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 2,000-acre (8.1 km2) tobacco plantation in Somerset County. 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.

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 became a problem and relief rolls rose. At the same time, planters were a strong force in the state; many Catholic and Episcopalian planters resided on the Eastern Shore, which continued as primarily agricultural. In 1853, the Maryland Know Nothing party was formed, initially from three nativist groups. Yet beginning in February, it took in large numbers of striking laborers from the ironwork's factory in Baltimore, whom the Democratic Party had refused to support. In opposing the pro-slavery Democrats, the Know Nothings became a powerful, but divisive, party in the state. They were pro-Union, pro-labor, anti-Catholic, and anti-immigrant. Along with other reformers, Anna Carroll campaigned by writing against urban machine corruption, crime, and what was perceived as the political threat of the power of the Catholic Church. In Maryland the Catholic planter/urban vote could combine to establish a pro-slavery state government. In 1856, the Whig Party split nationally into Northern and Southern factions due to the slavery issue. During the 1856 presidential election, Carroll supported and campaigned on behalf of Fillmore, the Know Nothing candidate. Carroll wrote many articles and pamphlets and she toured the Northeast on his behalf. Considered a moderate, Fillmore carried the state of Maryland, his only victory in the election. For the 1856 campaign, Anna Carroll published two party books that greatly extended her political and press contacts: The Great American Battle, or, The Contest Between Christianity and Political Roman-ism and The Star of the West, and influential pamphlets such as "The Union of the States". The former book was a virulent criticism of the political influence of the Roman Catholic Church under the papacy of Pius IX (see anti-clericalism). In 1857 Carroll was the chief publicist for Governor Thomas H. Hicks of Maryland; he credited his victory to her writings. In 1858, she took up the cause of former Congressman John Minor Botts, a Unionist from Virginia, in his presidential bid. She published a series of articles in the New York Evening Express newspaper on the 1860 candidates under the pseudonym "Hancock." Others over time appeared in the influential National Intelligencer, among other venues. CANNOTANSWER

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