On May 21, 1881 Clara
Barton, already famed for her tireless work as a Civil War nurse,
organized the founding meeting of the Association
of the American Red Cross (later the American
Red Cross) in the parlor her Washington, DC apartment. By August, she had organized the first three
local chapters in her summer country
home of Danville, New York in
the upstate Finger Lakes region and
in near-by Rochester, and Syracuse.
Within a month the fledgling chapters were mobilized to aid
the victims of a massive forest fire
in eastern Michigan. It was living example of Barton’s aim to
not only provide aid in time of war, but during domestic disasters as well.
It might have quelled opposition
in the Senate to ratifying the Treaty of the Geneva Convention which
among other things allowed the establishment of an American Chapter of the International
Red Cross.
Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross.
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The Senate finally approved the treaty in March of 1882 and chartered the American Red Cross. Barton, who had campaigned to establish the
organization for years, was naturally elected the first President, a position she held for the next 23 years.
Barton was born on Christmas
Day 1821 to an ardent Universalist family
in Oxford, one of the western Massachusetts towns that had been a
cradle of the denomination. Her beloved father was a Revolutionary War veteran and her high strung mother was subject to fits of abusive rage. The youngest of five children, small for her
age and suffering from a lisp, she was teased and tormented by her siblings.
Yet at an early age she had to learn to take care of an
older sister who suffered a mental break down and was confined to
an upper room of the house and a brother
who was severely injured in a fall. She
changed his bandages, administered pain killing medicine, and tended his
needs for two years then suffered her own deep
depression when he recovered sufficiently no longer needed her.
In her late teens she
was put to work, initially against her will, as a school teacher in an effort to overcome her paralyzing shyness. Much to
her own and everyone else’s amazement she excelled managing a class of 40
including rambunctious young men
near her own age.
29-year-old school teacher Clara Barton
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When her school won a prize for being “most disciplined” she explained to astonished
officials that no discipline was ever needed because, “When they [the boys]
found that I was as agile and as strong as themselves, that my throw was as
sure and as straight as theirs, their respect knew no bounds.”
After that she was a sought after teacher and commanded the
same pay as veteran male pedagogues. She taught for more than 10 years before
enrolling in the Clinton Liberal
Institute in New York State for formal training.
After graduation Barton moved to Bordentown to establish her own school which was soon so successful that a large new building
was constructed and additional instructors hired. But when the trustees brought in a man to run it and paid him $600 a year more
then she had received, she angrily resigned and moved to Washington where using
some political influence she became
the first woman appointed clerk in the Patent
Office and made a man’s salary.
But she was harassed by her male co-workers and the subject of rumors of sexual indiscretion as a single woman living alone in the
city. When the election of Democrat James Buchanan as President
ended her Whig patronage position she was not unhappy.
Returning to Massachusetts she found herself drifting
without purpose and unable to find regular employment for four years. She studied French and art and
battled bouts of immobilizing depression.
With the election of Republican
Abraham Lincoln and the patronage of her friend Senator Henry Wilson she was able to get a temporary appointment as
a copyist at the Patent Office
making far less than she had as a full clerk in what was regarded as “an
experiment” in employing women. She
eagerly took up the task of “being a pioneer.”
In April of l865 the men of the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, some of them Barton’s former
students, arrived in Washington after being attacked by mobs in Baltimore.
She and her sister Sally
Vassall greeted the men at the train
station and took seriously injured men to Vassall’s home to nurse their
wounds. And when she discovered that the
men’s baggage had been stolen in
Baltimore she rounded up donations of food, clothing and supplies for the
regiment from local merchants.
She soon was tending New
York and New Jersey troops as
well, including more former students.
When the grateful men wrote home about her efforts, supplies began being
sent to her. After tending the
casualties from the first big battle, the disastrous engagement at Manassas, she began to systematically
appeal for aid to groups like the Worcester Ladies’ Relief Committee back
home, providing them with detailed lists of what was needed and how to pack
it.
She returned home to attend her father’s last illness, but
was soon back in Washington and somehow wrangled a Quartermaster’s Pass to get to the front line. She arrived with
six wagon loads of supplies shortly
after the Battle of Culpepper in Virginia and spent non-stop days
tending the wounded, including captive Confederates.
Soon she considered herself, and was considered by grateful
troops, a member of the Army of the
Potomac, arriving with her wagons on battlefields including Second Manassas, Antietam and Fredericksburg. The Twenty-first
Massachusetts held a dress parade
in her honor and made her an honorary
member. She often wore a short-waisted soldier’s jacket over her
long skirts and kepi on her
head. She suffered a life threatening
bout of typhoid fever but yearned to
return to the front.
But when Unitarian minister
Henry Whitney Bellows organized the Sanitary Commission to serve the Army
and Dorthea Dix, a Unitarian
laywoman organized a formal nursing
corps, Barton found her individual volunteer efforts were officially
discouraged and that female nurses were to be limited to duty in rear echelon
hospitals. Barton preferred to work independently and bristled at the restrictions Dix placed on her
nurses.
She got special permission to accompany her brother David, the boy she had once nursed who
was now Quartermaster of the Eighteenth Army Corps which was
dispatched in April 1862 to lay siege to Charleston,
South Carolina. At Hilton Head she found the siege and bombardment of the port and its harbor
forts to be dull compared to the Virginia
and she toyed with leaving but was persuaded to stay by handsome Col. John H. Elwell, a married officer with whom she
none-the-less fell in love—a first time experience for the forty year old
spinster.
Nursing the Civil War wounded.
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Some biographers have described Barton as “plain,” but
contemporary photographs show a
trim, attractive woman. She was also
spirited and intellectually challenging.
An affair, or at least an intense romance, was inevitable.
When the siege of Ft.
Wagner turned into an intense battle, Barton moved to the front with fellow
Universalist nurse Mary Gage. She saw Elwell wounded and brought him to
safety before returning to tend others.
But local commanders were not as sympathetic to her as were those of the
Army of the Potomac and despite her long hours of service they made her life
difficult until she collapsed of exhaustion and was evacuated back to Hilton
Head where the recovering Elwell nursed her.
When she tried to return to the front, she was told that
only Dix’s nurses would be allowed.
Bitter and disillusioned, she turned to work with Mary
Gage’s mother, the Suffragist Frances Dana Gage among freed slaves in the area. Gage expanded her horizons turning her more
explicitly to a Feminist social
consciousness. They formed a bond
that lasted until Gage’s death in 1884.
She returned to Washington in December 1863 and went into
one of her periodic depressions that accompanied times of enforced
inactivity.
When General Ulysses
Grant’s bloody spring offensive
in 1864 began to overwhelm the Sanitary Commission, Barton received permission
to work in the hospitals at Fredericksburg. Her friend, Massachusetts General Benjamin Butler, finally gave
her permission to join a forward field
hospital.
At war’s end Barton found herself the most famous woman in America.
The original door sign of Barton's Missing Soldiers Bureau..
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In one of his final acts, President Lincoln assigned her the
daunting task of locating missing prisoners of war and informing families
of their fate. She read and answered
thousands of letters from families while pouring over shoddy and incomplete Confederate records.
In 1867 she undertook a nationwide speaking tour presenting
her lecture Work and Incidents of Army Life.
The tour provided her first personal
income since leaving the Patent Office at the outset of the war. She also began collaborating with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in advocating
for women’s suffrage. She was especially valued for her ability to
reach veterans and enlisting their
support with the appeal, “Soldiers! I have worked for you and I ask you, now,
one and all, that you consider the wants of my people. . . . God only knows
women were your friends in time of peril and you should be [theirs] now.”
She split with the most militant
feminists in support of her friend Fredrick
Douglas when she endorsed the Fifteenth
Amendment which gave Black men
but not women the right to vote.
Financially secure for the first time in her adult life,
Barton was traveling in Europe when
the Franco-Prussian War broke out in
1870. She offered her services to the
new International Red Cross. She set up aid centers behind the lines of each combatant, but especially in Strasbourg, Germany and later in Paris.
Barton organized aid centers behind the lines of both combatants in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870.
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After the war she was decorated
by both governments for her impartial
service and her work with prisoners of war.
She helped introduce the family reunion methods she had developed after
the Civil War to the International Red Cross.
Returning to the U.S. in 1873 with her health broken, Barton
spent three years recuperating in the family home at Worcester and in
Danville. She corresponded with the President of the International Red
Cross to ask how she could form an American section. Dr.
Louis Appia replied that she first needed to win public support, get the
approval of the President, and finally, get Congress to approve the Geneva
Convention. She set to work with her pen
placing articles in women’s magazines,
veteran’s publications and national newspapers.
But President Rutherford
B. Hayes and many Senators were
hostile. In 1877 she felt well enough to
travel twice to Washington to personally lobby, however fruitlessly. Finally with the election of James Garfield in 1880 she had an ally in the Presidency. Within months of his inauguration, she held
her organizing meeting.
Her long stewardship of the Red Cross was not without its
difficulties. Although the organization
responded to such disasters as the Johnstown Flood and Galveston Hurricane
standards of local chapters were uneven, and fundraising a chronic problem. Barton’s go-it-alone style of administration
was often ineffective.
In fact like many visionary
founders, she was not a good administrator.
Her failings and the failings of the organization were often criticized
in the press. Disgruntled former
associates challenged her for leadership and set up rival organizations. Despite
continuing to recognized and decorated abroad, Barton felt besieged at home.
By 1904 the Red Cross had undergone reorganization, not entirely to her approval, and Barton was
carefully eased out as President.
She flirted with a rival
organization, The National First Aid
Association of America, but it and its functions of training local
volunteers were soon absorbed back into the Red Cross.
Barton's house and Red Cross Headquarters in Glen Echo, Maryland is now the Clara Barton National Historic Site, the first such site dedicated to the accomplishments of an American woman.
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Responding to requests from children Barton wrote a juvenile book, The Story of My Childhood,
which was published in 1907. She enjoyed
attending and being honored at Suffrage
conventions and Grand Army of the
Republic encampments.
Clara Barton died of pneumonia
at her home on the grounds of the Red Cross Headquarters she built at Glen Echo, Maryland on April 12, 1912 at the age of 90.
Pretty good for a “frail waif.”
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