroine nor Fool: Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland (review)

BOOK REVIEWS157 as utterly distinctive, Wilson overlooks and disregards too much evidence provided by numerous scholars such as David Potter, Mills Thornton, and Lacy Ford that southerners shared many values and ideals with other Americans, and that the white South was emphatically not a cultural monolith. Thus, I commend Wilson for an excellent study of a fascinating individual, but I question his overall interpretation. William J. Cooper, Jr. Louisiana State University Neither Heroine nor Fool: Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland. By Janet L. Coryell. (Kent, Ohio and London: The Kent State University Press, 1989. Pp. xv, 177. $22.00.) Hyperbole is no stranger to fame. In Anna Ella Carroll that art form found a marvelous mixture of talent, intelligence, personality, and aggressiveness . Carroll achieved a lasting "fame" by claiming that it was she who authored the Tennessee plan which, as she claimed, led to the invasion of that state in 1862, thereby saved the Union, and brought about the Confederacy's downfall. But for her gender she would, in turn, have received the recognition of authorship that she justly deserved. The legend of "Lincoln's Lady Strategist" has long intrigued readers of popular history and has remained at times a source of heated controversy, even though most historians have long discounted it. However, for Carroll the legend would be one of her most successful and enduring selfpromotional projects in a rather colorful career. Anna Carroll, born on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in 1815, was a member of a lesser branch of the distinguished Carroll family. Her father, Thomas King Carroll, served briefly as governor of that state. Sadly for the family he was also a poor manager and failed in a number of careers. Finances were always precarious for them and would remain a dominant factor in Anna's life. Forced to help support the family, she initially established a school, but using her pen and political connections, she began a career as a political writer that was more suited to her talents. Limited by a masculine world, Carroll initially and shrewdly employed certain formulas which allowed recognition. Accepting the "restrictions of the cult of domesticity" and defining herself as a Southern lady, she devised an ideology of the "domestic imagery of the republican mother" (xiv, 20). That ability enabled her to become a major propagandist for nativism and, later, the Union. In the 185Os she was deeply involved in the nativist movement, the American party, and was an ardent supporter of Millard Fillmore. Her book, The Great American Battle, was heralded by nativists as "the textbook of the Cause" (16). However, toward the end of the 1856 presidential campaign the accent in her writings turned more to Unionist 158CIVIL WAR HISTORY concerns. With the fading of the American party she began to move into an accommodation with the Republican party. During the Civil War she produced a number of noted letters and pamphlets. In an early one in 1861, Reply to Breckinridge, she defended and supported Lincoln's actions, although not uncritically. In her War Powers, printed by the State Department for distribution to members of Congress, Carroll— despite her hatred of slavery—opposed confiscation and emancipation; she instead preferred colonization. In keeping with her position she became a lobbyist for an ill-fated project intended in British Honduras. A more lasting notoriety, however, came with the claim of authorship of the Tennessee plan—a claim that she would spend the rest of her life defending, not just for recognition but for compensation as well. Not only was the idea not original with Carroll, for she owed much of its origins to Charles M. Scott, a Mississippi riverboat pilot, but as Janet Coryell points out, such a plan was already evolving in the minds of Halleck and Grant. Even before Carroll made the suggestion, federal gunboats had probed the Tennessee River. For Coryell the crux of it was that "As always, Carroll was trying to make a living," for she was "ever possessed in her constant search for power and recognition" (79-80). In judiciously laying to rest the claims of both Carroll and Scott, the author succinctly notes that "neither one can be taken seriously by military...