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

XXII

Clara Barton dressed the wounded of both armies indiscriminately—a practice which first annoyed and sometimes angered the Union officers—from whose headquarters she worked. Ida Tarbell.

Be generous and noble. Clara Barton.

War is in its very nature cruel—the very embodiment of cruelty in its effects—not necessarily in the hearts of the combatants.

Clara Barton.

As the daughter of a Mason my Father bade me to seek and comfort the afflicted everywhere, and as a Christian he charged me to honor God and love mankind. Clara Barton.

Baron Thomas B. Macaulay thought it not a mitigation but an aggravation of the evil that men of tender culture and humane feelings, with no ill will, should stand up and kill each other.

Clara Barton.

It is comforting, in our reflections upon the past, to know that the idea of humanity to an enemy in distress is not entirely modern; for Xenophon in Cyropaedia, about 400 B.C. represents Cyrus the Great as ordering his surgeons to attend the wounded prisoners.

Clara Barton.

A wounded Confederate that Clara Barton had been serving whispered to her, “Lady, you have been kind to me—every street and lane in the city is covered with cannon. When your entire army has reached the other side of the Rappahannock, they’ll find Fredericksburg only a slaughter pen. Not a regiment will escape. Do not go over or you will go to certain death.”

Percy H. Epler.