The cry came from the other side of the tent flap as the orderly rushed in.
“President Lincoln is coming!”
A wail erupted from the beds of the Confederate wounded.
“Oh, don’t leave us, Miss! He is a beast! He will kill us!”
“Oh, no. He is a grand good man,” Mary Blackmar replied.
Again, the wounded men cried, “Don’t leave us, Miss!”
“Well, I’ll not leave you. Don’t fear,” she said.
She walked to the front of the tent, and opened the flap. There, only a few feet away, stood Gen. Ulysses Grant and President Abraham Lincoln.
“These are the Confederate quarters,” Grant said, as he gestured toward the tent flap.
The president turned to the general and whispered, “I wish to go in here alone.”
Blackmar watched as the president bent under the open flap and entered the ward. He walked over to the bed of a young soldier and, with tears streaming down his face, asked, “Oh, my man. Why did you do it?”
The young soldier leaned up as much as he could and weakly whispered, “I went because my state went.”
Lincoln went to each bed in the ward and asked the same question, and, again, he got the same reply.
“On that ground floor, a pin could almost have been heard to fall,” Blackmar later wrote.
Mary Blackmar attended Hillsdale College in the 1850s. After graduating, she went into nursing, which led her to City Point Hospital, where she observed the interaction between President Lincoln and the confederate wounded.
She worked at the hospital for ten months, during which time City Point became one of the busiest hospitals in the country. The siege of Petersburg had begun in June of 1864 and had run until the end of March 1865.
Blackmar recollected her experiences more than 45 years later.
“After one of the fearful onslaughts at Petersburg, the wounded came pouring into my tent, which was nearest to the firing line, so that a drummer-lad had named it ‘the halfway house,’” she wrote.
As she watched the wagons roll past carrying the Union wounded, one soldier slumped off and fell into the dirt. He laid there motionless.
“Stop!” she cried out.
The driver, looking back, coolly replied, “He is dead. What does it matter?”
Blackmar knelt beside the soldier, feeling for a pulse. She found a faint heartbeat, and called a surgeon over.
The surgeon looked at the young Rebel and declared it a hopeless cause.
“We must go on,” he said.
Blackmar refused to leave his side.
“With my knowledge that he was so young and had the force of youth, moreover, the hardships of the Confederates had toughened him, I remained on the ground at his side, not daring to leave him,” she later wrote.
She used her fingers to plug the young soldier’s wound and remained on the ground at his side for 24 hours before surgeons finally moved the boy inside.
At the close of the siege of Petersburg, City Point saw the departure of the Union Army. Blackmar traveled with the army to Richmond, Va., where she stayed until the end of the war.
“At the close of hostilities, I, with many others, went with the army to Washington, and there saw the final parade of 60,000 troops before the White House,” she wrote.
Blackmar left her job as an army nurse and traveled to Philadelphia. She attended the Women’s Medical College, the first medical school for women in the country.
After graduating in 1867, she moved to Rhonerville, Fla., where she attempted to establish a medical practice. She was forced to leave after two months because local residents would not allow a woman to set up a medical practice in their town.
In 1870, she moved to Jacksonville, Fla., where she practiced medicine for the rest of her life.
