Clara Barton: From Educator to Founder of the American Red Cross
Clarissa Harlowe "Clara" Barton (December 25, 1821 - April 12, 1912) was an American nurse, teacher, and humanitarian. She is best known for founding the American Red Cross. Her life was marked by a dedication to service, whether in the classroom, on the battlefield, or in the face of natural disasters.
Early Life and Education
Clarissa Harlowe Barton was born on December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts, a small farming community. She was the fifth child of Stephen and Sarah Barton. She was named after the main character of Samuel Richardson's novel Clarissa. Her father, Captain Stephen Barton, a member of the local militia and a selectman, instilled in her a sense of patriotism and humanitarianism. He was a soldier under the command of General Anthony Wayne in his violent removal of Indigenous peoples in the northwest.
In 1825, when she was three years old, Barton was sent to school with her brother Stephen, where she reportedly excelled in reading and spelling. At school, she became close friends with Nancy Fitts. Beginning in 1833, when Barton was eleven years old, she acted as a nurse to her brother David for two years after he fell from the roof of a barn and suffered a severe head injury. In nursing her brother, she learned how to deliver prescription medications and perform the practice of bloodletting, in which blood was removed from the patient by leeches attached to the skin.
Barton's parents tried to encourage her to be more outgoing by enrolling her in Colonel Stones High School, but Barton became more timid and depressed and would not eat. Upon her return, Barton's family relocated to help the widow of Barton's cousin, who had been left to manage four children and a farm after her husband's death. Barton helped to perform maintenance and repair work on the home in which her family was to live. After the work was done, she was reportedly concerned with becoming a burden to her family. Therefore, she began to play with her male cousins, participating in their activities, such as horseback riding.
A Career in Education
To assist Barton in overcoming her shyness, her parents persuaded her to become a schoolteacher. She studied at the Clinton Liberal Institute in Clinton, New York. She achieved her first teacher's certificate in 1839, at 17 years old. Barton became an educator in 1838 and served for 11 years in schools in and around Oxford, Massachusetts. Clara was still living in Washington when the American Civil War began in 1861.
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Clara was sixteen years old, the famous Fowler brothers visited Oxford. The Fowler brothers were phrenologists, “scientists” who studied the bumps on a person’s head to determine their future. After studying her, they declared a career in teaching would cure Clara of her shyness. In 1839, at the age of seventeen, Clara became a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse in North Oxford, Massachusetts. Clara earned praise when she refused to physically punish her students, yet was able to produce disciplined scholars.
Barton fared well as a teacher; she knew how to handle children, particularly the boys since as a child she enjoyed her boy cousins' and brothers' company. She learned how to act like them, making it easier for her to relate to and control the boys in her care. Clara Barton excelled as a teacher. She captured the imagination of her students so they were eager to learn, just as her father had held her interest with tales of his service in the Indian wars. After teaching in the Oxford area for a dozen years, she decided to further her own education and in 1850 enrolled at the Clinton Liberal Institute in Clinton, New York, for a year of study.
After her mother's death in 1851, the family home closed down. Barton decided to further her education by pursuing writing and languages at the Clinton Liberal Institute in New York. In this college, she developed many friendships that broadened her point of view on many issues concurring at the time. The principal of the institute recognized her tremendous abilities and admired her work. This friendship lasted for many years, eventually turning into a romance. As a writer, her terminology was pristine and easy to understand.
Pioneering a Free School in New Jersey
While teaching in Hightstown, Barton learned about the lack of public schools in Bordentown, the neighboring city. New Jersey, unlike Massachusetts, had no free public schools. With the help of the local school committee, Clara decided to open her own school in Bordentown. In 1852, she was contracted to open a free school in Bordentown, which was the first ever free school in New Jersey. She was successful, and after a year she had hired another woman to help teach over 600 people. Both women were making $250 a year. This accomplishment compelled the town to raise nearly $4,000 for a new school building. When Schoolhouse Number One opened in the fall of 1853, Clara was shocked to learn that she would not be principal of the school which she had founded. Instead a man was hired, at twice her salary, to run the school. They saw the position as head of a large institution to be unfitting for a woman.
A Clerkship at the Patent Office
In 1854 she moved south to Washington, D.C. in search of a warmer climate. From 1854 to 1857 she was employed as a clerk in the Patent Office until her anti-slavery opinions made her too controversial. Patent Office; this was the first time a woman had received a substantial clerkship in the federal government and at a salary equal to a man's salary.
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Service During the Civil War
Early in 1861 Barton returned to Washington, D.C. and, when the Civil War broke out, she was one of the first volunteers to appear at the Washington Infirmary to care for wounded soldiers. On April 19, 1861, the Baltimore Riot resulted in the first bloodshed of the American Civil War. The victims, members of the 6th Massachusetts Militia, were transported after the violence to the unfinished Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., where Barton lived at the time. Wanting to serve her country, Barton went to the railroad station when the victims arrived and nursed 40 men. Barton provided crucial, personal assistance to the men in uniform, many of whom were wounded, hungry and without supplies other than what they carried on their backs. Barton quickly recognized them, as she had grown up with some of them and even taught some. Barton, along with several other women, personally provided clothing, food, and supplies for the sick and wounded soldiers. She learned how to store and distribute medical supplies and offered emotional support to the soldiers by keeping their spirits high. It was on that day that she identified herself with army work and began her efforts towards collecting medical supplies for the Union soldiers.
After her father’s death late in 1861, Barton left the city hospitals to go among the soldiers in the field. Her presence-and the supplies she brought with her in three army wagons-was particularly welcome at the Battle of Antietam (Sharpsburg) where overworked surgeons were trying to make bandages out of corn husks.
Prior to distributing provisions directly onto the battlefield and gaining further support, Barton used her own living quarters as a storeroom and distributed supplies with the help of a few friends in early 1862, despite opposition in the War Department and among field surgeons. Ladies' Aid Society helped in sending bandages, food, and clothing that would later be distributed during the Civil War. In August 1862, Barton finally gained permission from Quartermaster Daniel Rucker to work on the front lines. She gained support from other people who believed in her cause. After the First Battle of Bull Run, Barton placed an ad in a Massachusetts newspaper for supplies; the response was a profound influx of supplies. She worked to distribute stores, clean field hospitals, apply dressings, and serve food to wounded soldiers in close proximity to several battles, including Cedar Mountain, Second Bull Run, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. Barton helped both Union and Confederate soldiers. Supplies were not always readily available though. At the battle of Antietam, for example, Barton used corn-husks in place of bandages. Barton organized able-bodied men to perform first aid, carry water, and prepare food for the wounded.
Speaking of her commitment to being a nurse in the war after experiencing battle, Clara would say, "I shall remain here while anyone remains, and do whatever comes to my hand. In April 1863, Barton accompanied her brother David to Port Royal, South Carolina, in the Union-occupied Sea Islands after he was appointed as a quartermaster within the Union Navy. Clara Barton resided in the Sea Islands until early 1864. While in South Carolina, she became friends with prominent abolitionist and feminist Frances Dana Barker Gage, who had traveled south to educate formerly enslaved people (see Port Royal Experiment). Barton also became acquainted with Jean Margaret Davenport, an actress from England, who was then residing on the Sea Islands with her husband, Union General Frederick W. Lander. Barton provided medical care to the Black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment following their attack on Fort Wagner. Additionally, she traveled to Morris Island to nurse Union soldiers there, accompanied by a Black woman named Betsey who worked under Barton during her time in the Sea Islands. She quarreled with General Quincy Adams Gillmore after he suddenly ordered her to evacuate her post at Morris Island. Also in the Sea Islands, she became acquainted with a Union officer, Colonel John J. Elwell. Historian Stephen B.
In 1864, she was appointed by Union General Benjamin Butler as the "lady in charge" of the hospitals at the front of the Army of the James. Among her more harrowing experiences was an incident in which a bullet tore through the sleeve of her dress without striking her and killed a man to whom she was tending. She was known as the "Florence Nightingale of America". She was also known as the "Angel of the Battlefield" after she came to the aid of the overwhelmed surgeon on duty following the battle of Cedar Mountain in Northern Virginia in August 1862. She arrived at a field hospital at midnight with a large number of supplies to help the severely wounded soldiers. Throughout the war, Barton and her supply wagons traveled with the Union army giving aid to Union casualties and Confederate prisoners. Some of the supplies, like the transportation, were provided by the army quartermaster in Washington, D.C., but most were purchased with donations solicited by Barton or by her own funds.
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The Office of Missing Soldiers
After the end of the American Civil War, Barton discovered that thousands of letters from distraught relatives to the War Department were going unanswered because the soldiers they were asking about were buried in unmarked graves. Many of the soldiers were labeled as "missing." Motivated to do more about the situation, Barton contacted President Lincoln in hopes that she would be allowed to respond officially to the unanswered inquiries. In March, President Abraham Lincoln appointed her General Correspondent for the Friends of Paroled Prisoners. Her job was to respond to anxious inquiries from the friends and relatives of missing soldiers by locating them among the prison rolls, parole rolls, or casualty lists at the camps in Annapolis, Maryland.
After the war, she ran the Office of Missing Soldiers, at 437 ½ Seventh Street, Northwest, Washington, D.C., in the Gallery Place neighborhood. To assist in this enormous task, Barton established the Bureau of Records of Missing Men of the Armies of the United States and published Rolls of Missing Men to be posted across the country. The office's purpose was to find or identify soldiers killed or missing in action. Barton and her assistants wrote 41,855 replies to inquiries and helped locate more than 22,000 missing men.
Introducing the Red Cross to America
Clara Barton achieved widespread recognition by delivering lectures around the country about her war experiences from 1865 to 1868. During this time she met Susan B. Anthony and began an association with the woman's suffrage movement. She also became acquainted with Frederick Douglass and became an activist for civil rights. After her countrywide tour she was both mentally and physically exhausted and under doctor's orders to go somewhere that would take her far from her current work. She closed the Missing Soldiers Office in 1868 and traveled to Europe.
In 1869 Clara Barton traveled to Geneva, Switzerland as a member of the International Red Cross. In 1869, during her trip to Geneva, Switzerland, Barton was introduced to the Red Cross and Dr. Appia; he later would invite her to be the representative for the American branch of the Red Cross and help her find financial benefactors for the start of the American Red Cross. Inspired by that cause, Clara volunteered with the International Committee of the Red Cross, providing civilian relief during the Franco-Prussian War. In the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870, she assisted the Grand Duchess of Baden in the preparation of military hospitals and gave the Red Cross society much aid during the war. At the joint request of the German authorities and the Strasbourg Comité de Secours, she superintended the supplying of work to the poor of Strasbourg in 1871, after the Siege of Paris, and in 1871 had charge of the public distribution of supplies to the destitute people of Paris.
When Barton returned to the United States, she inaugurated a movement to gain recognition for the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) by the United States government. In 1873, she began work on this project. In 1878, she met with President Rutherford B. Hayes, who expressed his concern that the United States would never again face a calamity like the Civil War. In 1880 the American Red Cross was established, the culmination of a decade of work by Barton. ratified the Geneva Conventions - laws that, to this day, protect the war-wounded and civilians in conflict zones.
Leading the American Red Cross
Clara Barton served as Red Cross president for 23 years, retiring in 1904. The society's role changed with the advent of the Spanish-American War during which it aided refugees and prisoners of the civil war. Once the Spanish-American War was over the grateful people of Santiago built a statue in honor of Barton in the town square, which still stands there today. Domestically in 1884 she helped in the floods on the Ohio river, provided Texas with food and supplies during the famine of 1887, took workers to Illinois in 1888 after a tornado, and that same year took workers to Florida for the yellow fever epidemic. Within days after the Johnstown Flood in 1889, she led her delegation of 50 doctors and nurses in response, founding what would become Conemaugh Health System. In 1896, responding to the humanitarian crisis in the Ottoman Empire of the Hamidian massacres, Barton arrived in Constantinople February 15. Barton along with Minister Terrell spoke with Tewfik Pasha, the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs, to procure the right to enter the interior. Barton herself stayed in Constantinople to conduct the business of the expedition. Her General Field Agent, J. B. Hubbell, M.D.; two Special Field Agents, E. M. Wistar and C. K. Wood; and Ira Harris M. D., Physician in Charge of Medical Relief in Zeitoun and Marash, traveled to the Armenian provinces in the spring of 1896, providing relief and humanitarian aid to the Armenian population who were victims of the massacres done in 1894-1896 by Ottoman Empire. Barton also worked in hospitals in Cuba in 1898 at the age of 77. Barton's last field operation as President of the American Red Cross was helping victims of the Galveston hurricane in 1900.
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