Sally Tompkins was living in Richmond when the First Battle of Bull Run erupted. "This afternoon Mrs.Lee (the general's sister-in-law) told me that the battle had begun at 4 o' clock and oh the intense anxiety we all felt, for it must be a struggle, bloody and terrible," she wrote her sister. Ten day s later, Sally answered the confederacy's call for help caring fot the wounded. She talked Judge John Robertson into donating his house for use as a private hospital to be subsidized by her own inheritance. Fashionable Richmond women and four of Sally's slaves came every day to tend the sick there, and Robertson Hospital treated 1,333 Confederate soldiers from it's opening unti the last patients were discharged in June 1865.

Frail and not more than five feet tall, Sally was "the little lady with the milk-whits hands" to her soldier patients. Because she was ahead of her time and insisted on cleanliness, her hospital returned more patients to the field than any other medical facility. Wounded soldiers begged to be sent to her, and officers tried to place their most seriously wounded there. Only seventy-three deaths were recorded at Robertson Hospital during its forty-five month existance. WHen President Jefferson Davis ordered all of Richmond's private hospitals to be closed, he noted Ms. Tompkins' high sucess rate and gave her a commission as captain. Though Sally refused the pay, she accepted the position because it allowed Robertson Hospital to stay open under formal government supervision.