A military genius

by Sarah Ellen Blackwell

As long as it pleases the English people to maintain a royal line, it makes no difference to them whether its representative be a man or a woman. England never had a salic law. But America—when a grand woman comes to her for her deliverance at the crisis of her fate, crowned with heaven's own prerogative of genius, what America does for her in return for her accepted services is to stamp her under foot and bury her out of sight, that her well-earned glory may fall by default upon the ruling class.

Can America continue to be so unjust to women? Can it continue to hold them down as a disfranchised class?

Owing to continued petitions, Military Committees were appointed during this last Congress to investigate Miss Carroll's claim.

I have not heard the result, but again Congress has adjourned without taking action. About March 27 I had the opportunity of looking over the file which had just come back from the Senate Committee. First of all came a surprising number of petitions sent in during this past year; then the documents in evidence of the claim. They were a meager lot compared to what they should have been. In a case of this importance one would suppose that a copy of every memorial and of every report should have been on the file. Not at all. Quite early in the history of the case "supply exhausted" was the answer given to every request for these documents, and Miss Carroll herself was unable to obtain them.

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.

In reading these records a sorrowful thought must come into every woman's soul as she recognizes how deep must have been the feeling against women to prevent Congress, in all these years, from coming to a fair and square acknowledgment of the truth.

But a different spirit is coming over the world: A spirit of justice, a spirit of brotherly kindness towards women, shown in innumerable ways and recognized by them with gratitude and joy.