Anna Ella Carroll (August 29, 1815 – February 19, 1894) was an American political activist, pamphleteer and lobbyist.

Anna Carroll was born in 1815 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland into a prominent upper-class, religiously mixed Catholic-Protestant family.

[1] Her father was Thomas King Carroll, a planter who owned a 2,000-acre (8.1 km2) tobacco plantation in Somerset County, and was the Governor of Maryland from 1830 to 1831.

[2] Carroll entered the national political arena in the 1850s, following her father's appointment as Naval Officer for the District of Baltimore by Whig President Zachary Taylor.

Due to this rapid increase in population density, there was competition with free people of color for housing and jobs; street crime became a problem and relief rolls rose.

Yet beginning in February, it took in large numbers of striking laborers from the ironwork's factory in Baltimore, whom the Democratic Party had refused to support.

Along with other reformers, Anna Carroll campaigned by writing against urban machine corruption, crime, and what was perceived as the political threat of the power of the Catholic Church.

The former book was a virulent criticism of the political influence of the Roman Catholic Church under the papacy of Pius IX (see anti-clericalism).

[clarification needed] During the summer of 1861, Carroll wrote a political pamphlet in response to a speech given on the floor of the senate by the Hon.

He had argued that Lincoln had acted in violation of the Constitution by mustering state militias into service following the bombardment of Fort Sumter, suspending the writ of habeas corpus, and imposing martial law and a naval blockade.

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.

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.

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.

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.

[4] Years later, Assistant Secretary of War Scott and Senator Wade testified to her critical role before Congress.

[citation needed] 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.

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.

Justice J. Nott wrote that the documents she used to back up her claim were "impressive" but "valueless as blank paper" because "they establish no judicial fact.

Anna Ella Carroll died of Bright's disease, a kidney ailment, on February 19, 1894, at the age of 79.

Some scholars, however, have attempted to discredit her tale, arguing that she was more a "relentless self-promoter" than the "woman who saved the Union," as novelists, playwrights, and suffragists called her.