Great Necessities: The Life, Times, and Writing of Anna Ella Carroll, 1815-1894.

Great Necessities: The Life, Times, and Writing of Anna Ella Carroll, 1815-1894. By C. Kay Larson. (New York: Xlibris Corporation, c. 2004. Pp. 693. Paper, $26.64, ISBN 1-4134-2748-0; cloth, $35.09, ISBN 1-4134-2749-9.)

Though an astute propagandist, critic, historian, and political strategist, Anna Ella Carroll is seldom recognized for her work. A remarkable, independent woman, she crafted campaign biographies and helped devise the Union army's Tennessee River campaign. Unfortunately, Great Necessities: The Life, Times, and Writings of Anna Ella Carroll, 1815-1894, while earnest and conscientious, will do little to increase Carroll's fame with the general public.

Born to a prominent Maryland family, Carroll was indoctrinated in the legacy of Scots-Irish political and religious dissent. While the exact nature of her education is obscure, she developed striking competencies and a vast knowledge of law and political theory. Her early association was with the Know-Nothing Party, and she expressed common religious and social prejudices in her articles supporting the party's candidates. Her writings and family connections led her to draft a campaign biography for Millard Fillmore. Her most important political contributions were position papers, distributed in Maryland to sway her home state toward the Union's cause, and her role in devising Union strategy along the Tennessee River. She served as an unofficial advisor to Lincoln and later to other politicians. Her value to the Union cause was never fully appreciated: she spent her declining years in a futile struggle for reimbursement, even as she was being embraced as a heroine by the suffrage movement.

Great Necessities provides a wealth of information on American politics in the mid-nineteenth century. It takes readers behind the scenes in party conventions and cabinet discussions and lingers long on congressional hearings. Larson illuminates the factors that shaped Carroll's writings and her reaction to the nation's turmoil. A substantial appendix of Carroll's literature allows readers to draw their own conclusions as to her merits as a propagandist.

Unfortunately, while Larson draws a sharp portrait of Carroll as a strategist, there is little sense of Carroll as a person. This biography of a prominent woman is distressingly uninformed by women's history. Admittedly the author is hampered by a subject who considered her own life unimportant, but readers are left wondering how others saw her or reacted to her. The breath-taking realization that a woman became a Washington insider in an age when most women were relegated to the home--and that her insider credentials came from her intellect, not from any illicit relationship with a prominent man--is lost in the ponderous details of Civil War politics.

Larson's writing is workmanlike at best, relying far too heavily on block quotes. Much of the information provided, such as a long chapter on English politics and religion, is unnecessarily exhausting. The maps of the military campaigns are tiny and illegible.

Readers seeking detailed information on the Know-Nothing Party and the birth of the Republican Party will be well served by Great Necessities. However, anyone curious as to how a nineteenth-century woman could break from her sphere and be accepted as a competent political advisor will have to look to other biographies.

TRACY J. REVELS

Wofford College