Clara Barton

Clara Barton Click to enlarge

• Born: 25 December 1821
• Birthplace: North Oxford, Massachusetts
• Died: 12 April 1912 (natural causes)
• Best Known As: Founder of the American Red Cross

Civil War nurse Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross. Barton was a teacher and a U.S. Patent Office clerk before devoting herself to nursing in the American Civil War (1861-65). She earned the nickname "the angel of the battlefield" and in 1864 was named superintendent of all Union nurses. In the 1870s, officials of the International Red Cross invited her to help form a branch of the service in the U.S.; she agreed, and led the American Red Cross for its first 26 years.

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(1821–1912), Civil War nurse, relief worker, and founder of the American Red Cross

Raised in a quiet New England family, Clara Barton taught, founded a public school in New Jersey, and in 1854 became a copyist in the U.S. Patent Office. In 1861, the Civil War catapulted her to national prominence. During the first two years, Barton functioned as a one‐woman relief agency. Relying on the assistance of a few sympathetic politicians and friends, and shunning official channels of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and Dorothea Dix's nursing corps, Barton brought supplies and relief to thousands of suffering Union soldiers on fields in the Eastern theater. Her timely arrivals from Fredericksburg to Antietam earned her the nickname “Angel of the Battlefield.” In June 1864, she agreed to serve as head nurse in the Army of the James.

As the Civil War, especially early on, afforded few official roles for women, Barton could carve out an independent niche and use her status to bypass the formidable military bureaucracy. Throughout, she sought to bring humanity and personal dignity to the war; to counteract the brutal and dehumanizing affects of modern, large‐scale carnage. Although her relief activities abated somewhat later in the war, she began in February 1865 the herculean effort of identifying missing men. Much of her attention focused on the unknown dead of Andersonville Prison, securing the identification of nearly 11,000 in that infamous pen.

When the Civil War ended, Barton continued her mission of humanizing the horrors of military suffering. She worked tirelessly for U.S. ratification of the Geneva Conventions of 1864 (conferring neutrality on wounded and hospital personnel in war), and in 1881, organized the American Association of the Red Cross. In 1898, she personally led Red Cross relief efforts in Cuba during the Spanish‐American War.

Bibliography

• RevWilliam E. Barton., Life of Clara Barton, 2 vols., 1922.
• Stephen Oates, A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War, 1994

Barton, Clara (1821-1912) Civil War nurse, relief worker, and founder of the American Red Cross, born Clarissa Harlowe Barton in North Oxford, Massachusetts. Barton tended wounded Union soldiers and ran medical supply lines at Antietam, Fredericksburg (both 1862), the Wilderness campaign (1864), and other battles. Barton publicized the work of the International Red Cross, lobbied tirelessly for Senate ratification of the Geneva Conventions (signed in 1882), and was the American National Red Cross's first president (1882-1904).

Clara Barton was an early feminist; in her work as a teacher and clerk at the Patent Office, she demanded—and got—pay equal to what men in the same position were getting.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

The American humanitarian Clara Barton (1821-1912) was the founder of the American Red Cross. Her work made her a symbol of humanitarianism.

Clara Barton was born on Dec. 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Mass. She was the youngest child of Stephen Barton, a farmer and state legislator who had served in the Revolution under Gen. Anthony Wayne; she later recalled that his tales made war early familiar to her.

Well-spoken and well-read, at the age of 15 Clara Barton began teaching at nearby schools. In 1850 she went to teach at Bordentown, N.J., where state tradition required paid schooling and thus served few children. Barton offered to teach without salary if payment were waived. She later took pride in having established the first free school in New Jersey and having raised enrollment in Bordentown from 6 to 600. When town officials decided to appoint a male administrator over her, she resigned. At this time she suffered her first crisis of nervous illness, associated in part with uncertainty about her future.

In 1853 she obtained an appointment as copyist in the Patent Office in Washington, D.C., becoming the first woman in America to hold such a government post. She continued this work till April 1861, when the Civil War began and she determined to serve the Federal troops.

Civil War Activities

Although the U.S. Sanitary Commission was formed in June 1861 to aid soldiers, Barton had little association with it. (Casual reports later misnamed her as one of its founders.) Her own enterprise involved appeals for provisions to be carried into the war zones; she collected and stored them in Washington for personal distribution. In 1862 the U.S. surgeon general permitted her to travel to the front, and she implemented this order with directives from generals John Pope and James S. Wadsworth, who welcomed her work. Barton was present with Federal forces during the siege of Charleston, S.C., and also at engagements in the Wilderness and at Fredericksburg, Va., and elsewhere.

Barton's mission was not primarily that of a nurse. She became increasingly adept at obtaining and passing out provisions, though her courage and humanity made her a vital presence everywhere. In 1864 she made her most influential connection, joining Gen. Benjamin F. Butler with the Army of the James. She later visited the notorious prison camp at Andersonville, Ga., to identify and mark Union graves.

In 1865 she conceived the project of locating missing soldiers and obtained a note of endorsement from President Lincoln. She set up the Bureau of Records in Washington and traced perhaps 20, 000 names. She also lectured on her experiences until her voice failed in 1868.

Franco-Prussian War

Barton's health continued to trouble her; in 1869 she went to Geneva, Switzerland, for rest and a change. There, officials of the International Red Cross, organized in 1864, urged her to seek United States agreement to the Geneva Convention recognizing the work of the Red Cross; the powerful U.S. Sanitary Commission had been unable to obtain it. But before Barton could turn to the task, the Franco-Prussian War began.

She offered her services to the Grand Duchess of Baden in administering military hospitals. Her most original idea (developed further in later situations) was to put needy Strasbourg women to work sewing garments for pay. Later, with the French defeated and Paris held by the Commune, she entered the starving city to distribute food and clothing. She served elsewhere in France - in Lyons again instituting her work system. She was awarded the Iron Cross of Merit by the German emperor, William I, in 1873; this was one of many such honors.

American Red Cross

Clara Barton settled in Danville, N.Y., where for several years she was a semi-invalid. In 1877 she wrote a founder of the International Red Cross, offering to lead an American branch of the organization. Thus, at 56 she began a new career.

In 1881 Barton incorporated the American Red Cross, with herself as president. A year later her extraordinary efforts brought about United States ratification of the Geneva Convention. She herself attended conferences of the International Red Cross as the American representative. She was, however, far from bureaucratic in interests. Although wholly individualistic and unlike reformers who worked on programs for social change, she did a great social service as activist and propagandist.

In 1883 Barton served as superintendent of the Women's Reformatory Prison, Sherborn, Mass., thus deviating from a career marked by single-minded commitment to her major cause. As a Red Cross worker, she went to Michigan, which had been ravaged by fires in 1882, and to Charleston, S.C., which had suffered an earthquake. In 1884 she traveled the Ohio River, supplying flood victims. Five years later she went to Johnstown, Pa., to help it recover from a disastrous flood. In 1891 Barton traveled to Russia, which was enduring famine, and in 1896 to Turkey, following the Armenian massacres. Barton was in her late 70s when the Cuban insurrection required relief measures. She prepared to sail in aid of Cubans, but the outbreak of the Spanish-American War turned her ship into a welfare station for Americans as well. As late as 1900 she visited Galveston, Tex., personally to supervise relief for victims of a tidal wave. In 1900 Congress reincorporated the Red Cross, demanding an accounting of funds. By 1904 public pressures and dissension within the Red Cross itself had become too much for Barton, and on June 16 she resigned from the organization. (She even entertained unrealistic thoughts of beginning another one.) A figure of international renown, she retired instead to Glen Echo, Md., where she died on April 12, 1912.

Further Reading

Clara Barton was the subject of innumerable sketches and books, many merely eulogistic and even fanciful. She herself wrote The Story of My Childhood (1907), as well as enlightening accounts of her work, such as The Red Cross in Peace and War (1899). Most useful for general purposes is Ishbel Ross, Angel of the Battlefield: The Life of Clara Barton (1956). William E. Barton, Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross (2 vols., 1922), is adulatory but reproduces revealing letters. Percy H. Epler, The Life of Clara Barton (1915), details her life as it appeared to her contemporaries.

(1821-1912), founder of the American Red Cross. Barton was born in Massachusetts and worked briefly as a schoolteacher. She became a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office in 1854, but lost the job when the Democrats won the presidency in 1856.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Barton saw the need for an efficient organization to distribute food and medical supplies to the troops. The network, Barton believed, had to be disentangled from the bureaucracy of the War Department and the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Her work of soliciting and distributing supplies and nursing the wounded was grueling and endless. She once complained to a friend, "I cannot tell you how many times I have moved with my whole family [the Army] of a thousand or fifteen hundred and with a half hour's notice in the night." Her efforts, however, were much appreciated at battle sites, especially Antietam and Fredericksburg. At war's end she set up an office to sort out the difficult business of locating and identifying prisoners, missing men, and the dead buried in unmarked graves. But the strain of her work took its toll, and she was ordered to Europe by her doctor for a rest cure in 1869.

While abroad Barton came into contact with the International Committee of the Red Cross. She participated in relief efforts during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870-1871, but was forced into temporary retirement by ill health in 1872. After recovering, she campaigned to establish an American branch of the Red Cross, despite government resistance arising from fears of foreign entanglements. The U.S. Senate, after years of lobbying, finally ratified the Geneva Convention in 1882, forming the American Association of the Red Cross. Barton became its president. Her subsequent domestic program was impressive. The Red Cross provided relief at the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood in 1889 and after hurricanes in the Sea Islands off the southeastern coast in 1893. The organization also marshaled support for international campaigns, sending supplies to Russia during a famine in 1892 and to Armenia in 1896.

Barton, at the age of seventy-seven, distinguished herself again, this time in Cuba during the Spanish-American conflict. But her presence on the battlefield called her methods into question and widened a rift between the national Red Cross and its local chapters. Barton was unwilling to delegate responsibility and her inability to do so was a drawback sustained within the ranks of the Red Cross. Her inflexibility forced her to resign in 1904 from the organization she had founded and built. Barton nevertheless remained active and involved in relief work until her death at the age of ninety-one. Her energy and commitment to humanitarian causes over a forty-year period has made her a household name, a symbol of charitable self-sacrifice.

Bibliography:

Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Clara Barton: Professional Angel (1987).

Author:

Catherine Clinton

Barton, Clara, 1821-1912, American humanitarian, organizer of the American Red Cross, b. North Oxford (now Oxford), Mass. She taught school (1839-54) and clerked in the U.S. Patent Office before the outbreak of the Civil War. She then established a service of supplies for soldiers and nursed in army camps and on the battlefields. She was called the Angel of the Battlefield. In 1865 President Lincoln appointed her to search for missing prisoners; the records she compiled also served to identify thousands of the dead at Andersonville Prison. In Europe for a conference at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (1870), she went to work behind the German lines for the International Red Cross. She returned to the United States in 1873 and in 1881 organized the American National Red Cross, which she headed until 1904. She worked successfully for the President's signature to the Geneva treaty for the care of war wounded (1882) and emphasized Red Cross work in catastrophes other than war. Among her writings are several books on the Red Cross.

Bibliography

See biographies by I. Ross (1956) and W. E. Barton (1969); S. B. Oates, A Woman of Valor (1994).

A reformer and nurse of the nineteenth century, who founded the American Red Cross in the 1880s. She had organized nursing care for Union soldiers during the Civil War.

Quotes:

"I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them."

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