Doing Something Decided
When President Lincoln issued his call for volunteers to maintain the Union, the response was immediate and troops began heading for Washington. Some Massachusetts volunteers passing through Baltimore, which was decidedly Southern in sentiment, were attacked by local citizens.
In late April 1861, less than two weeks after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the Massachusetts Sixth Regiment arrived in Washington, D.C., from Massachusetts. This regiment hailed from the Worcester area and many of the men were friends or former pupils of Clara Barton. Their train was mobbed while passing through Baltimore, and Barton, concerned that one of her “boys” might have been injured, rushed to their temporary quarters in the Senate Chamber. She found the Regiment unharmed, but sadly lacking in basic necessities—“towels and handkerchiefs ... serving utensils, thread, needles ... etc.” She bought and distributed as many of these items as she could, then wrote to the anxious families in Massachusetts to send preserved fruits, blankets, candles, and other supplies to supplement the unreliable army issues. “It is said upon proper authority, that ‘our army is supplied,’” she wrote to a group of ladies in Worcester, “how this can be so I fail to see.” When the generous New Englanders inundated her with useful articles and stores, Barton’s home became a virtual warehouse. “It may be in these days of quiet idleness they have really no pressing wants,” she observed, “but in the event of a battle who can tell what their needs might grow to in a single day?” Such garnering of supplies against unforeseen disaster eventually became a central characteristic of her relief work in the years to come.
Barton’s earliest concern with aiding the Union army stemmed from her loyalty to the Massachusetts men. She felt a personal involvement with those who “only a few years ago came every morning ... and took their places quietly and happily among my scholars” and an allegiance to others from her home state. “They formed and crowded around me,” she noted. “What could I do but go with them, or work for them and my country? The patriot blood of my father was warm in my veins.”
Her patriotism also was aroused by the Union cause. Although she maintained that the purpose of the war was not solely to abolish slavery, she also held little sympathy for the Southern way of life and aligned herself with such Republicans as Henry Wilson who believed that historically the Southern states had conspired to tyrannize the North. “Independence!” she once scoffed, “they always had their independence till they madly threw it away.” She was exhilarated. “This conflict is one thing I’ve been waiting for,” she told a friend, “I’m well and strong and young—young enough to go to the front. If I can’t be a soldier I’ll help soldiers.” And feeling even more exalted, she declared that “when there is no longer a soldier’s arm to raise the Stars and Stripes above our Capitol, may God give strength to mine.”
For a year Barton contented herself with soliciting supplies. Then, as the horrible effects of battle were reported in Washington, she began to think of aiding soldiers directly on the battlefield. She had visited hospitals and invalid camps, but what disturbed her most were the tales of suffering at the front. Soldiers often had wounds unnecessarily complicated by infection due to neglect, or died of thirst while waiting for transportation to field hospitals. Nurses were urgently needed at the battlefield, but she wondered if it was seemly for a woman to place herself directly in the lines of battle: “I struggled ... with my sense of propriety, with the appalling fact that I was only a woman whispering in one ear, and thundering in the other [were] the groans of suffering men dying like dogs.”
Her father encouraged her to go where her conscience directed. When Captain Barton died in March 1862, she felt that her duties to the family had closed. She petitioned Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew and other government officials for permission to join General Burnside’s division at the front. Late in the summer of 1862, at the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Virginia, she “broke the shackles and went to the field.”
At Cedar Mountain, and the subsequent second battle of Bull Run, she began a remarkable service which continued to the end of the war. Here, for the first of many times, Barton and her “precious freights” were transported in railroad cars or by heavy, jolting army wagons to a scene of utter desolation and confusion. When she arrived at Bull Run, 3,000 wounded men were lying in a sparsely wooded field on straw, for there was no other bedding. Most had not eaten all day; many faced amputations or other operations. She was unprepared for such carnage, but she distributed coffee, crackers, and the few other supplies she had brought. With calico skirt pinned up around her waist, she moved among the men and prayed that the combination of lighted candles and dry straw would not result in a fire that would engulf them.
Andersonville prison camp in Georgia
Confederate dead at Antietam
Scanty as her supplies were, Barton’s aid was timely and competent. An army surgeon, Dr. James I. Dunn, wrote to his wife: “At a time when we were entirely out of dressings of every kind, she supplied us with everything, and while the shells were bursting in every direction ... she staid [sic] dealing out shirts ... and preparing soup and seeing it prepared in all the hospitals.... I thought that night if heaven ever sent out a homely angel, she must be one, her assistance was so timely.”
Dunn’s letter was widely published during the Civil War, and he was embarrassed that his private portrayal of Barton as a “homely angel” ever saw print. She, too, seems to have been embarrassed, for she crossed the word out on the newspaper clippings she kept and substituted the word “holy” for “homely.” Although the original letter shows that Dunn did indeed mean “homely,” Barton’s biographers have taken their cue from her and given her the title “the holy angel.”
These early battles taught Clara Barton how poorly prepared the Union army was for the immense slaughter taking place and how immediate battlefield aid meant much more than a battalion of nurses back in Washington.
In quick succession the battles of Fairfax Court House and Chantilly followed second Bull Run. A surgeon recalled that at Chantilly “we had nothing but our instruments—not even a bottle of wine. When the [railroad] cars whistled up to the station, the first person on the platform was Miss Barton again to supply us with ... every article that could be thought of. She staid [sic] there till the last wounded soldier was placed on the cars.” She worked for five days in the pouring rain with only two hours of sleep. As at all battles, she took time to jot down the names of many wounded men, so that their families could be informed.
Barely two weeks later, on September 14, she again went to the field, this time with advance information about a battle to be fought near Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). She arrived too late but rushed on to Antietam, which she reached at the height of battle on September 17. Once again, she cooked gruel, braved enemy fire to feed the wounded, and provided surgeons with precious medical supplies. She had a narrow escape from death when a bullet passed under her arm, through the sleeve of her dress, and killed the wounded soldier cradled in her arms.
In all this fury, Barton was unflappable. At the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, “a shell destroyed the door of the room in which she was attending to wounded men,” recalled co-worker Rev. C.M. Welles. “She did not flinch, but continued her duties as usual.” And she was working at the Lacy House, where hundreds of men were crowded into 12 rooms, when a courier rushed up the steps and placed a crumpled, bloody slip of paper in her hands. It was a request from a surgeon asking her to cross the Rappahanock River to Fredericksburg where she was urgently needed. As always, hospital space was inadequate, and dying men, lying in the December chill, were freezing to the ground. With shells and bullets whistling around her, Barton bravely crossed the swaying pontoon bridge. As she reached the end of the bridge an officer stepped to her side to help her down. “While our hands were raised, a piece of an exploding shell hissed through between us, just below our arms, carrying away a portion of both the skirts of his coat and my dress.” She made her way into Fredericksburg without further mishap. She was lucky; the gallant officer who helped her on the bridge was brought to her a half hour later—dead.
Bravery and timeliness were conspicuous elements of Barton’s Civil War service. But of equal importance was her compassion for the individual soldier. And she treated the wounded of both sides alike. Her relief work was also notable for its resourcefulness. She built fires, extracted bullets with a pocket knife, made gallons of applesauce, baked pies “with crinkly edges,” drove teams, and performed last rites. When all other food gave out she concocted a mixture of wine, whiskey, sugar, and army biscuit crumbs. “Not very inviting,” she admitted, “but always acceptable.” When she lacked serving implements, she emptied jars of fruit and jelly and used them. When tired she propped herself against a tent pole or slept sitting up in a wagon. The common soldier remembered her sympathy and tenderness, the officer her calmness and alert activity under fire.
As historian R.H. Bremer notes, Barton viewed her role in the war as something of a family matter. If she was a “ministering angel,” she was also “everybody’s old-maid aunt”—fussing over “my boys,” worrying over clothes and food, and treating the men as fond nephews. Much of her success with quartermasters, officers, and men was due to this attitude, which eclipsed suspicion of her as a woman and radiated the sentimentality of the time.
She pursued her self-appointed task with remarkable tenacity. Her contribution was unique, for she worked directly on the battlefield, not behind the lines in a hospital. She worked primarily alone—and liked it that way. Although she respected such organizations as the Sanitary Commission, she felt that by working independently she could comfortably assist where she saw need. She wanted to be her own boss and be appreciated for her individual efforts. She did not seek glory, but she needed praise and did not wish to have it bestowed on the name of an impersonal group or commission.
There is no question that Clara Barton hugely enjoyed acclaim. She liked being in the inner elite of wartime politics, for it gave her the chance to shine as a personality, to be revered as an “Angel of the Battlefield.” In later life she enjoyed trips to Europe that amounted to triumphal tours.
Barton’s relief work benefitted her in another way. Throughout her life she was self-conscious and introspective, preoccupied with small personal incidents which she magnified out of proportion to their importance. She once described herself as “like other people ... only sometimes a ‘little more so,’” and the description is apt. She was inwardly pessimistic, and highly sensitive to criticism. She confided to her diary that she felt “pursued by a shadow” and spent years with “scarcely one cheerful day.” Periodically she became so depressed that she could not “see much these days worth living for; cannot but think it will be a quiet resting place when all these cares and vexations and anxieties are over, and I no longer give or take offense. I ... have grown weary of life at an age when other people are enjoying it most.”
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“They Saw in High Purpose a Duty to Do”[1]
Dorothea Dix (1802-87) started teaching Sunday School at the East Cambridge House of Corrections in Massachusetts in 1841. The appalling conditions she observed there spurred her to attempt to reform prisons and mental institutions. This work preoccupied her the rest of her life. She died in Trenton, New Jersey.
Clara Barton was not the only civilian who ministered to the wounded during the Civil War. The nature of this conflict was so personal and so immediate that many hundreds of volunteers gave enormously of their time in hospitals and on the field. In the North, Dorothea Dix interrupted her pre-war work with the insane to become superintendent of Female Nurses; Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Frances Dana Gage, and “Mother” Mary Ann Bickerdyke are a few of the other famous names connected with such service. Of especial importance were the Christian and Sanitary Commissions, organizations which worked with the government in camp and on the battlefield to improve the lot of the Union soldier. In the Confederacy, stringent financial conditions and widely scattered population prevented relief efforts from being as organized as those of the North. But charity had a deep-rooted meaning for the Southern cause, and self-denial became a matter of pride. “We had no Sanitary Commission in the South,” wrote one Confederate veteran, “we were too poor.... With us each house was a hospital.”
The United States Sanitary Commission was established in April 1861. It was originally designed for inquiry into the health of the troops and as an advisory board to the government on improvement of sanitary conditions in the army. In the early months of the war, the Sanitary Commission attempted to methodize the fragmented benevolent efforts of the Union. It fought favoritism to particular regiments with equitable distribution of supplies, administered from a network of regional and local auxiliaries. By 1863, however, the commission was, of necessity, drawn to the battlefield, where it established hospital and transport ships, supply stations, and gave direct aid to the wounded. Several million dollars were raised by the commission through “Sanitary Fairs,” large fund-raising bazaars. At one point the Sanitary Commission had more than 500 agents working in the field. By its impartiality and organization, the Sanitary Commission was the forerunner of the Red Cross in concept, if not in actuality.
Another organization, drawn along similar lines, was the United States Christian Commission. Established by a group of New York churches in 1862, its object was to “give relief and sympathy and then the Gospel.” Volunteers in the Christian Commission were called “Ambassadors of Jesus;” they were chosen largely from the ranks of clergymen and YMCA members but many women were among its workers. The Christian Commission did give battlefield relief, and sought to supply reading material, clothing, and medicine.
“They would stand with you now, as they stood with you then,
The nurses, consolers and saviors of men."
The Women Who Went to the Field
Clara Barton was familiar with these organizations, and, especially in the latter part of the war, often worked alongside them. But though she wrote publicly that their labor was always in “perfect accord, mutual respect and friendliness,” she chose to work alone rather than align herself too closely with the commissions. Barton’s natural leadership and difficulty in working with others prompted her to remain independent, where she would not be “compromised by them in the least.” Furthermore, she secretly scorned the commissions’ work, which she thought inexperienced and impractical: “an old fudge” she called the Sanitary Commission in her journal.
Barton also chose not to work with Dorothea Dix’s “Department of Female Nurses.” A compulsive humanitarian worker, Dix had volunteered her services to the War Department at the opening of hostilities. Her offer was accepted and Dix began the impossible task of collecting supplies, selecting nurses, and supervising hospitals for the Union army. Dix was a perfectionist and her dogmatic and strident opinions won her few friends. But her sharp altercations with physicians and officers resulted more from frustration because she could not relieve the massive misery, than from an over-bearing personality. Feeling that she had failed to achieve her mission, Dix wrote at war’s end: “This is not the work I would have my life judged by.”
The use of female nurses was an innovation during the Civil War and Dix was anxious for the women under her to be taken seriously. Fearful that nursing would become a sport among adventurous young women, she laid down stringent and inflexible rules for nurses. These rules would have greatly hampered Clara Barton’s independent spirit and this is one reason she chose not to join Dix’s force.
In addition to the official organizations there were numerous “unsung heroes” during the Civil War. Most notable were the religious orders such as the Sisters of Charity who calmly defied the army’s restrictions and worked both at the front and in hospitals. Despite the fact that such diverse groups inevitably caused conflicts and jealousies, the Civil War provided a field large enough for all of the humanitarian organizations which labored in it.
Mary Ann Bickerdyke
Walt Whitman
While aiding others, Barton, for a time, forgot herself. Her “work and words,” she insisted, were solely bound up in “the individual soldier—what he does, sees, feels, or thinks in ... long dread hours of leaden rain and iron hail.” As she gained self-confidence and acclaim, she shed her morbid introspection. Once when she was asked if her work had been interesting, she gave a revealing reply: “When you stand day and night in the presence of hardship and physical suffering, you do not stop to think about the interest. There is no time for that. Ease pain, soothe sorrow, lessen suffering—this is your only thought day and night. Everything, everything else is lost sight of—yourself and the world.”
In April 1863, Barton transferred her base from Washington to Hilton Head Island off the coast of South Carolina. She had been advised that a major siege of Charleston would be attempted and believed she could be most useful there. She also hoped to be closer to her brothers: Stephen lived behind Confederate lines in North Carolina, and David had been sent by the army to Hilton Head in the early days of 1863.
During the eight-month siege of Charleston, she worked on the battlefields of Morris Island and Fort Wagner and helped nurse soldiers dying of malaria and other tropical fevers. Charleston proved to be a less active spot than anticipated, however, and this fact, coupled with a growing rift between Barton and hospital authorities, led her to leave the area in January 1864. She returned to Washington, where she continued to gather supplies as she awaited her next chance for service.
Her chance came in May 1864, when “the terrible slaughter of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania turned all pitying hearts once more to Fredericksburg.” Here she witnessed some of the most frightening scenes she ever encountered. Fifty thousand men were killed or wounded in the Wilderness Campaign. “I saw many things that I did not wish to see and I pray God I may never see again,” she told a friend. Rain turned the red clay soil of Virginia to deep mud, and hundreds of army wagons, crowded full of wounded and suffering men, were stuck in a tremendous traffic jam. “No hub of a wheel was in sight and you saw nothing of any animal below its knees.”
She immediately set about feeding the men in the stalled wagons, but another, more appalling situation arose. Some “heartless, unfaithful officers” decided that it was, in fact, a hardship on the refined citizens of Fredericksburg to be compelled to open their homes as hospitals for “these dirty, lousy, common soldiers.” Always a champion of the “army blue” against the “gold braid,” she hurried to Washington to advise her friend Henry Wilson of the predicament. Wilson, chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, swiftly warned the War Department. One day later the homes of Fredericksburg were opened to Union soldiers. She returned to the battlefield with additional supplies and continued to help the wounded. “When I rose, I wrung the blood from the bottom of my clothing before I could step, for the weight about my feet.”
After the Wilderness Campaign she served as a supervisor of nurses for the Army of the James, under Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, until January 1865. She organized hospitals and nurses and administered day-to-day activities in the invalid camps that received the wounded from Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and other battles near Richmond. Many of these soldiers remembered her thoughtfulness. If a wounded man requested codfish cakes “in the old home way,” he most likely got them; a young soldier, wasted to a skeleton, was tenderly cared for until his relatives arrived to take him home; requests to have letters written were never too much trouble.
Throughout the Civil War Benjamin Butler (1818-93) was a controversial figure as he invariably was at odds with the national administration on the treatment of the civilian population and the black slaves. Leaving the Army, he went into politics and served in the U.S. Congress and one term as governor of Massachusetts. It was as governor that he appointed Clara Barton superintendent of the Women’s Reformatory at Sherborn.
At the end of the Civil War an exhausted Clara Barton felt certain of one thing: “I have labored up to the full measure of my strength.” And she labored without pay and often used her own funds to buy supplies. In the field she shared the conditions of the common soldier: “I have always refused a tent unless the army had tents also, and I have never eaten a mouthful ... until the sick of the army were abundantly supplied.” Her pragmatic judgment and ability to work under the most dangerous and awkward of conditions earned her the respect of surgeons and generals who ordinarily considered they had “men enough to act as nurses” and did not want women around to “skeddadle and create a panic.” General Butler described her as having “executive ability and kindheartedness, with an honest love of the work of reformation and care of her living fellow creatures.”
Barton’s perceptive and sympathetic nature led her to foresee innumerable social problems after the Civil War. A champion of the underdog, she was concerned with the precarious situation of the newly freed slaves. What she saw on her travels to the South was alarming: uneducated, dependent blacks were being duped by their former masters, and freedom was, in many cases, a burden, not a blessing. Few blacks knew of the laws passed for their benefit and many did not understand that they must continue to work. She observed that the former “owners were disposed to cheat [a] great many.” Wherever she went, Barton tried to explain the law and the meaning of freedom to the blacks, many of whom walked great distances to ask her advice.
Frederick Douglass (1817?-95) was born in Talbot County, Maryland, the son of a white man and a slave woman. He was an eloquent spokesman for American blacks before and after the Civil War and spent his life fighting for equality. He was appointed U.S. minister to Haiti in 1889.
Barton, however, did more than advise. She consulted with Senator Wilson about the best possible personnel for the Freedman’s Bureau and lobbied Congress for a bill allowing blacks to use surplus army goods. She attended meetings of the Freedman’s Aid Society and sent reports on blacks’ conditions to the Freedman’s Bureau. She also worked for the extension of suffrage through “Universal Franchise” meetings and the American Equal Rights Association; she spoke at their rallies and formed lifelong attachments with such prominent leaders as Frederick Douglass and Anna Dickenson. During October of 1868, she began to formulate a plan for helping “the colored sufferers.” The plan, modelled on the work of Josephine Griffing, apparently involved the use of abandoned barracks and former hospitals near Washington for “Industrial Houses.” Here Freedmen could learn a trade and be “provided with the means of self-support and so command the respect of [their] former masters.” She discussed her ideas with several people, but unfortunately, the project was dropped because of her failing health.
Barton remained a staunch ally of blacks during her lifetime. Blacks employed by her received wages consistent with those of whites and generally received additional training and education. When few other charitable groups were willing to aid blacks who were the victims of natural disasters, such as the storm that hit the Sea Islands of South Carolina in 1893, Barton’s Red Cross never hesitated. And those who denied the bravery or competence of black troops in the Civil or Spanish-American Wars found her an outspoken opponent. Made honorary president of a society honoring soldiers of the Spanish-American War, she resigned when she found that it was open only to whites.
At the same time she was promoting the enfranchisement of freedmen, she embarked on a project aimed at diminishing another major post-war problem: the whereabouts of thousands of missing soldiers. She appreciated the difficulty of keeping accurate records in the confusion of battle and understood that it was often nearly impossible to recognize the dead, or identify individual graves among the hastily dug common trenches. Her wartime notebooks and diaries are filled with names of missing and wounded soldiers and lists of those who died in her arms with perhaps no one else to know their fate. With official permission from President Lincoln, she devised a plan to identify missing soldiers by publishing in newspapers monthly rolls of men whose families or friends had inquired. Any person with information could write to her and she would forward it to those concerned.
As she went about her work she learned that not everyone was willing to be found. Soldiers who were attached to Southern sweethearts, who had deserted, or who simply wished to start a new life, preferred to remain missing. One young man wanted to know what he had done to have his name “blazoned all over the country” in newspapers. “What you have done ... I certainly do not know,” she replied. “It seems to have been the misfortune of your family to think more of you than you did of them, and probably more than you deserve from the manner in which you treat them.... I shall inform them of your existence lest you should not ‘see fit’ to do so yourself.”
In all, Barton’s “Office of Correspondence with Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army” worked for four years to bring information to more than 22,000 families. The most help she received came from a young man named Dorence Atwater, a former Andersonville prisoner. He fortuitously had copied the names of more than 13,000 men who had died during his confinement. With his aid, she identified all but 400 of the Andersonville graves and caused the camp to be made a National Cemetery.
Atwater’s help was invaluable, and he became a close personal friend. She was highly indignant when the Federal Government arrested Atwater on charges that his death list was government property. Federal officials claimed that he had “stolen” back the list after turning it over to the War Department. The case appears to have been actually based on confusion and a stubborn refusal of both sides to back down, but Clara Barton was incensed. She fought for Atwater’s release with every influential person she knew; she advised and prompted his statements from prison and carried on a monumental publicity campaign to elicit public sympathy. Largely because of her efforts, he was freed.
Atwater’s defense and her work with the missing men further developed her publicity efforts, which she had used so effectively in the Civil War. As time went on, her relief work relied more and more on public support. “We enter a field of distress,” she wrote, “study conditions, learn its needs, and state these facts calmly, and truthfully to the people of the entire country through all its channels of information and leave them free to use their own judgments in regard to the assistance they will render.” Still, she knew how to publicize her causes dramatically. In 1886, when a tornado struck Mount Vernon, Illinois, she wrote: “the pitiless snow is falling on the heads of 3,000 people who are without homes, without food, or clothing.” The response was immediate.
Oral publicity also proved helpful during her attempt to identify missing men. In 1866, she began a successful lecture tour that publicized both her cause and her name. She gave lectures throughout the North and West and was featured on tours with such prominent speakers as Ralph Waldo Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, and Mark Twain. Her talks centered on “Work and Incidents of Army Life.” The flyer portrayed her lectures as “exquisitely touching and deeply interesting, frequently moving her audience to tears.” As always, she enjoyed the notoriety and in her diary wrote a flattering description of herself at the lecturn: “easy and graceful, neith[er] tall nor short, neith[er] large nor small ... head large and finely shaped with a profusion of jet-black hair ... with no manner of ornament save its own glossy beauty.... She [is] well dressed.... Her voice ... at first low and sweet but falling upon the ear with a clearness of tone and distinctness of utterance at once surprising and entrancing.”
Although she enjoyed being in the limelight, many of her old insecurities returned. “All speech-making terrifies me,” she said, “first I have no taste for it, lastly I hate it.” In 1868, while delivering a lecture in Boston, she suffered what was apparently a nervous breakdown and was ordered by her doctors to recuperate in Europe.
The periodic nervous disorders she suffered appear to have been directly related to her sense of usefulness. When she was not working, her diary entries often begin “Have been sad all day,” or “This was one of the most down-spirited days that ever comes to me.” She once remarked that nothing made her so sick of life as to feel she was wasting it. As long as she was needed, admired, demanded, she could perform near miracles of self-denial and courageous action. When the crisis ebbed, she became despondent and sick, requiring attention of a different sort. As a single woman, often removed from her family, she had no other way to attract notice than to excel as an individual. When such an opportunity faded, or when she found herself an object of criticism, she was, in several senses, prostrated. When her interest was again aroused by the chance of giving service, her health and spirits rebounded.