20, 1860. The first six states to secede were those that held the largest number of slaves. In February 1861, the Confederate government was formed in Montgomery, Alabama. During this time Carroll was advising Governor Thomas H. Hicks on compromise efforts in the Congress. After Virginia seceded, she sent him intelligence on Confederate plans that might have resulted in a coup d'état of Washington, D.C., had Maryland seceded. 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. John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky. 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 her reply pamphlet, which was widely circulated by the Lincoln administration, Carroll made informed legal arguments, later used by Attorney General Edward Bates, stating that Lincoln had acted in accordance with the Constitution. She noted that, as the chief enforcement officer of the nation, Lincoln could use all his powers to enforce federal law in the Southern states. Those powers included his role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Under an agreement made with the government, by 1862 Carroll had produced three more war powers pamphlets that presented able constitutional arguments supporting the federal government's actions. Governor Hicks wrote that her documents did more to elect a Union man as his successor than "all the rest of the campaign documents together." Wartime role 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. Carroll worked on her second war powers paper at the Mercantile Library. She also gathered information from the head librarian, who was the brother of Confederate General Joe Johnston. She took military matters into her own hands when she initiated an interview with a riverboat pilot, Capt. Charles M. Scott, about the feasibility of the planned Union Mississippi River expedition. 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. It could take years just to open up the river to navigation by trying