Anna Ella Carroll - 1850s Political Career

1850s Political Career

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. Shortly thereafter, Taylor died and Carroll's commission was signed by Millard Fillmore. In 1854, Carroll joined the American Party (the Know Nothing Party) following the demise of the Whigs. At the time much political realignment was going on nationwide. The same year the Republican party was formed and the Southern pro-slavery Democrats were to take over the control of their leadership in Congress due to the defeat of many Northern Democrats following the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in May. In Maryland, large numbers of immigrants, largely German and Irish Catholics, had flooded into Baltimore following the famines of the 1840s, taking work in the port and railroad yards. Due to this rapid urbanization, street crime became a problem and relief rolls rose. At the same time planters were a strong force in the state with many Catholic and Episcopalian ones residing on the Eastern Shore. In 1853, the Maryland Know Nothing party was formed, initially, from three nativist groups. Yet beginning in February, it took in large numbers of striking laborers from the ironworks factory in Baltimore whom the Democratic party had refused to support. Thus in opposing the pro-slavery Democrats, the Know Nothings became a powerful, but divisive, party in the state, being not pro-slavery, but pro-Union, pro-labor, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant.

Along with other reformers, Carroll campaigned against urban machine corruption, crime, and what was perceived as the political threat of the power of the Catholic Church. In Maryland the Catholic planter/urban vote could combine to establish a pro-slavery state government. In 1856, the party then split nationally into Northern and Southern factions due to the slavery issue. During the 1856 presidential election, Carroll supported and campaigned on behalf of Fillmore, the South American/Whig candidate, writing many articles and pamphlets and touring the Northeast on his behalf. Considered a moderate, Fillmore carried the state of Maryland, the only one he won.

For the 1856 campaign, Carroll published two party books that greatly extended her political and press contacts: The Great American Battle, or, The Contest Between Christianity and Political Romanism and The Star of the West, and influential pamphlets such as "The Union of the States". 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). In 1857 Carroll was the chief publicist for Governor Thomas H. Hicks of Maryland and he credited his victory to her writings. In 1858, she took up the cause of former Congressman John Minor Botts, a Unionist from Virginia, in his presidential bid. She wrote a series of articles in the New York Evening Express newspaper on the 1860 candidates under the pseudonym "Hancock." Others over time appeared in the influential National Intelligencer, among other venues.