Clara Barton was the founder and first president of the American Red Cross. Beyond her groundbreaking work with that organization, she is best known for her efforts as a courageous, independent battlefield nurse during the Civil War. However, her activism also extended to the areas of education, women’s rights, and civil rights where she worked closely with Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony to achieve reform in these areas.
Born on December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts, Clarissa Harlowe Barton was the daughter of Captain Stephen Barton and Sarah Stone Barton. Clara, as she always preferred to be called, was the youngest of five children, having two brothers and two sisters of which she was separated by ten years from the next youngest. Her father was a prosperous local businessman and militia captain. His stories of Indian wars in the Midwest represented her first exposure to both war and the importance of medical care for soldiers. Given his past experiences, he took it upon himself to teach her geography and military tactics, but her older siblings were her greatest and most effective teachers. While her sisters taught the precocious Clara to read, her older brothers mentored her in horseback riding skills and working with animals. In her riding she demonstrated considerable athletic talent. At the same time, she was painfully shy as a child. Concerned about her lack of friends outside the family, her parents sent her away to boarding school in hopes that she would better socialize. Her parents soon brought her home, however, after she became even more fearful and withdrawn.
Clara Harlowe Barton (1821–1912), the founder and first president of the American chapter of the Red Cross. Barton is best remembered for her fearless work as a nurse during the Civil War, for which she was known as the “Angel of the Battlefield.” An independent and highly accomplished individual, Barton was active in areas of civil rights as well, and made common cause with such notables of the day as Frederick Douglass and Susan B. Anthony. (National Archives)
The roots of her future career and fame were sown early when, as an eleven–year-old, she took it upon herself to nurse her brother David in the aftermath of his fall from the roof of a barn. From dispensing the proper medication to placing the leeches needed to bleed him (a popular practice at the time), Clara demonstrated a combination of strength and sensitivity while continuing to care for him after doctors had given up. By most accounts, her devoted efforts played a major role in his complete recovery. Despite this experience, Clara’s initial career was in education. For twelve years, beginning in 1838, she taught in schools in Canada and west Georgia. For all of her youthful shyness, she came alive in a classroom, and her natural athletic prowess, coupled with the lessons learned from her brothers, made her particularly successful with some of the older, more rambunctious, less academically focused boys she often encountered early in her career. While a highly successful teacher from the start, she took a year away from the classroom in 1850, seeking to strengthen her teaching by studying writing and language at the Clinton Liberal Institute in New York. With her enhanced skill set, she opened her own free school in New Jersey. Under her direction, the enrollment grew and the school flourished, but much to Clara’s chagrin, and despite her initial organizational efforts, the local school board hired a man to run it.
In frustration, she headed to Washington, D.C., where she secured a job as a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office, making her one of the first female employees of the federal government. Barton was working in that post when the Civil War broke out, and she immediately recognized the chaos inherent in the army manned by thousands of young, untrained soldiers, as they poured into the capital, some already injured in clashes with Confederate sympathizers encountered on their way to Washington, as well as in the early skirmishes. She helped provide assistance for early casualties, many of whom found shelter in the unfinished Capitol Building. As the war progressed, Barton and her associates organized a variety of volunteer operations in spite of lacking any formal governmental support with the exception of passes that allowed her access into the battlefield areas. These included services ranging from nursing individual soldiers to providing supplies to armies in the field as well as field hospitals. Frequently turning up unexpectedly at battlefields and hospitals, the women became an informal network and a source of medicines and supplies. In addition to helping to comfort wounded soldiers, they also served as a prod to sometimes careless or disinterested doctors. In addition, Barton used her connections with influential congressmen to help exert political pressure in an effort to achieve reforms in army medical practices. Barton and her associates also played a major role in communicating with soldiers’ families about their loved ones, an often heart-wrenching and unenviable task. Government workers, including President Lincoln, recognized and supported the important role she played in helping to identify and locate missing soldiers and prisoners of war. While her initial work had begun as an independent act of humanity, by 1864 her efforts were recognized and she was appointed superintendent of nurses for the Army of the James. Finally, at war’s end she played a critical role in the effort to establish a cemetery for the war dead, while also helping identify the remains of thousands of those who had given their lives in the cause.
In 1869, in the aftermath of the Civil War, Barton sought rest and relaxation in Europe. However, in characteristic fashion, she stepped into the turmoil created by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 and began working with the International Red Cross. She distributed needed supplies to war victims in France. That experience proved critical to her future pursuits. In being introduced to the International Red Cross, an organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, dedicated to protecting the victims of wartime without regard to nationality, she found a way to continue the work she had begun in the U.S. Civil War. The organization’s efforts were based on a treaty, most commonly referred to as the Red Cross Treaty, first signed by twelve European nations in 1864 and based on the principles of neutrality. The cause appealed to her, and motivated in no small part by her wartime experiences, she would later work diligently to make the United States a signatory member, an action that took place in 1882. Upon returning to the United States, and even prior to the nation’s legal acknowledgment of a tie to the organization, Barton and some associates established the American Association of the Red Cross. Its form and legal status changed a number of times, and while Barton resigned in 1904 amidst growing criticism of her efforts, the fledgling organization she had nurtured was well positioned to continue operations. In 1905 a congressional charter established the relationship between the government and the organization that exists to this day.
In the aftermath of her resignation as president of the Red Cross, Barton continued her efforts in the area of education and women’s suffrage. Her forceful commitment to these longtime causes was sometimes offensive to those less engaged, but like so much of her work, it inspired countless others. She was a widely known writer, whose works included several books about the early Red Cross as well as an autobiographical work about her childhood. An articulate speaker, she was known to move even battle-scarred veterans to tears with her accounts of the horrors she witnessed. In addition, her personal charisma, attested to by countless people, was no small part of her effectiveness in leadership.
Clara Barton died on April 12, 1912, at her home in Glen Echo, Maryland, and was buried in the family cemetery plot in Oxford, Massachusetts. Through her efforts in the Civil War and with the Red Cross, the formerly shy girl had sent a message to her fellow Americans about the importance of a national community and the shared responsibility of that community to help those ravaged by the volatile power of war and natural disasters.
William H. Pruden III
See also Earhart, Amelia; Oakley, Annie; Ross, Betsy; Truth, Sojourner; Tubman, Harriet
Further Reading
Barton, Clara. 1904. A Story of the Red Cross: Glimpses of Field Work. New York: D. Appleton.
Jones, Marian Moser. 2013. The American Red Cross: From Clara Barton to the New Deal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Oates, Stephen B. 1994. A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War. New York: Free Press.
Pryor, Elizabeth Brown. 1987. Clara Barton: Professional Angel. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Rose, Mary Catherine. 1960. Clara Barton: Soldier of Mercy. Champaign, IL: Garrard Press.