Virginia Heroine or Confederate Angel

Virginia Heroine, Sally Louisa Tompkins, was not only a commissioned female officer in the southern army, but was known by over a thousand wounded as their personal Confederate Angel. When the Confederate government, in Richmond, Virginia, asked the public to help care for the wounded of First Bull Run, Sally Tompkins responded by opening a private hospital in a house donated for that purpose by judge John Robertson. Robertson Hospital, subsidized by Tompkins’ substantial inheritance, treated, conservatively, 1,333 Confederate soldiers from its opening, until the last patients were discharged in mid June of 1865. Sally Tompkins is honored and remembered as not only a nurse, but a humanitarian, philanthropist, and Captain of Cavalry as commissioned by President Jefferson Davis.

Sally Louisa Tompkins, was born on November 9, 1833, in Mathews County, Virginia, at the family’s plantation in Poplar Grove. The daughter of Colonel Christopher Tompkins and Maria Booth Patterson, Sally was raised in the true style of the wealthy aristocratic planter elite. However, even as a child, Sally tended to care for those who were ill, she had a helping heart and desired to put it to good use.

After Sally’s father died, her family relocated to Norfolk, Virginia, where Sally and one of her sisters, attended the Norfolk Female Institute. In 1854, Sally, her mother and sister moved to Richmond and her late father’s business connections held the women in satisfactory financial circumstances.

Sally joined St. James Episcopal Church soon after moving to Richmond and made the acquaintance of the wealthy and socially prominent Judge Robertson. When the war began, Robertson moved his family to the countryside for safety’s sake. Sally begged him to let her use his home in Richmond for a hospital. The judge agreed and Sally used her substantial inheritance, in addition to others of the church, to turn the judge’s home into what would become known as Robertson Hospital.

After the First Battle of Bull Run, on July 21, 1861, the Civil War’s first major battle, the Southern Capitol was warned of high casualties, but remained ill-prepared for the hundreds of wounded pouring into the city from the sandy roads and Virginia Central Railroad. The shocking sights of mangled and bloody men, brought home to the citizens of Richmond, Virginia, the terrible reality of war.Tompkins and her “Ladies of Robertson Hospital” officially opened on July the 31st, 1861, and admitted their first patient the next day.

In September 1861, following the building of several military hospitals around Richmond, President Jefferson Davis, issued an order discontinuing all private hospitals, but to circumvent his order in Sally’s case he commissioned Tompkins a captain in the Confederate cavalry, making her the only woman to hold a Confederate commission. Captain Sally L. Tompkins, accepted the commission on one condition, she would not accept any salary, for her rank or duties.

Her new role quickly earned her the new nickname Captain Sally among her patients and staff at the hospital. Mary Boykin Chesnut related in her diary of the time;

“The men under Miss Sally’s kind care looked so clean and comfortable—cheerful, one might say.” 

A stickler for cleanliness, Sally Tompkins was said to have ruled her hospital with a stick in one hand and a Bible in the other. Captain Sally held nightly prayer meetings and, if a soldier was too sick to attend, Captain Sally would come by his bed later that night to pray with him and read the Bible to him. Whenever Captain Sally discharged a patient, she sent him off with a knapsack packed with blanket, clean clothes, warm socks she knitted herself, and a copy of the Gospels bound in oil cloth.

In the nearly four years her hospital was in operation, it cared for more than a thousand patients, of whom only 73 died, an amazing record unsurpassed by any other hospital during the Civil War.

Tompkins never married and instead, continued with her charity work after the war, helping widows and orphans of Confederate soldiers. When her own fortune was exhausted, Sally Louisa Tompkins, died penniless on July 26, 1916, at 83 years old and had resided at the Richmond Home for Confederate Women for almost 11 years. Captain Sally was buried with full military honors, at the Christ Episcopal Church in Mathews County, Virginia, an eight foot monument marks her final resting place.

Virginia Heroine, Sally Louisa Tompkins, was so much more than just a well-intentioned Southern Belle and Secession Patriot, Captain Sally was a genuine Confederate Angel. As Mary Boykin Chesnut remembered;

“Our Florence Nightingale is Sally Tompkins”

Bummer