Chapter II: Part 3: Guide and Adviser 66 (1)

Clara Barton National Historic Site: A Saga of Preservation 68
National Park Service Sites Associated with Clara Barton 72
National Park Service Sites Commemorating American Women 75
Related Sites 76
Armchair Explorations: Some Books You May Want to Read 78
Index 79

Clara Barton and Her Times

A Look at the Past

Clara Barton, humanitarian and founder of the American Red Cross, spent the last 15 years of her life in a house in Glen Echo, Maryland, now known as Clara Barton National Historic Site. Here her contributions to American life and her personal achievements are memorialized. Here you can see many of her personal effects and some of the awards given to her. Here, too, you can learn of the substance of her life and see how she lived and worked.

From Glen Echo, you can go on to several other National Park System sites associated with Clara Barton: Antietam, Andersonville, Manassas, Fredericksburg, and Johnstown. Together these diverse sites document her life, her work, and her legacy. Begin here at her house and fill in details of her life as you come across them at the other sites. For example, the lumber you see in the building at Glen Echo was originally used as temporary housing for victims of the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood in 1889. After Clara Barton and the Red Cross finished helping the injured and the homeless in that city, the structure was dismantled and shipped to Washington, D.C. Two years later, the materials were used at Glen Echo to construct a national headquarters for the American Red Cross.

The new building had essentially the same lines as the Johnstown structure with various alterations to accommodate the needs of the American Red Cross and Clara Barton herself.

Initially she planned to use this building as a warehouse for American Red Cross supplies. Six years after its construction, the building was remodeled and used not only as a warehouse, but also as the headquarters of the new organization and as the residence for her and her staff. The structure served all purposes well. Clara Barton did not distinguish between herself and the organization she founded. The lines were blurred; she was the Red Cross, and the Red Cross was Clara Barton. That is evident here in the house, for she did not separate living space from working space. The building’s purposes merged in its principal resident.

Using the place as a home, Clara Barton learned to love the passage of the seasons, to enjoy the way the light came in at different times of the year, to plant the yard and garden the way she wanted. As a headquarters and warehouse for the Red Cross, the building served her well, too. She met there with many dignitaries and volunteers on Red Cross business and stored supplies for potential disasters. Her home and office testify to her complete and unequivocal devotion to the Red Cross.

Less sharply focused is Clara Barton’s role in women’s rights. Miss Barton was neither a traditional woman nor a radical feminist, although Susan B. Anthony and Harriet Austin were friends. She did not repudiate the traditional roles for women. Instead she succeeded in enlarging that accepted sphere so that the traditional skills of women—teaching children, nursing the sick—became acceptable in the public sphere. Clara Barton argued for women’s equality and believed in their right to vote. But concern for her fledgling organization overrode her dedication to women’s rights and all other causes.

At her home and office in Glen Echo you can begin to sense this complex, fascinating individual: the public and private person so inextricably intertwined. You sense the space in which Clara Barton moved, worked, and thought. Impressions coalesce into an image. And yet that image cannot become distinct without understanding her many ideas, desires, and efforts noted in her diaries, letters, and papers. This handbook tells the story of her eventful 90 years. The next few pages contain a brief chronology of her life and times. Part 2 provides a full-length biographical essay by historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor. Barton in both triumph and defeat is here for the reader to accept, reject, or wonder at. Many of her own words are here to explain more fully what she was thinking—and worrying—about. The biography amplifies the chronology, making it come alive with the whims and inconsistencies of human nature. It’s a book within a book. And Part 3 is a guide to sites, managed by the National Park Service and other public and private organizations, associated with Clara Barton and her career.

Together the three parts of this handbook provide a clear image of one of the most outstanding women of the 19th century, Clara Barton.

A Chronology

1821 Clara Barton is born December 25 in North Oxford,
Massachusetts
1825 John Quincy Adams becomes President; Erie Canal opens
1829 Andrew Jackson becomes President
1830 U.S. population is 12,866,020; Peter Cooper builds first
U.S. locomotive
1832 Clara Barton nurses brother David back to health; Louisa
May Alcott is born

1834 Cyrus McCormick patents reaper
1835 Sarah and Angelina Grimké become active abolitionists;
Samuel Colt patents revolver

1837 Martin Van Buren becomes President
1839 Clara Barton begins teaching school in North Oxford and
continues teaching for the next 11 years; Mount Holyoke,
first college for women, opens

1841 William Henry Harrison becomes President, dies April 4 and
is succeeded by John Tyler
1842 Use of anesthetics begins in U.S.
1844 First telegraphic message sent by S.F.B. Morse
1845 James K. Polk becomes President; Margaret Fuller publishes
_Woman in the Nineteenth Century_; Frederick Douglass
publishes _Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an
American Slave_
1846 Mexican War begins, ends in 1848
1847 American Medical Association is founded
1848 First Women’s Rights Convention is held in Seneca Falls,
New York
1849 Zachary Taylor becomes President, dies July 9, 1850, and is
succeeded by Millard Fillmore; Elizabeth Blackwell becomes
first woman to receive M.D. degree
1850 Clara Barton plans to enter Clinton Liberal Institute,
Clinton, New York; Harriet Tubman begins helping slaves
escape via Underground Railway

1851 Clara Barton’s mother dies
1852 Clara Barton starts free school at Bordentown, New Jersey;
Harriet Beecher Stowe’s _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ is published

1853 Franklin Pierce becomes President; Singer sewing machine
factory opens
1854 Clara Barton moves to Washington, D.C., and becomes clerk
in Patent Office—at that time the _only_ female employed by
U.S. Government
1857 Battle of Solferino is fought June 24; James Buchanan
becomes President
1859 Edwin Drake drills first oil well
1860 U.S. population is 31,443,321 (includes 3,953,760 slaves
and 448,800 free blacks)
1861 Clara Barton begins aid to Union soldiers; Abraham Lincoln
becomes President, is assassinated April 15, 1865, and is
succeeded by Andrew Johnson; American Civil War begins with
firing on Fort Sumter, South Carolina, and ends 1865 at
Appomattox Court House, Virginia

1862 Clara Barton’s father dies; _Un Souvenir de Solferino_ is
published by Jean-Henri Dunant
1864 Clara Barton becomes supervisor of nurses for the Army of
the James; Treaty of Geneva is signed, thereby establishing
the International Red Cross
1865 Clara Barton works at Andersonville, Georgia, to establish
national cemetery
1867 U.S. purchases Alaska; first practical typewriter is
developed by Christopher Sholes
1868 Andrew Johnson is acquitted in impeachment proceedings;
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton begin
publication of _The Revolution_

1869 Clara Barton begins travels in Europe that last until 1873,
and meets Dr. Louis Appia of the International Committee of
the Red Cross; U.S. Secretary of State Hamilton Fish
rejects Treaty of Geneva; Ulysses S. Grant becomes
President; first state board of health is established in
Massachusetts
1870 Clara Barton works with Red Cross during Franco-Prussian
War, which lasts until 1871

1872 Victoria Woodhull becomes first woman to run for U.S.
President
1873 First school of nursing is established at Bellevue Hospital
in New York City
1874 Clara Barton meets Julian Hubbell in Dansville, New York;
Frances Willard founds Women’s Christian Temperance Union;
electric streetcars begin running in New York City

1876 Clara Barton collaborates with Susan B. Anthony on
biographies of noted women; Alexander Graham Bell invents
telephone
1877 Clara Barton begins correspondence with Louis Appia with
goal of having U.S. ratify Treaty of Geneva; Rutherford B.
Hayes becomes President

1879 Edison invents incandescent light bulb

1881 Clara Barton founds American Association of the Red Cross,
is elected president, establishes first local chapter of
the America Red Cross at Dansville, New York, and aids
victims of Michigan forest fires; James A. Garfield becomes
President, is shot July 2, and is succeeded by Chester
Arthur

1882 Clara Barton helps victims of Ohio and Mississippi river
floods; U.S. Senate ratifies Treaty of Geneva, March 16,
and ratification is proclaimed July 26

1883 Clara Barton serves for a short period as superintendent of
Women’s Reformatory Prison in Sherborn, Massachusetts, and
aids victims of tornadoes in Louisiana and Alabama
1884 Clara Barton assists survivors of Ohio and Mississippi
river floods; International Red Cross adopts “American
Amendment;” study of tuberculosis begins in earnest
1885 Ottmar Mergenthaler invents linotype machine; Grover
Cleveland becomes President
1886 Clara Barton sends relief to Charleston, South Carolina,
after earthquake
1888 Clara Barton organizes care of Jacksonville, Florida,
yellow fever victims; George Eastman perfects hand camera
1889 Clara Barton works at Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood scene;
Benjamin Harrison becomes President; Jane Addams opens Hull
House in Chicago; Mayo brothers open clinic in Rochester,
Minnesota

1890 U.S. population stands at 62,947,714
1891 Clara Barton builds house at Glen Echo, Maryland

1892 Clara Barton organizes relief for victims of drought and
famine in Russia
1893 Clara Barton sends relief to victims of Sea Island
hurricane; Grover Cleveland becomes President; Lillian Wald
establishes Henry Street Settlement House in New York City

1895 Röntgen discovers X-rays
1897 Clara Barton moves to Glen Echo; William McKinley becomes
President, is shot September 6, 1901, dies September 14,
and is succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt
1898 Clara Barton takes the Red Cross to the front lines during
Spanish-American War, which lasts from April 11 to August
13, and publishes _The Red Cross in Peace and War_

1900 Clara Barton organizes relief for Galveston, Texas, after
hurricane and tidal wave, and receives growing criticism
for way she is managing the Red Cross; Federal charter
granted to the American National Red Cross; Walter Reed
discovers that mosquitoes transmit yellow fever
1901 Jean-Henri Dunant shares, with Frederic Passy, the first
Nobel Peace Prize; Marconi transmits first radio signal
across the Atlantic
1902 Arthur Little patents rayon
1903 Wright brothers fly their first airplane

1904 Clara Barton resigns as president of the American National
Red Cross; Mabel Boardman takes control until 1946

1905 Clara Barton forms the National First Aid Society
1907 Clara Barton publishes _The Story of My Childhood_

1909 William Howard Taft becomes President
1912 Clara Barton dies April 12 at Glen Echo at age 90
1915 President Woodrow Wilson lays cornerstone for American
National Red Cross headquarters in Washington, D.C.
1963 Friends of Clara Barton, Inc., purchases house at Glen Echo
1974 The U.S. Congress establishes on October 26 Clara Barton
National Historic Site
1975 National Park Service assumes responsibility for Clara
Barton National Historic Site

The Professional Angel

Square as a Brick

As a woman of 87, Clara Barton remembered “nothing but fear” when she looked back to her childhood. She portrayed herself as an introspective, insecure child, too timid to express her thoughts to others. Yet this girl who felt terror in all new situations possessed the qualities that enabled her to overcome that fear, indeed to become the woman most universally acclaimed as courageous in American history.

Her childhood was unusual. She was born on December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts, and named Clarissa Harlowe Barton after an aunt, who in turn had been named for a popular novel of her day. Her parents, Capt. Stephen Barton and Sarah Stone Barton, had four other children, all at least 10 years of age by the time this child was born. Thus Clara—as she was always called—was born into a world of adults and, as she later recalled, “had no playmates, but in effect six fathers and mothers.” She might well have added “six teachers,” for she noted that “all took charge of me, all educated me according to personal taste.”

Sally Barton, her mother, was an erratic, nervous woman, with a reputation for profanity and a violent temper. She vented her frustrations in compulsive housework, and Clara Barton later recalled that her mother “never slept after 3 o’clock in the morning” and “always did two days work in one.” Sally Barton spent little time with her youngest daughter, preferring to leave her with other family members. Thus Clara Barton learned political and military lore from her father, mathematics from her brother Stephen, and horseback riding from brother David. Her two sisters, Sally and Dolly, concentrated on teaching her academic subjects. Besides this household instruction, she attended both private and public schools in the Oxford area.

She was a serious child, anxious to learn, but timid to try. Her later reminiscences of childhood were filled with stories of frightful thunderstorms, intimidating schools, encounters with snakes, and crippling illnesses. When she was six her sister Dolly, who had been an intellectual girl, became mentally unbalanced, and the family had to lock her in a room with barred windows. Once Dolly escaped and chased David’s wife, Julia, around the yard with an ax in her hand. Clara Barton never publicly mentioned her sister’s insanity, but she privately thought the illness had been brought on by Dolly’s unfulfilled desire to obtain a higher education. This rather frantic home-life and the presence of Dolly in the Barton household must have added greatly to her timidity and to her later emotional instability.

Barton developed great loyalty for her family, eccentric as they were. On one occasion she nursed her brother David for two years after he was seriously injured in a fall. Later she used her political influence to assist family members; for example, to defend a cousin’s job or to secure suitable military appointment for a relative. Throughout her life she was a faithful correspondent, continually interested in the affairs of nephews, nieces, cousins, brothers, and sisters. And in later years she described her family life in glowing terms, never mentioning her mother’s tantrums or Dolly’s insanity. Her devotion also extended to family friends.

The Bartons were quintessentially industrious. David and Stephen Barton were businessmen, successful pioneers of milling techniques. Clara Barton’s two sisters taught school; a cousin became the first woman Post Office official in Worcester County, Massachusetts. Such diligence was one of the great influences in Clara Barton’s life. “You have never known me without work,” she wrote when in her eighties, “and you never will. It has always been a part of the best religion I had.”

She began work early. She had been an intellectually precocious child and by her late teens was competent to teach. She first taught in the Oxford schools, and later she conducted classes for the children of workers in the Barton family mills. In these one-room schools she gained a reputation for first-rate scholarship and excellent discipline. She expelled and whipped students when necessary, but mostly she cajoled them into obedience through affection and respect. When her first school won the district’s highest marks for discipline, she remonstrated: “I thought it the greatest injustice ... [for] there had been no discipline.... Child that I was, I did not know that the surest test of discipline is its absence.”

Barton was introspective and keenly aware of herself as an individual, and this enabled her to view her students individually. She gave them such personal attention that scores of former pupils wrote to her in later years, confident that their uniqueness had touched her. Barton in turn called her pupils “my boys” and made no apologies for her loyalty. “They were all mine,” she recalled in the second part of her autobiography, “second only to the claims and interests of the real mother.... And so they had remained. Scattered over the world, some near, some far, I have been their confidant.... I count little in comparison with the faithful grateful love I hold today of the few survivors of my Oxford school.”

Teaching thus reinforced her loyalty and her sense of individuality. Her excellence as an instructor also had the effect of mitigating her introversion and strengthening her self-assurance. Indeed, she became confident enough to teach the roughest district schools and to demand pay equal to a man’s. “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing,” she told one school board, “but if paid at all, I shall never do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay.”

In 1850, after more than ten years of successful teaching, she felt compelled to “find a school ... to teach _me_ something.” Female academies were rare. She settled upon the Clinton Liberal Institute in Clinton, New York, and took as many classes as possible in her course.

The institute was, in many ways, an ideal academy for Barton. The school’s liberal philosophy and broad approach to education for women corresponded with her family’s liberal traditions and her own political and religious feelings. Moreover, the climate of New England and New York in the 1830s and 1840s was one of intellectual and moral progressiveness: Horace Mann instituted far-reaching educational reforms in Massachusetts; Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about the philosophic basis of human liberty; religion lost its evangelistic approach; William Lloyd Garrison expounded on the plight of the enslaved black; and a few women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton realized that their position was little better than that of slaves and protested against it.

None of this activity was lost on Clara Barton, who possessed an innate sense of honesty and justice. She became an early advocate of rights for women. “I must have been born believing,” she wrote, “in the full right of woman to all the privileges and positions which nature and justice accord her in common with other human beings. Perfectly equal rights—human rights. There was never any question in my mind in regard to this.” She supported the cause of woman suffrage, for she maintained that while a woman was denied the vote she “had no rights and ... must submit to wrongs, and because she submits to wrongs she isn’t anybody.” Yet she steadfastly asserted her rights and deemed it “ridiculous that any sensible, rational person should question it.” Although she did not participate in women’s rights rallies until later in her life, she always acted on her principles. In February 1861, for example, Barton began to champion the cause of her cousin, Elvira Stone, a postmistress who was about to lose her job to a man. Barton laid the unpleasant facts before her friends in Washington without hesitation: “As Cousin Elvira had never taken any parts [_sic_] in politics ... political tendencies can scarcely be made a pretext, neither incompetence, neglect of business, location or lack of a proper recognition of, or attention to, the wants of the community in any manner—And it would not _look well_ to commence a petition with _Mankind_ being naturally prone to selfishness we hereby etc., etc.—And I have been able to divine nothing except that she is guilty of being a woman.” By April she had secured her cousin’s position. She dryly remarked that Elvira Stone was certainly entitled to it, for, “I have never learned that the [post office] proceeds arising from the female portion of the correspondence of our country were deducted from the revenue.”

Barton felt that by winning such small battles, her larger feminist principles were upheld. But her real contribution in these early years was her own attitude and actions. By demonstrating that her talents, courage, and intellect were undeniably equal to a man’s she quietly furthered the women’s cause as much as parades and speeches did. “As for my being a woman,” she told the men who questioned her, “[you] will get used to that.”

Her interest in the extension of liberties for women was not selfishly inspired. Rather it was a product of her deep-rooted sense of integrity and fairness. She believed rigidly in human rights, especially in the rights of those unable to defend or help themselves. “What is everybody’s business is nobody’s business,” Barton once declared. “What is nobody’s business is my business.” Her advocacy of equality colored her political views.

Neither could Barton tolerate dishonesty and petty arrogance. More than once during the Civil War she railed against “the conduct of improper, heartless, unfaithful Union officers” who blithely ignored the plight of the “dirty, lousy, common soldiers.” She expected high standards of politicians, soldiers, and schoolboys alike. Once when a former pupil had misused some money she had entrusted to him, she lamented: “I am less grieved by the loss than I am about his manner of treating my trust.... I am as square as a brick and I expect my boys to be square.”

In 1852, Barton demonstrated the sincerity of her principles in a dramatic way. She left Clinton to stay with a schoolmate near Bordentown, New Jersey, and taught at a private subscription school, for there were no free public schools. She felt uneasy about the numbers of children whose parents could not afford private instruction, and she began to agitate for a free school. But the popular view was that free schools were a form of charity. She refused to give in and eventually swayed the local school board. A small house was outfitted, and she began to lead one of the first free schools in the state.

The Bordentown free school was a pronounced success. In its first year the number of pupils rose from 6 to 600, and the town built a new school-house. The town, however, could not accept a woman as the head of a school of 600 pupils and a man was named principal. She became his assistant. “I could bear the ingratitude, but not the pettiness and jealousy of this principal.”

Whether the pettiness was real or imagined, Barton could not endure a secondary position. While she debated resignation, her nerves gave way, causing a case of laryngitis. Early in 1854, she resigned and left for Washington, D.C., where she hoped to improve her health and “do something decided” with her newly realized “courage and tolerable faculty of winning [her] way with strangers.”

Barton’s health did improve in Washington, and she was soon able to “do something decided.” Charles Mason, the commissioner of patents, hired her as a clerk. At this time no women were permanently employed by the Federal Government though previously there had been. Most officials agreed with Secretary of the Interior Robert McClelland who declared that there was an “obvious impropriety in the mixing of the two sexes within the walls of a public office.” She gained the confidence of Commissioner Mason, however, and became his most competent and trusted clerk. Moreover, she combatted the many dishonest clerks who sold patent privileges illegally. The whole affair, she concluded, made quite a commotion, and the clerks “tried to make it too hard for me. It wasn’t a very pleasant experience; in fact it was very trying, but I thought perhaps there was some question of principle involved and I lived through it.”

Although she lost her job at the Patent Office under the Buchanan administration in 1856, Barton was reappointed late in 1860. She enjoyed living in Washington, for she was fascinated by politics and liked knowing such prominent figures as Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson. She often sat in the Senate gallery to watch the proceedings and became astute and well-informed on political matters.

Clara Barton was still a clerk at the Patent Office when the Civil War began. Like many other intelligent and independent women of her day, she was often filled with restless discontent, probably stemming from having more to give than life demanded. Her job as Patent Office clerk demanded little but self-effacement and neat penmanship. The conflict that arose in 1861 provided her with an outlet for her energy and satisfied her longing to lose herself in her work and to be needed.

Doing Something Decided

In late April 1861, less than two weeks after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the Massachusetts Sixth Regiment arrived in Washington, D.C., from Massachusetts. This regiment hailed from the Worcester area and many of the men were friends or former pupils of Clara Barton. Their train was mobbed while passing through Baltimore, and Barton, concerned that one of her “boys” might have been injured, rushed to their temporary quarters in the Senate Chamber. She found the Regiment unharmed, but sadly lacking in basic necessities—“towels and handkerchiefs ... serving utensils, thread, needles ... etc.” She bought and distributed as many of these items as she could, then wrote to the anxious families in Massachusetts to send preserved fruits, blankets, candles, and other supplies to supplement the unreliable army issues. “It is _said_ upon proper authority, that ‘our army is supplied,’” she wrote to a group of ladies in Worcester, “how this can be so I fail to see.” When the generous New Englanders inundated her with useful articles and stores, Barton’s home became a virtual warehouse. “It may be in these days of quiet idleness they have really no pressing wants,” she observed, “but in the event of a battle who can tell what their needs might grow to in a single day?” Such garnering of supplies against unforeseen disaster eventually became a central characteristic of her relief work in the years to come.

Barton’s earliest concern with aiding the Union army stemmed from her loyalty to the Massachusetts men. She felt a personal involvement with those who “only a few years ago came every morning ... and took their places quietly and happily among my scholars” and an allegiance to others from her home state. “They formed and crowded around me,” she noted. “What could I do but go with them, or work for them and my country? The patriot blood of my father was warm in my veins.”

Her patriotism also was aroused by the Union cause. Although she maintained that the purpose of the war was not solely to abolish slavery, she also held little sympathy for the Southern way of life and aligned herself with such Republicans as Henry Wilson who believed that historically the Southern states had conspired to tyrannize the North. “Independence!” she once scoffed, “they always had their independence till they madly threw it away.” She was exhilarated. “This conflict is one thing I’ve been waiting for,” she told a friend, “I’m well and strong and young—young enough to go to the front. If I can’t be a soldier I’ll help soldiers.” And feeling even more exalted, she declared that “when there is no longer a soldier’s arm to raise the Stars and Stripes above our Capitol, may God give strength to mine.”

For a year Barton contented herself with soliciting supplies. Then, as the horrible effects of battle were reported in Washington, she began to think of aiding soldiers directly on the battlefield. She had visited hospitals and invalid camps, but what disturbed her most were the tales of suffering at the front. Soldiers often had wounds unnecessarily complicated by infection due to neglect, or died of thirst while waiting for transportation to field hospitals. Nurses were urgently needed at the battlefield, but she wondered if it was seemly for a woman to place herself directly in the lines of battle: “I struggled ... with my sense of propriety, with the appalling fact that I was only a woman whispering in one ear, and thundering in the other [were] the groans of suffering men dying like dogs.”

Her father encouraged her to go where her conscience directed. When Captain Barton died in March 1862, she felt that her duties to the family had closed. She petitioned Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew and other government officials for permission to join General Burnside’s division at the front. Late in the summer of 1862, at the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Virginia, she “broke the shackles and went to the field.”

At Cedar Mountain, and the subsequent second battle of Bull Run, she began a remarkable service which continued to the end of the war. Here, for the first of many times, Barton and her “precious freights” were transported in railroad cars or by heavy, jolting army wagons to a scene of utter desolation and confusion. When she arrived at Bull Run, 3,000 wounded men were lying in a sparsely wooded field on straw, for there was no other bedding. Most had not eaten all day; many faced amputations or other operations. She was unprepared for such carnage, but she distributed coffee, crackers, and the few other supplies she had brought. With calico skirt pinned up around her waist, she moved among the men and prayed that the combination of lighted candles and dry straw would not result in a fire that would engulf them.

Scanty as her supplies were, Barton’s aid was timely and competent. An army surgeon, Dr. James I. Dunn, wrote to his wife: “At a time when we were entirely out of dressings of every kind, she supplied us with everything, and while the shells were bursting in every direction ... she staid [_sic_] dealing out shirts ... and preparing soup and seeing it prepared in all the hospitals.... I thought that night if heaven ever sent out a homely angel, she must be one, her assistance was so timely.”

Dunn’s letter was widely published during the Civil War, and he was embarrassed that his private portrayal of Barton as a “homely angel” ever saw print. She, too, seems to have been embarrassed, for she crossed the word out on the newspaper clippings she kept and substituted the word “holy” for “homely.” Although the original letter shows that Dunn did indeed mean “homely,” Barton’s biographers have taken their cue from her and given her the title “the holy angel.”

These early battles taught Clara Barton how poorly prepared the Union army was for the immense slaughter taking place and how immediate battlefield aid meant much more than a battalion of nurses back in Washington.

In quick succession the battles of Fairfax Court House and Chantilly followed second Bull Run. A surgeon recalled that at Chantilly “we had nothing but our instruments—not even a bottle of wine. When the [railroad] cars whistled up to the station, the first person on the platform was Miss Barton again to supply us with ... every article that could be thought of. She staid [_sic_] there till the last wounded soldier was placed on the cars.” She worked for five days in the pouring rain with only two hours of sleep. As at all battles, she took time to jot down the names of many wounded men, so that their families could be informed.

Barely two weeks later, on September 14, she again went to the field, this time with advance information about a battle to be fought near Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). She arrived too late but rushed on to Antietam, which she reached at the height of battle on September 17. Once again, she cooked gruel, braved enemy fire to feed the wounded, and provided surgeons with precious medical supplies. She had a narrow escape from death when a bullet passed under her arm, through the sleeve of her dress, and killed the wounded soldier cradled in her arms.

In all this fury, Barton was unflappable. At the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, “a shell destroyed the door of the room in which she was attending to wounded men,” recalled co-worker Rev. C.M. Welles. “She did not flinch, but continued her duties as usual.” And she was working at the Lacy House, where hundreds of men were crowded into 12 rooms, when a courier rushed up the steps and placed a crumpled, bloody slip of paper in her hands. It was a request from a surgeon asking her to cross the Rappahanock River to Fredericksburg where she was urgently needed. As always, hospital space was inadequate, and dying men, lying in the December chill, were freezing to the ground. With shells and bullets whistling around her, Barton bravely crossed the swaying pontoon bridge. As she reached the end of the bridge an officer stepped to her side to help her down. “While our hands were raised, a piece of an exploding shell hissed through between us, just below our arms, carrying away a portion of both the skirts of his coat and my dress.” She made her way into Fredericksburg without further mishap. She was lucky; the gallant officer who helped her on the bridge was brought to her a half hour later—dead.

Bravery and timeliness were conspicuous elements of Barton’s Civil War service. But of equal importance was her compassion for the individual soldier. And she treated the wounded of both sides alike. Her relief work was also notable for its resourcefulness. She built fires, extracted bullets with a pocket knife, made gallons of applesauce, baked pies “with crinkly edges,” drove teams, and performed last rites. When all other food gave out she concocted a mixture of wine, whiskey, sugar, and army biscuit crumbs. “Not very inviting,” she admitted, “but always acceptable.” When she lacked serving implements, she emptied jars of fruit and jelly and used them. When tired she propped herself against a tent pole or slept sitting up in a wagon. The common soldier remembered her sympathy and tenderness, the officer her calmness and alert activity under fire.

As historian R.H. Bremer notes, Barton viewed her role in the war as something of a family matter. If she was a “ministering angel,” she was also “everybody’s old-maid aunt”—fussing over “my boys,” worrying over clothes and food, and treating the men as fond nephews. Much of her success with quartermasters, officers, and men was due to this attitude, which eclipsed suspicion of her as a woman and radiated the sentimentality of the time.

She pursued her self-appointed task with remarkable tenacity. Her contribution was unique, for she worked directly on the battlefield, not behind the lines in a hospital. She worked primarily alone—and liked it that way. Although she respected such organizations as the Sanitary Commission, she felt that by working independently she could comfortably assist where she saw need. She wanted to be her own boss and be appreciated for her individual efforts. She did not seek glory, but she needed praise and did not wish to have it bestowed on the name of an impersonal group or commission.

There is no question that Clara Barton hugely enjoyed acclaim. She liked being in the inner elite of wartime politics, for it gave her the chance to shine as a personality, to be revered as an “Angel of the Battlefield.” In later life she enjoyed trips to Europe that amounted to triumphal tours.

Barton’s relief work benefitted her in another way. Throughout her life she was self-conscious and introspective, preoccupied with small personal incidents which she magnified out of proportion to their importance. She once described herself as “like other people ... only sometimes a ‘little more so,’” and the description is apt. She was inwardly pessimistic, and highly sensitive to criticism. She confided to her diary that she felt “pursued by a shadow” and spent years with “scarcely one cheerful day.” Periodically she became so depressed that she could not “see much these days worth living for; cannot but think it will be a quiet resting place when all these cares and vexations and anxieties are over, and I no longer give or take offense. I ... have grown weary of life at an age when other people are enjoying it most.”

_Continues on page 30_

“They Saw in High Purpose a Duty to Do”[1]

Clara Barton was not the only civilian who ministered to the wounded
during the Civil War. The nature of this conflict was so personal and
so immediate that many hundreds of volunteers gave enormously of their
time in hospitals and on the field. In the North, Dorothea Dix
interrupted her pre-war work with the insane to become superintendent
of Female Nurses; Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Frances Dana Gage,
and “Mother” Mary Ann Bickerdyke are a few of the other famous names
connected with such service. Of especial importance were the Christian
and Sanitary Commissions, organizations which worked with the
government in camp and on the battlefield to improve the lot of the
Union soldier. In the Confederacy, stringent financial conditions and
widely scattered population prevented relief efforts from being as
organized as those of the North. But charity had a deep-rooted meaning
for the Southern cause, and self-denial became a matter of pride. “We
had no Sanitary Commission in the South,” wrote one Confederate
veteran, “we were too poor.... With us each house was a hospital.”

The United States Sanitary Commission was established in April 1861.
It was originally designed for inquiry into the health of the troops
and as an advisory board to the government on improvement of sanitary
conditions in the army. In the early months of the war, the Sanitary
Commission attempted to methodize the fragmented benevolent efforts of
the Union. It fought favoritism to particular regiments with equitable
distribution of supplies, administered from a network of regional and
local auxiliaries. By 1863, however, the commission was, of necessity,
drawn to the battlefield, where it established hospital and transport
ships, supply stations, and gave direct aid to the wounded. Several
million dollars were raised by the commission through “Sanitary
Fairs,” large fund-raising bazaars. At one point the Sanitary
Commission had more than 500 agents working in the field. By its
impartiality and organization, the Sanitary Commission was the
forerunner of the Red Cross in concept, if not in actuality.

Another organization, drawn along similar lines, was the United States
Christian Commission. Established by a group of New York churches in
1862, its object was to “give relief and sympathy and then the
Gospel.” Volunteers in the Christian Commission were called
“Ambassadors of Jesus;” they were chosen largely from the ranks of
clergymen and YMCA members but many women were among its workers. The
Christian Commission did give battlefield relief, and sought to supply
reading material, clothing, and medicine.

“They would stand with you now, as they stood with you then,
The nurses, consolers and saviors of men."
_The Women Who Went to the Field_

Clara Barton was familiar with these organizations, and, especially in
the latter part of the war, often worked alongside them. But though
she wrote publicly that their labor was always in “perfect accord,
mutual respect and friendliness,” she chose to work alone rather than
align herself too closely with the commissions. Barton’s natural
leadership and difficulty in working with others prompted her to
remain independent, where she would not be “compromised by them in the
least.” Furthermore, she secretly scorned the commissions’ work, which
she thought inexperienced and impractical: “an old fudge” she called
the Sanitary Commission in her journal.

Barton also chose not to work with Dorothea Dix’s “Department of
Female Nurses.” A compulsive humanitarian worker, Dix had volunteered
her services to the War Department at the opening of hostilities. Her
offer was accepted and Dix began the impossible task of collecting
supplies, selecting nurses, and supervising hospitals for the Union
army. Dix was a perfectionist and her dogmatic and strident opinions
won her few friends. But her sharp altercations with physicians and
officers resulted more from frustration because she could not relieve
the massive misery, than from an over-bearing personality. Feeling
that she had failed to achieve her mission, Dix wrote at war’s end:
“This is not the work I would have my life judged by.”

The use of female nurses was an innovation during the Civil War and
Dix was anxious for the women under her to be taken seriously. Fearful
that nursing would become a sport among adventurous young women, she
laid down stringent and inflexible rules for nurses. These rules would
have greatly hampered Clara Barton’s independent spirit and this is
one reason she chose not to join Dix’s force.

In addition to the official organizations there were numerous “unsung
heroes” during the Civil War. Most notable were the religious orders
such as the Sisters of Charity who calmly defied the army’s
restrictions and worked both at the front and in hospitals. Despite
the fact that such diverse groups inevitably caused conflicts and
jealousies, the Civil War provided a field large enough for all of the
humanitarian organizations which labored in it.

While aiding others, Barton, for a time, forgot herself. Her “work and words,” she insisted, were solely bound up in “the individual soldier—what he does, sees, feels, or thinks in ... long dread hours of leaden rain and iron hail.” As she gained self-confidence and acclaim, she shed her morbid introspection. Once when she was asked if her work had been interesting, she gave a revealing reply: “When you stand day and night in the presence of hardship and physical suffering, you do not stop to think about the interest. There is no time for that. Ease pain, soothe sorrow, lessen suffering—this is your only thought day and night. Everything, everything else is lost sight of—yourself and the world.”

In April 1863, Barton transferred her base from Washington to Hilton Head Island off the coast of South Carolina. She had been advised that a major siege of Charleston would be attempted and believed she could be most useful there. She also hoped to be closer to her brothers: Stephen lived behind Confederate lines in North Carolina, and David had been sent by the army to Hilton Head in the early days of 1863.

During the eight-month siege of Charleston, she worked on the battlefields of Morris Island and Fort Wagner and helped nurse soldiers dying of malaria and other tropical fevers. Charleston proved to be a less active spot than anticipated, however, and this fact, coupled with a growing rift between Barton and hospital authorities, led her to leave the area in January 1864. She returned to Washington, where she continued to gather supplies as she awaited her next chance for service.

Her chance came in May 1864, when “the terrible slaughter of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania turned all pitying hearts once more to Fredericksburg.” Here she witnessed some of the most frightening scenes she ever encountered. Fifty thousand men were killed or wounded in the Wilderness Campaign. “I saw many things that I did not wish to see and I pray God I may never see again,” she told a friend. Rain turned the red clay soil of Virginia to deep mud, and hundreds of army wagons, crowded full of wounded and suffering men, were stuck in a tremendous traffic jam. “No hub of a wheel was in sight and you saw nothing of any animal below its knees.”

She immediately set about feeding the men in the stalled wagons, but another, more appalling situation arose. Some “heartless, unfaithful officers” decided that it was, in fact, a hardship on the refined citizens of Fredericksburg to be compelled to open their homes as hospitals for “these dirty, lousy, common soldiers.” Always a champion of the “army blue” against the “gold braid,” she hurried to Washington to advise her friend Henry Wilson of the predicament. Wilson, chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, swiftly warned the War Department. One day later the homes of Fredericksburg were opened to Union soldiers. She returned to the battlefield with additional supplies and continued to help the wounded. “When I rose, I wrung the blood from the bottom of my clothing before I could step, for the weight about my feet.”

After the Wilderness Campaign she served as a supervisor of nurses for the Army of the James, under Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, until January 1865. She organized hospitals and nurses and administered day-to-day activities in the invalid camps that received the wounded from Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and other battles near Richmond. Many of these soldiers remembered her thoughtfulness. If a wounded man requested codfish cakes “in the old home way,” he most likely got them; a young soldier, wasted to a skeleton, was tenderly cared for until his relatives arrived to take him home; requests to have letters written were never too much trouble.

At the end of the Civil War an exhausted Clara Barton felt certain of one thing: “I have labored up to the full measure of my strength.” And she labored without pay and often used her own funds to buy supplies. In the field she shared the conditions of the common soldier: “I have always refused a tent unless the army had tents also, and I have never eaten a mouthful ... until the sick of the army were abundantly supplied.” Her pragmatic judgment and ability to work under the most dangerous and awkward of conditions earned her the respect of surgeons and generals who ordinarily considered they had “men enough to act as nurses” and did not want women around to “skeddadle and create a panic.” General Butler described her as having “executive ability and kindheartedness, with an honest love of the work of reformation and care of her living fellow creatures.”

Barton’s perceptive and sympathetic nature led her to foresee innumerable social problems after the Civil War. A champion of the underdog, she was concerned with the precarious situation of the newly freed slaves. What she saw on her travels to the South was alarming: uneducated, dependent blacks were being duped by their former masters, and freedom was, in many cases, a burden, not a blessing. Few blacks knew of the laws passed for their benefit and many did not understand that they must continue to work. She observed that the former “owners were disposed to cheat [a] great many.” Wherever she went, Barton tried to explain the law and the meaning of freedom to the blacks, many of whom walked great distances to ask her advice.

Barton, however, did more than advise. She consulted with Senator Wilson about the best possible personnel for the Freedman’s Bureau and lobbied Congress for a bill allowing blacks to use surplus army goods. She attended meetings of the Freedman’s Aid Society and sent reports on blacks’ conditions to the Freedman’s Bureau. She also worked for the extension of suffrage through “Universal Franchise” meetings and the American Equal Rights Association; she spoke at their rallies and formed lifelong attachments with such prominent leaders as Frederick Douglass and Anna Dickenson. During October of 1868, she began to formulate a plan for helping “the colored sufferers.” The plan, modelled on the work of Josephine Griffing, apparently involved the use of abandoned barracks and former hospitals near Washington for “Industrial Houses.” Here Freedmen could learn a trade and be “provided with the means of self-support and so command the respect of [their] former masters.” She discussed her ideas with several people, but unfortunately, the project was dropped because of her failing health.

Barton remained a staunch ally of blacks during her lifetime. Blacks employed by her received wages consistent with those of whites and generally received additional training and education. When few other charitable groups were willing to aid blacks who were the victims of natural disasters, such as the storm that hit the Sea Islands of South Carolina in 1893, Barton’s Red Cross never hesitated. And those who denied the bravery or competence of black troops in the Civil or Spanish-American Wars found her an outspoken opponent. Made honorary president of a society honoring soldiers of the Spanish-American War, she resigned when she found that it was open only to whites.

At the same time she was promoting the enfranchisement of freedmen, she embarked on a project aimed at diminishing another major post-war problem: the whereabouts of thousands of missing soldiers. She appreciated the difficulty of keeping accurate records in the confusion of battle and understood that it was often nearly impossible to recognize the dead, or identify individual graves among the hastily dug common trenches. Her wartime notebooks and diaries are filled with names of missing and wounded soldiers and lists of those who died in her arms with perhaps no one else to know their fate. With official permission from President Lincoln, she devised a plan to identify missing soldiers by publishing in newspapers monthly rolls of men whose families or friends had inquired. Any person with information could write to her and she would forward it to those concerned.

As she went about her work she learned that not everyone was willing to be found. Soldiers who were attached to Southern sweethearts, who had deserted, or who simply wished to start a new life, preferred to remain missing. One young man wanted to know what he had done to have his name “blazoned all over the country” in newspapers. “What you have done ... I certainly _do not_ know,” she replied. “It seems to have been the misfortune of your family to think more of you than you did of them, and probably more than you deserve from the manner in which you treat them.... I shall inform them of your existence lest you should not ‘see fit’ to do so yourself.”

In all, Barton’s “Office of Correspondence with Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army” worked for four years to bring information to more than 22,000 families. The most help she received came from a young man named Dorence Atwater, a former Andersonville prisoner. He fortuitously had copied the names of more than 13,000 men who had died during his confinement. With his aid, she identified all but 400 of the Andersonville graves and caused the camp to be made a National Cemetery.

Atwater’s help was invaluable, and he became a close personal friend. She was highly indignant when the Federal Government arrested Atwater on charges that his death list was government property. Federal officials claimed that he had “stolen” back the list after turning it over to the War Department. The case appears to have been actually based on confusion and a stubborn refusal of both sides to back down, but Clara Barton was incensed. She fought for Atwater’s release with every influential person she knew; she advised and prompted his statements from prison and carried on a monumental publicity campaign to elicit public sympathy. Largely because of her efforts, he was freed.

Atwater’s defense and her work with the missing men further developed her publicity efforts, which she had used so effectively in the Civil War. As time went on, her relief work relied more and more on public support. “We enter a field of distress,” she wrote, “study conditions, learn its needs, and state these facts calmly, and truthfully to the people of the entire country through all its channels of information and leave them free to use their own judgments in regard to the assistance they will render.” Still, she knew how to publicize her causes dramatically. In 1886, when a tornado struck Mount Vernon, Illinois, she wrote: “the pitiless snow is falling on the heads of 3,000 people who are without homes, without food, or clothing.” The response was immediate.

Oral publicity also proved helpful during her attempt to identify missing men. In 1866, she began a successful lecture tour that publicized both her cause and her name. She gave lectures throughout the North and West and was featured on tours with such prominent speakers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, and Mark Twain. Her talks centered on “Work and Incidents of Army Life.” The flyer portrayed her lectures as “exquisitely touching and deeply interesting, frequently moving her audience to tears.” As always, she enjoyed the notoriety and in her diary wrote a flattering description of herself at the lecturn: “easy and graceful, neith[er] tall nor short, neith[er] large nor small ... head large and finely shaped with a profusion of jet-black hair ... with no manner of ornament save its own glossy beauty.... She [is] _well_ dressed.... Her voice ... at first low and sweet but falling upon the ear with a clearness of tone and distinctness of utterance at once surprising and entrancing.”

Although she enjoyed being in the limelight, many of her old insecurities returned. “All speech-making terrifies me,” she said, “first I have no taste for it, lastly I hate it.” In 1868, while delivering a lecture in Boston, she suffered what was apparently a nervous breakdown and was ordered by her doctors to recuperate in Europe.

The periodic nervous disorders she suffered appear to have been directly related to her sense of usefulness. When she was not working, her diary entries often begin “Have been sad all day,” or “This was one of the most down-spirited days that ever comes to me.” She once remarked that nothing made her so sick of life as to feel she was wasting it. As long as she was needed, admired, demanded, she could perform near miracles of self-denial and courageous action. When the crisis ebbed, she became despondent and sick, requiring attention of a different sort. As a single woman, often removed from her family, she had no other way to attract notice than to excel as an individual. When such an opportunity faded, or when she found herself an object of criticism, she was, in several senses, prostrated. When her interest was again aroused by the chance of giving service, her health and spirits rebounded.

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