By MacKenzie Reagan
In May 1861, the City of Alexandria seceded from the Union. It was here that the first casualties of the Civil War occurred, when Union troops descended on Old Town via the Potomac; Union occupation of Alexandria would last until the end of the war.
During the war, 620,00 soldiers from both sides were killed and 476,000 more were wounded. In Alexandria, many were treated at the Mansion House hospital on Fairfax Street, a luxury hotel owned by the Green family that was converted into a Union hospital.
The new PBS drama Mercy Street is based on the real-life volunteer nurses who worked at the hospital, including Mary Phinney (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), a New England abolitionist and Emma Green (Hannah James), a Southern belle whose family owned the hotel before its occupation.
Born Hannah Vere Nicoll, James was raised on a farm in Madison County, about an hour and a half from Richmond, where Mercy Street is filmed.
“I wasn’t necessarily raised with ‘Southern values;’ my mom is very British, so I probably have more of an English background than Southern,” James says; her voice carries the faintest British lilt.
James started taking ballet lessons at 3; it was then that she knew the performing arts were her calling.
“When I was about 15, I decided that I absolutely wanted to do TV and film,” she says over the phone from Los Angeles. After graduating from Tandem Friends School in Charlottesville, she moved to England and studied at the Guildford School of Acting in Surrey, graduating in 2014.
Mercy Street is James’s first professional acting job out of drama school.
“[I] came on the set very naive and didn’t know what was going on and had to figure out my surroundings, … which is very much what Emma does, starting out as a young Southern belle, going to hospitals and finding the purpose of a woman in a man’s world and taking a stand and fighting for the side that she’s on,” she says.
As James continues to come into her own as an actress, she has hopes of acting in “anything across the board.” If her success on Mercy Street is any indication – the show’s premiere drew 3.3 million viewers, and some critics have heralded it as the next Downton Abbey – she’ll have more than enough opportunities.
