Chapter I: Front Matter

CLARA BARTON

See Contents.
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CLARA BARTON
A CENTENARY TRIBUTE

TO
THE WORLD’S GREATEST HUMANITARIAN
FOUNDER OF THE AMERICAN RED CROSS SOCIETY
AUTHOR OF THE AMERICAN AMENDMENT TO THE INTERNATIONAL
RED CROSS CONVENTION OF GENEVA
FOUNDER OF THE NATIONAL FIRST AID
ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA

CHARLES SUMNER YOUNG, A.M. Ph.D

ILLUSTRATED

BOSTON

RICHARD G. BADGER

THE GORHAM PRESS

COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY RICHARD G. BADGER

All Rights Reserved

Made in the United States of America

Press of J. J. Little & Ives Company, New York, U. S. A.

This book is respectfully dedicated to the Boys and Girls of the
World; and to the Men and Women who are still Boys and Girls, in their
love for humanity.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author, in the preparation of his pen pictures, begs to acknowledge with sincere thanks the courtesies extended to him by Mr. Stephen E. Barton, the Executor of the Clara Barton Estate; by Doctor J. B. Hubbell, for many years the manager for Clara Barton; by the Oxford (Mass.) Memorial Day Committee of 1917; by the Twenty-First Massachusetts Regiment G. A. R.; by many of the Army Nurses of the Civil War; also for material assistance in data by the American National Red Cross; by Mrs. J. Sewall Reed Acting-President, National First Aid Association of America; by Honorable Herbert Putnam, Librarian of Congress; by General W. H. Sears for the use of his data in his book of 177 pages, prepared for and used in the defense of Clara Barton before the Library Committee of Congress, and his generous contribution of incidents in the life of his personal friend; by Honorable Francis Atwater for data in “The Story of My Childhood,” by Clara Barton; by the Macmillan Co., Publishers of the Life of Clara Barton by Percy H. Epler, the book of the best data on her life now before the American people; by the National First Aid Association of America and likewise to many other associations, personal friends and admirers of America’s most remarkable woman.

There is a woman at the beginning of all great things.
LAMARTINE.

Honor women! they entwine and weave heavenly roses in our earthly life. SCHILLER.

“The fairest chaplet Victory wears
is that which mercy weaves.”

I live to learn their story,
Who suffered for my sake;
To emulate their glory
And follow in their wake;
Bards, patriots, martyrs, sages,
The noble of all ages,
Whose deeds crown History’s pages,
And Time’s great volume make.

· · · · ·

For the cause that needs assistance,
For the wrongs that need resistance,
For the future in the distance
And the good that I can do.

THE FOREWORD

The author undertakes to produce a few pen pictures of a personal friend—humanity’s friend. They are pictures of sentiment, pictures of reality—pictures of humanity.

Although precluded the use of data left by Clara Barton for her biography the author, nevertheless, is conforming to the sentiment of her oft expressed wish that he write the story of her life. Recognizing the wish to be a sacredly imposed trust, for the past six years he has gleaned what he could for his sketches from public documents, from her personal friends in California, New England, New York, Washington and elsewhere, as well as from his memory of facts developing through the years he enjoyed her confidence and received from her highest inspirations.

The author assumes not a rôle literary—has herein no aspirations, literary. His impulse to write is not fame; it is sentiment, a love-sentiment for a woman whom all the world loves and whose “life gives expression to the sympathy and tenderness of all the hearts of all the women of the world.” His motive in writing is to point a moral in “a passion for service”; to limn scenes, vivid, along “paths of charity over roadways of ashes”; to depict for the lesson it teaches a career, a career the memory of which must remain a rich heritage to the American people.

In life’s drama, wherein Clara Barton played the leading rôle, there appear faces to inspire, faces to instruct, but also the faces of intrigue. In the closing incidents of a life-heroic time’s detectives disclose the plotters, and the motive in their plot to destroy—

Like a led victim to my death I’ll go,
And, dying, bless the hand that gave the blow.

Except now and then in dim outline, the faces of intrigue in the _tragic_ scene do not appear. These faces are un-American—inhuman—and would mar humanity’s picture.

The Divine Humanitarian forgave His enemies, but the picture of the crucified on the cross ever suggests the Pontius Pilate and the executioners. Clara Barton also forgave her enemies, and yet some day a literary artist may portray the Judasette Iscariot, or possibly the plotting Antony and Cleopatra, to make a Clara Barton picture historically and tragically complete.

In biography is the world’s history. If, in human logic, the silencing of truth in biography be an imperative virtue, then literature should be relegated to the ash-heap of forgotten lore. As “in a valley centuries ago grew a fern leaf green and slender,” leaving its impress on what have become the rocks of the centuries, so truth leaves its impress imperishable on what become the tablets of history. Truth crushed to earth again and again will appear; and, when Clara Barton’s Gethsemane appears with all its delineations in a picture complete, there will be none so poor to do reverence to Clara Barton’s character assassins, nor to the Clara Barton ghouls who desecrate her tomb and use the United States mails to traduce the dead.

Sentiment is the soul of action. The highest tribute to mortal is the angel-sentiment—the tribute to self-sacrificing woman that blazes her “path where highways never ran.”

Ever the blind world
Knows not its angels of deliverance
Till they stand glorified ’twixt earth and heaven,

and yet more powerful than armies is the soul-sentiment that protects fame,—the fame of the Florence Nightingales, the Clara Bartons and the Edith Cavells.

Her “friends” say time will vindicate Clara Barton. The more such “friends” the more’s the pity. It’s not time, it’s truth, that vindicates. “Procrastination is the thief of time.” The thief of time must not be permitted to steal from the present, even under pledge to disgorge in the future. The present is ours to possess, ours to enjoy. It’s not that the millions can do something for Clara Barton; instead, the Clara Barton spirit can do something for the millions. The plotter may revile the Red Cross Mother; the Red Cross Artist may picture the cross of red on the breast of a fictitious “Greatest Mother in the World;” the self-constituted autocrat in Red Cross literature may suppress, and belie, truth; but the spirit of Clara Barton is the Mother-Spirit still, the real spirit of the American Red Cross, the Red Cross spirit in all Christendom. The fighting sons of America on the “Western Front” may not have read of Clara Barton in recent Red Cross literature but, trooping under the Red Cross peace-banner that Clara Barton brought here from Europe, were more millions of her followers in America than in the world war there were soldiers marshalled under the military banners in all the armies in Europe.

Grant was “Grant the Great” at Appomattox; Lincoln was more than “six feet four” when in the home of Confederate General Pickett he stooped down to kiss the brow of “Baby George” Pickett; Stephen A. Douglass was more than “the little giant” when at the inauguration on the east steps of the capitol he held the hat of Abraham Lincoln; Clara Barton was more divine than human when, with love for her enemies, in her last world prayer she gave expression to the forgiving sentiment of the Divine Humanitarian.

Clara Barton said that the bravest act of her life was crossing the pontoon bridge under fire at Fredericksburg. The historian will say that the bravest act of her life was snatching her Red Cross child from the social—political—fat-salaried-swiveled-chair clique at Washington, and handing over her best beloved unharmed to the country for which in the smoke of battle and terrors of disaster she had many times risked her life. The historian will further say that in refusing to accept a pension of $2500 for life and Honorary Presidency of the Red Cross from that “clique” as the price of her child, and suffering persecution for life as the penalty, there was shown the true mother spirit that must commend her for all time to those who respect the spirit of self-sacrificing Motherhood.

President Warren G. Harding, the president also of the Red Cross, “entertains the highest sentiment regarding the splendid service of Miss Barton.” Ex-President Woodrow Wilson—also ex-president of the Red Cross—has voiced the sentiment of the American people in no uncertain sound as has a second Clara Barton,—the soldier-angel Margaret Wilson. General John J. Pershing has not been silent in his admiration of the great woman, nor have the hundreds of thousands of American boys on the “Western Front” been unmindful in gratitude to the Founder of the American Red Cross; and, if signs fail not, from the American Congress there will come to America’s greatest humanitarian a testimonial—accompanied by an acclaim that will be heard around the world.

On a certain state occasion the statement was made that there is less to censure, and more to commend, in the public life of Clara Barton for the twenty-three years she was President of the Red Cross than in the public life of any one of the twenty-eight Presidents from George Washington to Woodrow Wilson. There commenting on the statement, America’s beloved Mrs. General George E. Pickett significantly said: “Yes, that’s true, but Clara Barton was a woman.” But woman is coming into her own, and Clara Barton said, “My own shall come to me.” Never was prophecy more certain of fulfillment. With hundreds of thousands of Americans receiving the benefits of “First Aid”; with more than thirty thousand brave American nurses, ten thousand of these following the illustrious example of Clara Barton by going to the battlefield; with more than thirty millions of Americans serving the Red Cross in time of war; with more than a billion of human beings making use of the Red Cross American Amendment in times of peace and war, Clara Barton already has come into her own.

The American nation will come into its own, as did respectively two great nations of Europe, when she wipes out from the scroll of history its foulest blot,—by giving national recognition to a national heroine; the American Red Cross will come into its own when it shall repossess the name Clara Barton; the American people will come into their own when they patriotically recognize, and sacredly cherish, that immortal Mother-Spirit which, after a half century of heroic sacrifices in the war of human woes, passed triumphant through the archway ’twixt earth and heaven.

If these pen pictures give to the boys and girls of America inspiration to loftier patriotism and higher ideals in achievement; if truth in the biography give renewed impulse to American Red Cross philanthropy; if through this volume immortal deeds, and a name unsullied, be treasured for world-humanity then Clara Barton’s dying message to the author shall not have been in vain.

CHARLES SUMNER YOUNG
]

The only picture of myself that I have cared anything about at all is
the one taken at the time of the Civil War (1865), in which I am
represented in the uniform of a nurse. If my friends had let me have
my way, I would never have had another picture taken. (_Frontispiece_)

CLARA BARTON.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I Babyhood Impressions 21

II School—Childish Memories—Military 24

III On Her Favorite Black Horse 28

IV Phrenology—Read Her Characteristics—Basis of Friendship 30

V “Spontaneous Combustion” Laid to Clara Barton 34

VI Christmas—a Christmas Carol 36

VII “Button”—“Billy”—Clara Barton Ownership 38

VIII Pauper Schools; from Six to Six Hundred 43

IX Child Love—Joe and Charlie—Appreciation 45

X Temperance—Clara Barton and the Hired Man—Stranger than
Fiction 48

XI Looking for a Job—Equal Suffrage 51

XII Credulous Ox—Innocent Child—Clara Barton, a Vegetarian 55

XIII Fell Dead on the Ground beside Her 57

XIV Wickedness of War—Settles no Disputes 59

XV Her Wardrobe in a Handkerchief—The Battle Scene 63

XVI The Bravery of Women—Clara Barton’s Bravest Act 66

XVII Yes, and Got Euchred 69

XVIII To Dream of Home and Mother 71

XIX Tribute of Love and Devotion 74

XX Cheering Words—Always Ready—Wears a Smile 76

XXI Horrible Deed—Leads American Navy—Angel of Mercy 80

XXII Confederates and Federals alike Treated 86

XXIII The Enemy, Starving—Tact—The White Ox 89

XXIV Bullethole—Amputated Limbs Like Cordwood—God Gives
Strength 91

XXV Fearless of Bullets and Kicking Mules 95

XXVI His Comfort, not Hers; His Life, not Hers 97

XXVII Does not Need any Advice 99

XXVIII Had but a Few Moments to Live 102

XXIX Enlisted Men First—The Colonel’s Life Saved 104

XXX You’re Right, Madam—Good Day 107

XXXI Bleeding to Death—His Headless Body—Women in the War 109

XXXII Timid Child—Timid Woman 112

XXXIII Ez Ef We Wuz White Folks 115

XXXIV In Her Dreams—Again in Battle 117

XXXV Four Famous Women 120

XXXVI Simplicity of Childhood—Pet Wasps—Pet Cats—Loved
Life—Domestic 122

XXXVII Clara Barton in the Literary Field 128

XXXVIII The Art of Dressing—Clara Barton’s Individuality 133

XXXIX The Jewelled Hand and the Hard Hand Meet 138

XL Clara Barton and the Emperor 140

XLI America—Scarlet and Gold—Europe 143

XLII Three Cheers—Wild Scenes in Boston—Tiger!! No, Sweetheart 147

XLIII The Last Reception—Her Autograph—The Boys in Gray 150

XLIV Open House—Cost of Fame, Self-Sacrifice—Best in Woman 152

XLV Kneeled Before Her and Kissed Her Hand 158