A military genius : $b Life of Anna Ella Carroll of MarylandBlackwell, Sarah Ellen
History
A military genius : $b Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland
Blackwell, Sarah Ellen
Carroll, Anna Ella, 1815-1894; United States -- History -- Civil War, 1861-1865
The reprint of a few of the earlier ones by no means represents them,
and owing to the universal exclusion from the Congressional indexes of
the later and more important ones, especially the memorial of 1878 and
Bragg's report thereon, much important evidence was wanting. Still
considering that all that has been printed by "order of Congress" is
guaranteed, I should have thought that the evidence given before the
Military Committee of 1871 would have been sufficient. Certain I am
that if a woman had been on that committee the matter would have
assumed more prominence, and there would have been a research for the
additional documents that have been omitted. It is the old, old story
that every intelligent woman is coming to understand, that you cannot
leave to others the interests of a disfranchised class.
In looking over the file at the War Department I noted that there had
been inquiries from committees asking if there was a letter of Miss
Carroll's there of November 30, 1861, and others mentioned, and the
answer returned was "_no_." It would be in place here to call
attention to the fact that they had once been on file there, and the
reason that they are there no longer is given in the memorial of 1878,
on the evidence of Wade, Hunt, and others.
On April 16, 1891, at the file-room of the House, I saw the file that
had come back from the House Committee of this past Congress, whose
attention also had been called to the subject in consequence of the
many petitions received by the House as well as by the Senate. I
counted twenty-five petitions with numerous signatures, as well as
some detached letters. An interesting petition was from one of the
Army Posts, signed by soldiers and by officers, asking for award to
their great coadjutor. I noted a statement in one of them that the
widow of one of the Generals employed in carrying out the Tennessee
campaign had been in receipt, ever since her husband's death, of a
pension of $5,000 a year, while the great projector of the campaign
had been left neglected. Asking if there was anything more, another
bundle of petitions was handed to me, each package containing a paper,
with extracts from the memorials and reports, neatly arranged, giving
some of the remarkable letters of Scott, Wade, and Evans, and the
decisions of the Military Committees fully endorsing the claim. It
would seem that the committees were appointed to receive the
petitions, not to consider evidence, as the documentary evidence was
not here on the file. And why should they consider it, when the case
had been at the first examined carefully, tried, and a unanimous vote
had endorsed the claim, and succeeding reports, including the one
mistakenly marked as "adverse," all bore witness to the incontestable
nature of the evidence. To go on trying a case so established over and
over for twenty years would be a manifest absurdity.
And thus the case stands.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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