(1821-1912)
American battlefield nurse, founder of the American Red Cross. Born on December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts, Clara Barton was the youngest child of Captain Stephen and Sarah Stone Barton. Raised by doting elder siblings, Barton was a precocious learner and became an excellent marksman and rider. In the 1840s, however, these skills did not offer career prospects beyond school teaching, which Barton pursued in Massachusetts and New Jersey until 1850, when she founded a public school in New Jersey, only to be removed to make way for a male principal. Until the outbreak of the Civil War, Barton worked in a Republican patronage job as a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office, one of only four women employed by the federal government before 1862.
Barton became involved in the Civil War when she saw how badly friends and relatives in the 6th Massachusetts Regiment fared without medical supplies or food after being hurt in the Baltimore riots. Using her own salary and calling on a wide network of women’s organizations in Massachusetts, Barton assembled a warehouse of goods that she began distributing to troops on the battlefield. Encouraged by her dying father, who urged her to take action as a respectable lady, Barton used her connections in Washington, D.C., to receive permission from the War Office to accompany the Army of the Potomac. From the battles of Culpepper Court House to Bull Run, Sharpsburg, Fredericksburg, and An-tietam, Barton became the "angel of the battlefield," often the only person organizing care for the wounded and doling out food, blankets, and comfort. Ironically, having won acclaim for working under fire on the battlefield, Barton made it possible for women like Dorothea Dix and her Sanitary Commission nurses to cross gender barriers and work with the army, yet she found herself excluded from their activities.
Barton was present at the siege of Charleston in April 1863, where she developed a deep antipathy for slavery and an appreciation for feminists evidence later used to convict Andersonville’s camp administrator, Henry Wirz. After a successful national lecture tour, Barton sailed for Europe to recuperate in 1869. While there, she learned of both the Geneva Convention and the International Red Cross, whose activities she witnessed on the battlefields of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Upon returning to the United States, she lobbied tirelessly for the United States to join the Geneva Convention, which happened in 1882. She also founded the American Red Cross, serving as its first president from 1881 to 1904. While in charge, she extended the charge of the organization into disaster relief in peacetime, and led Red Cross volunteers on both the battlefields of the Spanish-American War and the battered aftermath of the Galveston Flood in 1900.
Clara Barton, Civil War Nurse
"In my feeble estimation, General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield."
Letter from Clara Barton to Her Cousin
Head Quarters 2nd Div.
9th Army Corps-Army of the Potomac
Camp near Falmouth, Va.
December 12th, 1862 – 2 o’clock a.m.
My dear Cousin Vira:
Five minutes time with you; and God only knows what those five minutes might be worth to the many-doomed thousands sleeping around me.
It is the night before a battle. The enemy, Fredericksburg, and its mighty entrenchments lie before us, the river between—at tomorrow’s dawn our troops will assay to cross, and the guns of the enemy will sweep those frail bridges at every breath.
The moon is shining through the soft haze with a brightness almost prophetic. For the last half hour I have stood alone in the awful stillness of its glimmering light gazing upon the strange sad scene around me striving to say, "Thy will Oh God be done."
The camp fires blaze with unwanted brightness, the sentry’s tread is still but quick—the acres of little shelter tents are dark and still as death, no wonder for us as I gazed sorrowfully upon them. I thought I could almost hear the slow flap of the grim messenger’s wings, as one by one he sought and selected his victims for the morning. Sleep weary one, sleep and rest for tomorrow’s toil. Oh! Sleep and visit in dreams once more the loved ones nestling at home. They may yet live to dream of you, cold lifeless and bloody, but this dream soldier is thy last, paint it brightly, dream it well. Oh northern mothers wives and sisters, all unconscious of the hour, would to Heaven that I could bear for you the concentrated woe which is so soon to follow, would that Christ would teach my soul a prayer that would plead to the Father for grace sufficient for you, God pity and strengthen you every one.
Mine are not the only waking hours, the light yet burns brightly in our kind hearted General’s tent where he pens what may be a last farewell to his wife and children and thinks sadly of his fated men.
Already the roll of the moving artillery is sounded in my ears. The battle draws near and I must catch one hour’s sleep for tomorrow’s labor.
Good night near cousin and Heaven grant you strength for your more peaceful and less terrible, but not less weary days than mine. Yours in love, Clara Barton retired from the Red Cross in 1904 and died at her home in Glen Echo, Maryland, on April 12, 1912.
Clara Barton.
As the war ended, Barton took up the cause of finding and identifying missing and dead soldiers, securing a $15,000 appropriation from Congress to carry out her work. She led a party to Ander-sonville Prison in Georgia, where she located more than 13,000 dead prisoners and collected and abolitionists such as Frances Gage who were educating former slaves. Barton took particular pride in the all-black 54th Massachusetts Regiment and saw to the treatment of many black soldiers who otherwise would have been ignored. Barton was a master letter writer and crafted clever appeals to the women of the North, assuring them of the importance of their donations of medical supplies for wounded soldiers. She was also a dedicated Republican, who publicly supported Abraham Lincoln and his execution of the war. While in South Carolina, Barton carried on a discreet affair with married Lt. Colonel John Ellsworth, but this was not known until long after her death.
