Inspired by real people and events, Mercy Street goes beyond the front lines of the Civil War and into the chaotic world of the Mansion House Hospital in Union-occupied Alexandria, Virginia. Mercy Street takes viewers beyond the battlefield and into the lives of Americans on the Civil War home front as they face the unprecedented challenges of one of the most turbulent times in our nation’s history.
To recap, season one of Mercy Street, set in Virginia in the spring of 1862, followed the lives of two volunteer nurses on opposite sides of the conflict: Nurse Mary Phinney (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a staunch New England abolitionist, and Emma Green (Hannah James), a naive young Confederate belle. The two collide at Mansion House, the Green family’s luxury hotel that has been taken over and transformed into a Union Army hospital in Alexandria, a border town between North and South and the longest Union occupied city of the war. Ruled under martial law, Alexandria served as the melting pot of the region: with soldiers, civilians, female volunteers, doctors, wounded fighting men from both sides, runaway slaves, prostitutes, speculators and spies.
In season two, allegiances blur and loyalties shift as the war pushes the drama beyond the hospital. Over the next few weeks, follow the growing chaos at Alexandria’s Mansion House, the precarious position of the Green family, and the changing situation of the burgeoning black population.
Rhode Island PBS presents back-to-back epidoes of Mercy Street on Fridays at 9 p.m. and 10 p.m., beginning March 24. Read more...
