Among the hundreds of women who disguised themselves as soldiers during the Civil War, few left behind the kind of documented proof that Malinda “Sam” Blalock did.
Her enlistment papers and discharge records still survive in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., under the War Department Collection of Compiled Military Service Records — making her one of the most verifiable female soldiers in American history, and, according to the State Library of North Carolina, the only known woman to serve in a Confederate regiment from the state.
Malinda Pritchard was born in the Caldwell County area and met William McKesson “Keith” Blalock as a child in a one-room schoolhouse near Grandfather Mountain. The two married sometime around 1856, six years before the war would test everything they had built together.
In the end, Keith enlisted in the Confederate Army though his loyalty was never to the Confederate cause. And where Keith went, Malinda followed. Blalock was nicknamed Keith, because he was a fighter in his youth and a man named Alfred Keith of Burnsville was a great fighter. And so young Blalock’s boyhood companions tagged him with the name.
His wife, the former Malinda Pritchard, took the name “Sam” Blalock when the war commenced and served with her husband in Zeb Vance’s 26th Regiment. National Archives records show she officially enlisted on March 20, 1862, at Lenoir, North Carolina, registering as “Samuel ‘Sammy’ Blalock,” supposedly Keith’s brother.
Tenting with her husband, she wore a private’s uniform, as the story goes.
Their loyalty was to the Union Army, and John Preston Arthur’s “A History of Watauga County, North Carolina” notes Keith joined “only to avoid conscription... in the hope that opportunity might offer for him to desert to the Union lines.” The regiment was sent to Kinston rather than Virginia, however, making desertion difficult.
During a night operation near Kinston, a firefight broke out with some accounts saying she was shot in the shoulder, with the surgeon who removed the bullet discovering that “Sam” was a woman. Others tell a different story: that she revealed herself only after her husband deliberately exposed himself to poison oak to secure a discharge.
Blalock had found some poison oak and covered himself with it. While the result puzzled the army surgeons, NCpedia, published by the State Library of North Carolina, records that he was formally discharged on April 20, 1862, as a result of the rash.
Both her enlistment document and discharge papers survive in the National Archives, making her one of the only documented female soldiers from North Carolina.
They returned to their home near Grandfather Mountain and applied strong saltwater to cure Keith’s rash.
His recovery confused Confederate sympathizers who wanted to know why he didn’t go back to war. And when Keith proffered his discharge papers, they decided to arrest and conscript him. So Keith and Malinda retreated further up Grandfather’s slopes and lived in a rail pen.
“But they were followed even there,” Arthur wrote, “and on one occasion Keith was so hotly pursued that he was shot in the left arm and had to take refuge with some hogs which had bedded up under the rocks.”
Keith eventually crossed into Tennessee, where he formally enlisted in the 10th Michigan Cavalry. Malinda accompanied him and, according to multiple accounts, participated in the couple’s scouting and raiding missions on behalf of the Union — though her Union-side service, unlike her documented Confederate enlistment, is not supported by surviving military records.
Whether true or not, Blalock believed that Robert Green, who then lived in the Globe, but had also a place at Blowing Rock, was in the party that had wounded him. Accordingly, when he and some of his comrades met Green one day while he was driving his wagon from the Globe to Blowing Rock, he shot Green as he ran down the side of the mountain, breaking his thigh.
The following accounts of the Green shooting are drawn from “A History of Watauga County, North Carolina,” which presents both sides without resolution. Arthur, who was commissioned by local citizens to write the history, recorded the conflicting accounts as he heard them:
“Green’s friends say that Blalock’s crowd left him lying as he had fallen, and that he managed to regain his wagon, turn it around and drive back home.”
“Blalock’s friends say that after he had wounded Green, shooting him through his wagon body and afterwards bragging on his marksmanship, he went to him, and finding him unconscious, took him to his wagon, put him in it, turned the wagon around and started the team in the direction of Green’s home.”
“This is doubted by Green’s friends, however.”
Keith and Malinda returned to the mountains of western North Carolina after the war. The couple is buried in Avery County, North Carolina. Malinda Blalock remains one of the most remarkable soldiers — male or female — of the American Civil War.
This story was originally published in the Watauga Democrat 1976 and was updated with more information for this story.