Anna Ella Carroll - Postwar Life and Death

Postwar Life and Death

In the postwar years, Carroll traveled with Lemuel Evans to report on his role in the Texas constitutional convention to draw up a new state constitution. She was active in the Republican Party in Maryland and continued her political writing career. After 1870, however, her life was largely consumed trying to gain payment for $5,000 she insisted that the government still owed her for her wartime publications. She went through twenty years of congressional hearings. Every military committee but one voted in her favor, but no bills passed the Congress. She filed a claim in the United States Court of Claims in 1885, but was denied, Justice J. Nott writing that the documents she used to back up her claim were "impressive" but "valueless as blank paper" because "they establish no judicial fact." Despite the rulings against her claim—or, more likely, because of those negative rulings—Carroll received support from women’s and suffrage organizations and a biography by Sarah Ellen Blackwell was commissioned by the suffragists in 1891.

Anna Ella Carroll died of Bright's disease, a kidney ailment, on February 19, 1894. She is buried at Old Trinity Church, near Church Creek, Maryland, beside her father, mother, and other members of her family. The epitaph on her grave reads, "A woman rarely gifted; an able and accomplished writer." In 1959, the state historical society unveiled a monument to Carroll with the words, "Maryland’s Most Distinguished Lady. A Great humanitarian and close friend of Abraham Lincoln. She conceived the successful Tennessee Campaign and guided the President on his constitutional war powers." Curiously, the gravestone has the wrong year—1893—as her date of death, but a Washington, D.C. death certificate lists the correct death year of 1894, and surviving letters in her writing exist from the same year.