Clara Barton: A Centenary Tribute to the World's Greatest Humanitarian / Founder of the American Red Cross Society, Author of the American Amendment to the International Red Cross Convention of Geneva, Founder of the National First Aid Association of America

by Charles Sumner Young

DATA AS TO THE TWENTY-FIRST MASSACHUSETTS REGIMENT

	Number
Enlisted men leaving Worcester, August 23, 1861	1,001
Total enlisted men throughout the war	1,277

Number		Ages
1	Emery G. Wilson, Co. K.	15 years
5		17 years
101		18 years
111		19 years
140		20 years
358	Total number under 21 years
170	at the age of	21 years
574	between 22 years and 30 years
120	between 30 years and 40 years
50	between 40 years and 48 years
2	at the age of	46 years
1	at the age of	47 years
2	at the age of	53 years
1277

Of this number 560 were killed or wounded in battle. The regiment was a member of the ninth-army Corps under General Burnside, a corps that did not lose a color nor a gun.

Membership of the Twenty-first Massachusetts Regiment Association August 23, 1921–61.

Carrie E. Cutter, Daughter, 1861–1862.

Clara Barton, Daughter, 1862–1912.

Flora S. Chapin, Secretary and Daughter, 1912——.

Miss Carrie E. Cutter, delicate and accomplished, was known as the Florence Nightingale of the Twenty-first. She was the daughter of Calvin E. Cutter, surgeon of the regiment; died in the service as nurse, March 24, 1862. Aged, nineteen years and eight months. Mrs. Flora S. Chapin is the daughter of Reverend Charles E. Simmons Hospital Steward in the Civil War, under Surgeons Calvin E. Cutter and James Oliver, of the Twenty-first Massachusetts Regiment. Clara Barton was the daughter of non-commissioned officer Stephen Barton. He enlisted in 1793, serving three years in the Indian wars (1793–97), and later was known by his friends as “Captain Barton.”

Clara Barton, then a war nurse and nearly forty-one years of age, was made Daughter of the Regiment on the battlefield of Antietam, in October, 1862. This was a few days after President Lincoln had reviewed the Army of the Potomac, the review occurring October third. The army at that time numbered about 145,000 men. It was towards nightfall, and the regiment was on dress parade. “She made a little speech,” says Comrade James Madison Stone, “and there was cemented a friendship begun under fire which was destined to last to the end of the lives of all the participants.”

Says Captain Charles F. Walcott of the Twenty-first Regiment (afterward Brigadier-General), and the author of the history of the regiment: “Our true friend, Miss Barton, a Twenty-first woman to the backbone, was now permanently associated with the regiment and, with two four-mule covered wagons which by her untiring efforts she kept well supplied with delicacies in the way of food and articles of clothing, was a ministering angel to our sick. General Sturgis kindly ordered a detail from the regiment of drivers and assistants about her wagon. And this true, noble woman, never sparing herself nor failing in her devotion to our suffering men, always maintained her womanly dignity, and won the lasting respect and love of our officers and men.”

Clara Barton’s last message to the regiment was delivered forty-five years after the Civil War, through an address and original poem, she then being eighty-nine years of age. The occasion was the annual reunion of the regiment, the date August 23, 1910; the reunion held at Worcester, Massachusetts.

REUNION OF 21ST MASSACHUSETTS REGIMENT

Picture taken on the occasion of the annual reunion of the Twenty-first Massachusetts Regiment Association—on August 23, 1921—Sixtieth anniversary of the day the Regiment left Worcester for the field.

On Fame’s eternal camping-ground

Their silent tents are spread;

And Glory guards, with solemn round,

The bivouac of the dead.

Theodore O’Hara.

I hear the loved survivors tell

How naught from death could save,

’Til every sound appears a knell

And every spot a grave.

Abraham Lincoln.

“I never made a secret of the fact that of all the glorious regiments that marched to the music of the Union and cooled their heated brows in the shadows of the Stars and Stripes, the Twenty-first Massachusetts was peculiarly my own—nearest in my thoughts, and deepest in my love, and there are many who know that more than once my heart went down in agony under the blood-stained soil with the lifeless forms of its bravest and its best. I would divide the last half of the last loaf with any soldier in that regiment, though I had never met him.”—Clara Barton.

• Top, left hand corner—Clara Barton.
• Top, right hand corner—Carrie E. Cutter.
• Lower row, center—Flora S. Chapin.

But evil on itself shall back recoil,

And mix no more with goodness when, at last,

Gathered like scum, and settled to itself,

It shall be an eternal restless change,

Self-fed and self-consumed. If this fail

The pillared firmament is rottenness,

And earth’s base built on stubble.