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, she had to devote much time to trying to gain payment for $5,000 which 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 wrote 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. The suffragists commissioned a biography of her in 1891 by Sarah Ellen Blackwell. Anna Ella Carroll died of Bright's disease, a kidney ailment, on February 19, 1894, at the age of 79. She is buried at Old Trinity Church, near Church Creek, Maryland, beside her parents 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." The gravestone was inscribed with 1893 as the year of her death, but a Washington, D.C., death certificate lists the correct death year of 1894. Surviving letters in her writing exist from that year before her death. Later evaluation Well into the 20th century, Carroll was hailed as a feminist heroine whose contributions were denied because of her sex. 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. Carroll had condemned the Emancipation Proclamation and recommended colonization of blacks. Yet research published in 2004 unveiled new sources, primarily Maryland political histories and Lincoln administration records, that analyze the Maryland Know Nothing party in a new progressive light. These materials generally support (but slightly diminish) Carroll's role in the Tennessee River campaign. A plan nearly identical