Sally Louisa Tompkins
Confederate Army officer
Sally Louisa Tompkins (November 9, 1833 – July 25, 1916) was a Confederate nurse and the first woman to have been formally inducted into an army in American history. She may have been the only woman officially commissioned in the Confederate Army. She is best remembered for privately sponsoring a hospital in Richmond, Virginia to treat soldiers wounded in the American Civil War. Under her supervision, she had the lowest death rate of any hospital Union or Confederate, during the Civil War. She has been remembered as the "Angel of the Confederacy".
Early life
Sally Tompkins was born on November 9, 1833, at Poplar Grove in the Tidewater Region of Virginia's Middle Peninsula. She was the daughter of Maria Patterson and Colonel Christopher Tompkins. Colonel Tompkins eventually became a very wealthy merchant, doing business in Mathews County, Norfolk, and Richmond, Virginia. On August 16, 1838, Colonel Tompkins died. Sally was almost five years old at the time.
“Sally Louisa Tompkins” enters the record as confederate Army officer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Sally, Louisa and Tompkins can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 10, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7405206. VIAF identifies the subject as 38637651. The Library of Congress control number is n96036642. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1833, 1916 and 1838.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sally Louisa Tompkins” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.