Anna Ella Carroll (August 29, 1815 – February 19, 1894) was an American political activist, pamphleteer and lobbyist. She wrote many pamphlets criticizing slavery. She played a significant role as an adviser to the Lincoln presidential cabinet during the American Civil War (1861-1865). Early life Anna Carroll was born in 1815 on the Eastern Shore of Maryland into a prominent upper-class, religiously mixed Catholic-Protestant family. Her father was Thomas King Carroll, a planter who served as Maryland governor in 1830; he owned a tobacco plantation in Somerset County. She was born into a very wealthy and prominent family in her state and city: her great-grandfather, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence and the last surviving signers and a delegate to the Second Continental Congress and later in the new Congress of the United States, her father was the Governor of Maryland from 1830–1831, and her mother was the daughter of a Baltimore physician. She was also the eldest of eight children. The eldest of eight children, Anna was educated and trained by her father to be his aide. She was likely tutored in the law by him. This allowed her access into the male world of politics. Anna contributed to her family's income by establishing a girls' school at their home of Kingston Hall. Little is known about her life between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. 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. The Southern pro-slavery Democrats took over control of their party's leadership in Congress due to the defeat of many Northern Democrats following the passage of the unpopular Kansas–Nebraska Act in May. In Maryland, large numbers of immigrants, largely Irish and German Catholics, had flooded into Baltimore during the Great Famine in Ireland and the 1848 Revolutions in Germany. They took work in the port and railroad yards. Due to this rapid increase in population density, there was competition with free people of color for housing and jobs; street crime