The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross (Vol. 2 of 2)

by William E. Barton

FOOTNOTES:

[4] As this second volume goes to press, there is placed in my hands a typewritten brief by General W. H. Sears, who accompanied Miss Barton on many of her fields of service, and who, from his personal knowledge and many compiled documents, answers in detail these charges. I have examined this document of 162 pages with interest, but have not found it necessary to quote from it.

CHAPTER XVI
CLARA BARTON AT HOME

Clara Barton loved a home. Although she went forth from her father’s ample and generous house while still she was a young woman, and lived as school-teacher, department clerk, and humanitarian for many years, she never failed to make a home for herself if there was opportunity. Hotel life had no charms for her, and, while she enjoyed entertainment in the homes of her friends and was a gracious and appreciative guest, she always preferred a roof of her own above her head where she could be hostess rather than guest and could minister instead of being ministered unto. While she was a clerk in Washington, she had her own quarters to which she was accustomed to bring homeless women, girls who lacked friendship, and others who were in need. While she was in Europe during the Franco-Prussian War, although at times the guest of royalty, she fled from the too abundant hospitality of her friends and the excessive luxury of hotels, and lived in her own rented lodgings.

She owned, and kept until her death, a summer home in Oxford. But the home of which it is especially proper to speak is that which she erected for herself and the Red Cross, at Glen Echo, Maryland.

More than once Miss Barton had occasion to meditate on the prayer of Peter offered on the Mount of Transfiguration, that the disciples might be permitted to erect three tabernacles and remain with Jesus and the spirits of the glorified saints. “Lord, it is good to be here,” is the enthusiastic cry of those who, being caught up by the spirit of a noble charity, see no reason why it should not continue permanently. Clara Barton saw to it that her work was discontinued when the need for it had passed.

When she finished her work at Johnstown, she was requested by the lumber dealers not to give away miscellaneously the material which had been used in the erection of her temporary Red Cross buildings. Times were returning to normal; there was employment at good wages for every one who wanted to work; and there was no good reason why people should not buy their lumber or why the lumber business should be demoralized by a thoughtless form of charity. Miss Barton knew that this was good sense. She learned who were the people who really needed and deserved free lumber, and these she assisted; but a portion of the lumber she shipped to Washington and erected at Glen Echo, a few miles out from the city, a permanent home for the American National Red Cross. Here she made her home during the remainder of her life. Now and then she returned for a few weeks to her summer home in Oxford, but the Red Cross Headquarters was where she lived and moved and had her being. There she dwelt and there she died.

It seemed to many to be far from an ideal home for her; it was a bare, barnlike sort of place with two tiers of rooms, the upper tier opening into a gallery as in the cabin of a steamboat. It was erected with reference to use as a possible storehouse and emergency hospital, as well as a central office building for the organization and a shelter for herself and her assistants. One might have expected that a woman who was at heart a tidy housekeeper would have preferred to put her warehouse and office building under one sufficiently ample roof, and to have erected for herself a little cottage adjacent; but Clara Barton lived and died surrounded by all that went into the daily performance of her work.

CLARA BARTON’S SUMMER HOUSE AT OXFORD, MASSACHUSETTS

The author of this volume confesses to a certain chill and sinking of heart when he first saw the interior of the Glen Echo home. He wanted to take Clara Barton out of it and house her in a cozy little place of her own, where for a few hours of the day she could forget the Red Cross and all its cares. But Clara Barton gloried in those undecorated board walls as if they had been palatial. There she hung her diplomas and testimonials from foreign Governments as proudly as though they had been backed by glorious tapestry of cloth of gold. Her sitting-room was at the south of the house, overlooking the Potomac Canal; there she worked late at night and watched the moon as it rode over the tree-tops and reflected itself in the water. From the windows of her bedroom just above, she habitually witnessed the sunrise. Her narrow bed was a soldier’s cot, and beside it was a little table with a candle, a pad of paper and a pencil. If, as often happened, she lay awake in the night, she did not fret over her insomnia, but lighted her candle, propped herself in bed, wrote down the good thoughts that came to her, and then blew out the candle and went to sleep, and was refreshed for work at five o’clock the next morning.

But there was a certain appropriateness in the construction of the Glen Echo home. One might look down from the bare walls that had seen service in Johnstown to find his feet on a rug presented by a Turkish Pasha; he searched the room in vain for relics, as such, for Clara Barton had no fondness for dust-gathering mementoes, but he could not fail to see about him inconspicuous trophies from hard-won fields of service. There was no luxury, but there was a simple, homely comfort in the air of the place. The main hall of the building was two stories high, with a gallery around the upper tier of rooms. It was a place for service, and that service was the joy and glory of her life.

Glen Echo is on the banks of a canal along the Potomac, about eight miles from the Capitol in Washington. This site she selected for herself in 1890, but did not occupy it until 1897. Her reasons for building there were that the location gave her convenient access to Washington, with ample space and freedom for outdoor life and opportunity for storage of Red Cross supplies without the excessive cost which an adequate building would have required in Washington.

At the time she erected her home, a Chautauqua Assembly was in operation in Glen Echo, and her house adjoined the grounds. Indeed, her home was almost one of the Chautauqua buildings, the front being of native stone such as was used in the construction of the large auditorium and Hall of Philosophy which stood within a stone’s throw of her house. But the stone front which was the one picturesque feature of the house gave it a prison-like chill on the inside and had to be removed, and the Chautauqua Assembly itself went down and gave place to a summer amusement park. Spite of the changes in the environment, Clara Barton kept her home at Glen Echo. A Ferris wheel was erected at her front door; the roller-coaster went thundering by her window; the dancing in what had been the auditorium kept up till a late hour; and the goddess of folly with cap and bells superseded divine philosophy in the hall dedicated to the latter; but Clara Barton lived and died in her home in Glen Echo.

The inside of her house was not much more luxurious than the outside. Few homes have been erected with so little attempt at display, or with such modest provision for reasonable comfort.

In one aspect the Glen Echo home was fashioned almost like a cathedral, but in its practical arrangement much more like a ship. It had more windows than either a ship or a cathedral. They were almost as thick as they could be placed and leave any room for walls, but they were very plain windows, except that one on the stairs had a little inexpensive ornamentation and the glass in the two front doors had a red cross in each.

The front door faced north and led into a long wide hall, cool in summer, cold in winter, with an elongated oval well, railed round on the two upper floors, so that from the main deck one looked up to the upper deck and the boat deck of the ship-like building. This central three-deck cabin was ceiled with unpainted wood, not unattractive but unadorned. Doors opened on either side at regular intervals, and between the doors were deep closets where blankets, Horlick’s Malted Milk, canned goods and emergency supplies of various kinds were duly stored and catalogued. If a fire or a flood broke out in any part of the country, Clara Barton was ready to start and had something with which to begin relief.

It was this attempt to combine in one a home, a storehouse, a place of refuge for the needy, and a kind of organization headquarters which struck the visitor so strangely and almost repellently. She might have built a little bungalow for herself and her offices and housed her supplies in a separate building erected for storage purposes and with emergency sleeping-rooms attached, but she wished it otherwise and she had her way.

If the reader had been privileged to visit Clara Barton there during her lifetime and had made his way down the rather long cabin to her own quarters in the south end of this ship-like cathedral, he would have found Clara Barton at home. It would have made little difference how early or how late the call was made. She was up with the sun and often before, weeding her garden, feeding her chickens, caring for her pets, and looking after her house. She rarely went to bed before midnight. Fourteen to eighteen hours a day of work she did steadily until her death.

Let us suppose that she has an important address to deliver to-morrow night. This is the way she prepares for it. She rises at five this morning and does her own room work. Her bedding is aired, her bed is made, and the carpet sweeper is rolling over her floor before six o’clock gives its warning to other members of the household. She eats a simple breakfast with her household and guests and wastes no time, but still is in no haste about it. She gives no intimation that she is in a hurry, and enjoys the breakfast-table conversation, evincing a keen sense of humor and a hearty interest in all human happenings. She announces that she has attended to her most important correspondence for the morning, and excuses herself to see to the ways of her household. It is the day her curtains are to be washed, and she has to superintend affairs in the laundry and make some changes in her garden. She puts in very nearly the whole day in physical labor. She knows well how to direct the work of others, but she does not scorn to take the flatiron or the garden trowel in her own hands and show how she wants things done. Moreover, she gets things done the way she wants them. That is a habit of hers.

She lingers after the luncheon and evening meal and engages in cheerful conversation. Instrumental music has no charm for her, but good singing she enjoys if there is a distinct melody and if the words mean something. She likes to hear men sing better than she likes to hear women, and she likes the songs she knows, and is willing to hear them again and again. If among the guests is one who sings, she is a good listener. But the greater part of the evening is spent in conversation. Clara Barton was a good conversationalist. She could listen without restlessness and talk without monopolizing the privilege of talking. She was quick to see a point. She had a voice which was low, and while not sweet or musical was pleasant, and its cadences were those of the gentlewoman. Her sentences were always perfectly formed. Her grammar never needed apology; her speech was precise, but free from pedantry. Her talk was habitually cheerful. She was respectful of the opinions of others and never failed to have an opinion of her own.

After her guests have gone to bed, her light still burns. She sits in her south room, where she said it seemed as if “it was always moonlight,” and in her work she enjoyed the companionship of the woods, the stars, and the many voices of the night. Even the racket of the dancing and the whirl of the merry-go-round with the joyously frightened squeals of the girls descending the roller-coaster was far less objectionable than it would have been if it had been her habit to retire early.

But she is not yet working on her address. She is taking care of the belated mail which the day has brought and which her duties in the garden and laundry have kept her from attending to, but she has been thinking about the address more or less during the day, although when midnight comes she has not written a word of it. Beside her bed, however, she places a candle, a pencil, and a pad.

Clara Barton’s bed was a cot. It was not a very soft cot either. She was never a poor woman. From her father she inherited a modest patrimony, and she always had more than enough money of her own to supply her needs. She could have had a wide and soft bed if she had wanted it. She had just what she wanted, and she never cared to have people tell her that she ought to have things differently in so far as they related to her own comfort.

Do not think she was an ascetic or slept in a hard bed because she scorned bodily comfort. Comfort she had and exactly as much of it as she wanted. Luxury she did not want. She thanked no one for wasting any pity upon her. Her bed was as wide as she wished it, and as soft as she cared to have it, and in it she slept soundly and was refreshed.

Before it was light she woke and reached for her matches and her pencil, and sitting up in bed she wrote her address as fully as she cared to have it written. She rarely erased a word. Her mind was clear and her speech came to her just in the form in which she wished it. Her years of training as a school-teacher had laid well the foundations of her composition and rhetoric. She wrote, not rapidly, but accurately, and each word said exactly what she wanted to say.

Her address is finished before daylight, and she puts out the light and takes her final nap, but is up at her accustomed time, having enjoyed a good night’s rest, and is out in the garden and looking after the poultry until she joins her guests at breakfast.

After breakfast she copies her address in ink. Her handwriting is like copper-plate. When it is copied, she lays it aside. The process of copying it has photographed it upon her mind. She can deliver it either with or without manuscript. Although she trembles at the sight of an audience, she has learned to face one with perfect composure and no word of her speech escapes her memory.

Perhaps she excuses herself from lunch to-day and works at her desk, but not at the speech she is to deliver. It is her habit to keep free from any needless accumulation of unfulfilled duties. She sees her guests at the table and is herself within call, but for herself she has ordered an apple, a slice of bread, and a piece of cheese. No member of her household will suggest to her that she ought to eat more, and if one of her guests feels some compunction at eating a more ample repast while her hostess dines on homely fare, it is better that she keep her compunction to herself. If the guest should rise from the table and walk into the other room, carrying some delicacy, she would meet a mild rebuke. “I asked for exactly what I wanted,” Clara would say.

Outside the window at which she sits the mason wasps build their nests of mud. Woe unto the man who molests them! The sparrow finds a house and the swallow a nest in the shelter of the Lord of hosts, and the wasps are as welcome as the birds to a home at Glen Echo. Two or three wasps fly through the open window and light upon her half-eaten apple. She will not permit them to be driven away. There is enough for the wasps and for herself. Like Saint Francis and the birds, she is at home with every kind of gentle life, and the wasps, she maintains, are gentle if gently treated. She gently pushes them away from her apple when she is ready for another bite, cutting off a piece with her desk-knife and leaving it on the corner of her desk for the wasps. They also have a further portion in the core. They light upon her hand, her forehead, they buzz round her, but they never sting her. She and they are friends.

This is the kind of life Clara Barton lived in Glen Echo; and this is what those were privileged to see who visited her in her home.

CHAPTER XVII
CLARA BARTON’S RELIGION

Clara Barton was a religious woman. Her diaries, her home letters, her intimate confidences, all breathe a deeply religious spirit. But she was reserved concerning her personal religious feelings and convictions. Once, when she was abruptly asked by a stranger in a group of strangers what were her religious opinions, she answered that she could not undertake to answer so large a question in so short a time. She recorded this in her diary, with some resentment that she should have been called upon thus to stand and deliver at sight.

But sitting beside a dying soldier, she had no hesitation in praying with him, nor of telling him unreservedly her own faith in God and immortality.

She was reared a Universalist. In that faith she lived the greater part of her life. She did not, however, join the Universalist Church in her home town, and she went away quite early and never established personal relations with a church.

Her satisfaction in church-going was almost wholly in the sermon. For music she did not care, and there was nothing in ritual that appealed to her. But a well-reasoned sermon she enjoyed. Henry Ward Beecher was her favorite preacher, and she did not miss an opportunity of hearing him if she could help it. A truly great sermon or great address of any kind made a strong impression upon her; nor was it wholly intellectual. She was remarkably receptive and open to spiritual impressions. A woman of intellect and will, she was also a woman of unusually sensitive feelings and of deep, though controlled, emotions. She was ever eager to learn and had to the end of her life unshaken faith in the discovery and application of new truth.

It was reported in 1908 that Clara Barton had gone over to Christian Science. The report was not wholly correct. She became interested in Christian Science, but she never adopted it. The minister of the Universalist Church in Oxford, the Reverend Mr. Schoppe, became a Christian Science practitioner and reader, and she was much interested through him and his wife in this change on his part.

She was interested in Mrs. Eddy. It seemed to her a notable thing for a woman, alone and against great opposition, to have accomplished what she did.

She once witnessed the wreck of a sight-seeing automobile filled with Christian Science visitors to Boston, and she was impressed by the fortitude with which they bore pain.

Moreover, she had good reason to know that there is much reckless use of medicine and much needless surgery. She had memories of years in which she suffered many things of many physicians and was nothing better, but rather worse. She saw, in war and in peace, much use of the knife that seemed to her bloody and cruel. She saw women hurrying to the operating-table, sometimes, as she believed, for no better reason than to escape the risk of motherhood, and she scorned them. She expressed herself to me in terms anything but gentle concerning married women who willingly deprive themselves of the perilous privilege of motherhood by resort to surgery. She believed that people who take medicine usually take too much; and that cheerful and wholesome living is better than medicine.

Moreover, she was always ready for a thing that was new. Her delight in the discovery of something hidden and now revealed was intense.

For all these reasons she was disposed to give Christian Science a fair hearing.

In Dr. Epler’s excellent biography, free use is made of Miss Barton’s correspondence with Mr. and Mrs. Schoppe, in which she expressed her interest in their new faith. My own conviction is, that while Clara Barton was thus deeply interested, those letters tend to enlarge the degree of her permanent interest. I am confident that she was less near to being a Christian Scientist than the letters themselves would indicate if taken alone. Indeed, Mr. Schoppe himself gives what I think is a wholly truthful statement, as recorded by Mr. Epler, under date of December 17, 1914:

Clara Barton’s connecting point with Christian Science was on the positives it accented—not from its negative philosophy. She welcomed its doctrine of the Divine presence of God working with us and in us and working upon her own life—present to help. She was exceedingly grateful to Christian Science for bringing out this point of the Divine absoluteness.

Further than that she could not understand it; she could not go. She did not deny, but she believed (unlike the Christian Science negativism) in a perfectly vast realm of material and human progress. She traced it in the wonders of geological ages and historical evolution. She saw God’s handiwork in a colossal complex material creation. She never could bring herself to believe the material or human creation a mortal error!

I regard this as wholly correct. She read “Science and Health” and endeavored to use the “absent treatment” of the Schoppes. The first night it seemed to do good, and the next night the effect was gone. Her effort to obtain whatever was good in Christian Science was sincere; but her experiments did not make her a Christian Scientist.

She employed physicians till the day of her death, and took medicine. But she believed that spiritual things are the real things, and that man is more than body.

The two ministers whom she selected to have charge of her funeral in the old home in Oxford were both Congregationalists. The Reverend Percy H. Epler was chosen for his long friendship, and the Reverend William E. Barton for that and for his kinship. She did not choose, but would have been happy to have chosen, had her plans been worked out in detail, the Reverend Doctor Tyler, an aged minister of the Universalist faith, to have a share in the services. Happily, he was present, and did participate. He had baptized and buried whole generations of the Oxford Bartons, and it was a benediction to have him standing, like a patriarch, above her coffin, and speaking words of comfort and hope.

Her choice of Congregational ministers to perform this service did not imply a lack of honor for the church of her childhood. Yet, in some respects, her associations in later years were more intimate with Congregationalists than with Universalists.

I have no reason to suppose that she talked with any one more freely than she talked with me about her religion, or about her relations to the Universalist Church. I think I can represent her views essentially as they were.

She continued to believe all that was essential in the faith which she had been taught in the church of Hosea Ballou. She trusted in a God whom she believed too great and good to make an eternal hell necessary to his government. If God was infinite and also desired the salvation of all men, if He was not willing that any should perish, but that all should come unto Him and live; if Christ tasted death for every man; then, as it seemed to her, ultimately, sin must be eliminated from the moral universe and with sin must go punishment. She believed, not only with Ballou, but with Beecher, that God will not punish after punishment ceases to do good. That sin brings punishment she believed and knew, but that sin and punishment must go on eternally seemed to her to imply either that God was not wholly good or not wholly Sovereign.

Her Universalism was essentially Calvinistic; it was based on the sovereignty of God. She believed that God was great enough to

“treasure up his bright designs,
And work his sovereign will.”

She believed in the divinity of Christ. She was not a Unitarian. But she held to Christ’s divinity as a divinity of preëminence and not of exclusion. She believed that Jesus became the Son of God by moral processes which are essentially within the reach of men, “that He might be the first-born among many brethren.”

I think I can give a truthful impression about her feeling with regard to Universalism as an independent ecclesiastical organization. She talked freely with me about this, and expressed the definite wish that the Universalist Church and the Congregational Church might everywhere be reunited. She had something of the same feeling with regard to the Unitarian churches. She loved the memory of Theodore Parker, whom she sometimes felt she recognized as guiding her long years after his death. She honored him, and other of the Unitarian men of his generation. She felt that both Unitarianism and Universalism had been necessary protests against the immoral orthodoxy of the time of their origin.

But she felt that that protest was no longer needed, at least to the same extent. She felt the waste of competing religious organizations. The Universalist Church was the church of her father, but the Congregational Church was the church of his fathers. She had more friends in the latter than in the former. She told me she would be glad to see the liberty of thought which Universalism had stood for sacredly preserved in a union of those denominations.

She said, “What I see in Oxford I see everywhere, a need that churches shall forget old and past disputes, and come into more compact organization, merging denominations, and preserving religious liberty.”

It is a hazardous thing to repeat, after years have gone by, the impressions left by oral conversations. Yet I am confident that in this meager outline I give her essential faith.

She did not talk glibly about her faith. But it was very real, and very definite, and it remained with her to the end.

Concerning revivals of religion she wrote to a niece who, in the widespread religious interest awakened by Mr. Moody in the seventies, had been asked by an evangelist to take a step which, as she looked back upon it, implied more than she had intended:

Thursday night

If one acts with good intentions, believing they are doing rightly, and later, concludes it was unwise or wrong—there is a mistake somewhere, or has been. It may have been in the act, or it may be in the later conclusion, but it is only a mistake, not a sin, you poor little chick.

Another time when you are requested in prayer meeting to act on a double question, the putter of it mixing up your desire or willingness to stand up before an audience and be made a subject for public prayers with an act of personal courtesy or discourtesy to himself as to whether you want to hear him or not, once leaves you free to vote as you like, and then comes and questions your decision, and asks your reason,—if you feel like answering him at all,—tell him to divide his questions, put one at a time and you will act on each separately. He put two questions together, as a dodge to get all up to be prayed for, thinking and knowing it put every one in a hard place, as all would see that it was a little impolite not to hasten to accept his offer to come and preach. Oh, how tricky.

You have done rightly in it all, my dear little girl. When he asked why you did not side with the Lord you answered that you did. That was right and all he could ask for. When he added, “Then why did you not rise and kneel,” you might tell him you did not understand that request as coming from the Lord, or you should certainly have done so.

I send you a “Banner of Light” to-day. You will find two articles bearing on your subject—the one a lecture by a good sturdy Briton on Mr. Moody’s sermon on “Hell.” I think you will read it with interest just now, and every time you get assaulted in public prayer meeting, and followed by men, I should advise you to run home and calm your hysterical nerves by re-reading that lecture from end to end.

The other longer marked article on “Revivalism” is a fine sermon by a sound Unitarian clergyman who does not believe in special revivals of religion, as gotten up for the occasion, and to fill churches, but thinks religion, as being the best part of man’s nature, will revive itself like all else in nature, and feels that God does not need to be implored to save from endless pain and loss the poor creatures He has made, but believes that if we do our best to enlighten and elevate those around us we do all we are called upon to do in the way of their salvation.

But read it well and carefully for yourself, or read it again with Ida and “reason together” about it and see if you can find in your own convictions some justification for the course you are taking with the S.S. There is much to be read, before you decide, much to learn and consider; take time and do it and don’t either fall into a trap nor be driven into one.—Selah!

She retained to the end of her life a high regard for the church of her fathers, the Universalist Church. Of it she wrote to Mrs. Jennie S. M. Vinton at Oxford:

I am glad to learn by your valued letter of September 5th that the old church of our fathers is about to be refitted and I thank you for the information. It is thoughtful of you to name the facts of the early history of the church which I am happy to corroborate, both by tradition and recollection. My father was present at the ordination sermon of Hosea Ballou (a white-headed boy he seemed). He was one of the pillars of the church. His family came over the hills of extreme North Oxford, five miles every Sunday, to sit in its high pews. When I was a grown young woman it was decided to build the present church, and no body of church people ever worked harder than we. We held fairs, public and home, begged, and gave all but the clothes we wore; we cleaned windows and scrubbed paint after workmen, bought and nailed down carpets, fitted up the parsonage, and received the bride of the Reverend Albert Barnes, our first settled pastor. And I carried their first baby to the christening.

There are few people there who have memories of harder church work and better church love than I.

Think this over, dear sister, and remember that I have never lost my love for the old church of my fathers, my family, and my childhood.

She believed whole-heartedly in immortality. Not only so, but she believed that her friends were near. She never recovered from the impression that came to her, after the death of her brother Stephen, that he was an influence, a living influence, for good in her life. That influence was exerted directly. As she woke in the morning while it was yet dark, and faced the duties of the day, she was able to think and plan with such clarity of vision that she felt that she was helped by the presence of those whom she had loved and who had counseled her in life. Through Stephen she felt the influence of her mother, as she believed, and, less directly, that of her father. She said, “I do not believe I am a Spiritualist,” but she could not shake off, and did not desire to shake off, the conviction that those whom she had loved were near her.

The latest, and in some respects the most satisfactory, statement of her faith, was written a year before her death, to Judge A. W. Terrell, of Austin, Texas:

I suppose I am not what the world denominates a church woman. I lay no claim to it. I was born to liberal views, and have lived a liberal creed. I firmly believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Jesus of Nazareth; in His life and death of suffering to save the world from sin, so far as in His power to do. But it would be difficult for me to stop there and believe that this spark of divinity was accorded to none other of God’s creation, who, like the Master, took on the living form, and, like him, lived the human life.

CHAPTER XVIII
THE PERSONALITY OF CLARA BARTON

At the beginning of her public career, Clara Barton was short of stature and slender as she was short. Her form rounded out in middle life, but she never exhibited any approach to stoutness. She was so well proportioned as to give the impression of being taller than she was. When she spoke in public, if she stood beside a presiding officer, it was seen that she was small of stature, but when she stood alone, she gave the impression of being, and was often described as being, above medium height. Her maximum height, attained in adolescence, was five feet two inches in moderately high-heeled shoes. The author measured her in her later years, and she was exactly five feet tall without her shoes.

Her carriage was erect, except for a slight stoop in the shoulders. There never came any sag in her person, any letting down of her erect standing. Her spine below the shoulders was carried to the end of her life as erect as in youth. As she stood or sat, she never had the bearing of an old person. When seated, she commonly kept her back well away from the back of the chair, depending upon nothing external to assist her in maintaining her erect bearing.

She walked quietly, deliberately, and flat-footedly. She put her whole foot down at once. There was a certain firmness in her gait which indicated strength of character and resolute purpose. She did not dart or rush or drift or flutter; she walked, and her walk was of moderate speed and of marked decision.

Her hair was brown, and in her younger days she had great wealth of it. She took good care of it; and, while there was less of it in her later years, it retained its fine texture, its soft silky wave, and its rich brown color. The writer asked her once if she had a single gray hair. She replied that she thought she had one, but had forgotten just where it was.

Her eyes were brown, and in some lights appeared black. I find at least one description of her as she appeared on the lecture platform in which she was described as tall, with hair and eyes black as the raven’s wing. The reporter is not to be blamed for his departure from truth. She looked tall when she stood alone, and her eyes and hair appeared as he described them, when seen in some lights.

Her features were regular. Her nose was prominent and straight. Her mouth was large, and very expressive. Her features were remarkably mobile. Her forehead was both high and wide, and in her middle life she wore her hair so that its full breadth and height appeared beneath the graceful parting of the hair. In her later years her hair was combed down over the temples on either side, and remained parted in the middle. Her chin was a very firm chin. It did not protrude, neither did it recede. There was not the slightest suggestion of a lantern-jaw; but there was a clear-cut prominence of the chin that suggested a firm decision and a tenacious purpose. She said to the writer, “Every true Barton knows how to possess an open mind and teachable disposition with a firmness that can be obstinate if necessary, and no one can be more obstinate than a Barton.” Obstinate she certainly could be, but she was reasonable to a marked degree. No one who saw her shut her mouth when she had made a decision could cherish any doubt of her tenacity of purpose; and her chin was anything but a weak one.

She did not stare, but she had a habit of fixing her eyes upon an object or a person which did not put arrogance or pretense at ease. She could, on occasion, look through a person as if she discerned his inmost thoughts. But ordinarily her look into one’s face was gentle and companionable and sympathetic.

Clara Barton affected none of the arts by which women advanced in years attempt to appear young. On the other hand, she had no intention of growing old. She said to me that she did not see why people should be so curious about anybody’s age; what did it matter? So far as she was concerned, there was no secret about it; but when people had learned the date of her birth, how could they know whether she was old or young?

She did not greatly like to be asked for her “latest photograph.” The photograph which she liked best, the one which she had framed and which the author has just as it stood on her desk, was the familiar Civil War portrait.

On December 30, 1910, she wrote in her diary, concerning her friend, Julia Ward Howe, whose death she mourned, and whose biography she had read through with keen interest:

I notice a strife over the placing of Mrs. Howe’s portrait in Fanueil Hall. The art committee object to it, but the people demand that it be placed there. No reasons on the part of the art committee are yet given. The painting is by Mr. Elliott, husband of Maude. I wonder at the idea of people having their pictures taken after time and age have robbed them of all their characteristic features. I regard this as a mistake. I want the last picture of the friends I love to show them in their strength and at their best. Mrs. Howe’s picture as now painted would have shocked even herself in strong middle life. Why not show the world the writer of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as she was when she wrote it? Is it the rush of the curious for the “latest photo”? I think the idea wrong. I wish the art committee would insist on a picture of Mrs. Howe at the age of forty years.

When Clara Barton was in her eighties, she often, as was her custom, would sit upon the floor, à la Turk, with her work spread around her. When her work was finished, she would rise, with the suppleness of a girl, without touching her hands to the floor.

She had an almost morbid shrinking from the infliction of pain, or from the taking of life. She was not strictly a vegetarian. If she was at another’s table and meat was offered her, she ate it sparingly.

She carried through life a pulse ten beats slower to the minute than that of an ordinary woman of her years, but her pulse beat steadily and reliably. A half-cup of coffee stimulated her almost to the point of intoxication, and a child’s dose of medicine was too much for her. So simply did she live that when she died at the age of ninety-one there was not a physical lesion, not a diseased organ in her body. Her physician, who for thirty years had been her almost daily companion, Dr. J. B. Hubbell, declared that, barring accident, or some acute attack, such as that which actually caused her death, she could easily have lived to be one hundred years of age and still not have been technically old.

There was nothing about her voice or manner that suggested a really aged person. Senility was farther removed from her at ninety than from most women at sixty. A California octogenarian was compiling a book of personal testimonies by aged people and wrote to her asking for the secret of her long life. Her answer was contained in four words, “Low fare, hard work.” If to this she had added anything, it should have been a self-forgetful purpose, a serene spirit, and an upholding faith.

From her father Clara Barton inherited a spirit of broad philanthropy and wide human interest. From her mother she inherited a warm heart and a very hot temper. It was this temper that gave her self-control. She kept it perfectly under her bidding, and that lowered voice was the sign of mighty resolution and smouldering passion under the control of a conquering will.

Clara Barton was a lifelong believer in woman’s suffrage. She was a close friend and a warm admirer of Susan B. Anthony, and shared her aims and hopes for her sex. She believed in women receiving the same wages as men for the same work. She was never as militant an advocate of the rights of women as Miss Anthony, however. Temperamentally she was of quite another disposition. In her later years she saw with marked disapproval what she regarded as the unwomanly efforts of women to advance their cause. This she believed hurt the cause more than it helped it, and whether it helped or hurt she did not like it.

A lady who was about to undertake a long journey by rail spoke to Clara Barton of her dread of it. Railway travel, she said, always tired her out and made her sick. Miss Barton said, “Travel rests me.”

Her friend asked her how she managed it. She replied:

“I delegate to the conductor and the engineer the full responsibility for the running of the train. I do not overeat, nor take with me candy or other needless food to upset my digestion just when I am getting less than my usual exercise. I carry with me a book and a note-book. When I think of something that I want to remember, I jot it down; when I see something that interests me, I make note of it. I read as long as I enjoy reading; and when I grow tired of that, I close my eyes and rest, and let the train go on.”

Her friend replied, “That all sounds very simple; I will try it.”

She returned from her journey, reporting that she had had a delightful time, and that she had alighted from the train at each end of the trip less weary than when she started.

The directions which Clara Barton gave were those which she herself had tested.

Clara Barton lived long, and her life had many changes. Account has been given of certain episodes in her young womanhood in which she was loved and did not return the affection of the men who loved her. The question has been asked and should be answered whether in her later years she had any experience which made up for the lack of love in her youth. Some stories, nearly or quite apocryphal, have been told concerning the men who are supposed to have loved her and whom she loved, but whom she refused because she loved her work more.

The lovers of her youth were all good, worthy men, as good as the average New Englander. There is nothing to be said concerning any one of them that is not to his credit; but no one of them was the equal of Clara Barton. There was no tragedy about her experience, neither was there any consciousness of the ecstasy of a love completely possessing her. These affairs left her something of loneliness, but no memory of bitter grief or cruel disappointment. She could write, and did once write, some tender, sentimental verses about a sad parting, but the sadness did not break her heart, nor permanently cloud that of any of her lovers.

The time came when all this was changed. She lived in Washington, amid a wide circle of friends, among them men of every station in life. No longer was she possessed of ambition beyond that of any man of her age and acquaintance. There were men whom she knew and men whom she liked, who had ambitions equal to her own and ideals with which her own had much in common. During the Civil War she might have chosen any one of scores of grateful men, as her husband. But she seems hardly to have given matrimony a thought in those years. After she became famous, she was less readily accessible to any multitude of lovers, but at least one man to whom she had been kind sought to reward her with his heart and hand, and, after she had returned from Europe, at least one man whom she met abroad pressed upon her his ardent and unrewarded affections. If she had married any one, she would have married an American. No offer of matrimony from a man not of her own land would seem to have made any appeal to her. This offer of marriage she regarded rather with amusement than with serious consideration. It was honorable, but in her judgment most unsuitable, and she refused with a smile,—not the smile of contempt, but of good-humor and healthy merriment.

Among other friends in middle life there were two whom she would seem to have considered in the aspect of possible lovers.

In the days during and following the Civil War, she came to know intimately an American professor of wide repute, who at that time was pursuing extended researches in Washington. He was a widower of about her own age, a profound scholar, and he became a dear and trusted friend. For several months their paths were thrown together and for a time they boarded at the same table. She was interested, not only in his work, but in himself. The ardor and enthusiasm with which he worked impressed her. Like herself, he was little bound by precedent, and was engaged in a task which he confidently believed would increase the sum of human learning. There was something in a task of this character that made a direct appeal to Clara Barton. Much as she prized any kind of useful knowledge, she especially admired the spirit of the pioneer, and honored the man who blazed new paths and widened the horizons of learning. Such a man was this friend of hers. He read to her in many evenings the results of his investigation, and she shared his enthusiasm for his task. Her two nephews, Bernard and Sam, then in Washington, were wont to poke quiet fun at him and to joke their aunt about the possibility of his becoming an uncle of theirs and swamping the family with his knowledge of subjects which the boys cared little about. She took their raillery in good part. But one day, when she thought it had gone a little too far, she reproved her nephews and made a spirited defense of the professor. She said, “You need not wonder that, notwithstanding all your attempts to make fun of him, I admire a man of his profound learning and high character.” Her nephews then believed that their respect for each other had merged into affection, but, as the years went by and he and Clara gradually lost sight of each other, they came to think that they might have been mistaken, that the two were good friends and nothing more. So far as the author is aware, there exists no evidence from which an answer can be had to the question of how much they really cared for each other, or, if they cared, why they did not marry. The author has his own conjecture, and it is only a conjecture, but it is this: Both he and she were at that time at the beginnings of a great work. How long either one would need to continue to labor and sacrifice before success was won, neither could determine.

The last and in some respects the most interesting, as certainly the most distinguished, among Clara Barton’s matrimonial possibilities, came to her late in life. During the Civil War she became acquainted with a man who even then was held in high regard, and was attracting the attention of his own State and to some extent of the Nation. Rising largely by his own exertions to a position of eminence, he became one of the leading men of the generation. Through all the years when she was pursuing her war relief work, with scant appropriation for postage, he cheerfully loaned her his frank and was her friend. Through many long years they knew each other and always held each other in esteem. He was in Washington and so was she, and there was little need of interchange of letters between them; nor is there in the letters that are preserved any indication of personal affection. Those letters grew out of particular events when one or the other of them was away from Washington, and for the most part they had no significance as indicating the extent to which they may have cared for each other.

But there came a time when his work and her work brought them into close and more constant relations. They were both at the zenith of their respective careers. At that time he was a widower. Both were free and they could have married without the sacrifice of any important interest. The home which they might have established would have been a congenial one.

At that time Clara Barton took a brief vacation and went to Oxford where she prepared a new wardrobe, including a white satin dress. To her niece Mamie she confided that an occasion of unusual significance was in prospect, and that more would be known of it later.

Just at this time this distinguished statesman died. His death was a great shock to Clara Barton. She made no public lamentation; she never hinted even to those who were nearest to her that her grief was other than that which she might properly feel for an honored friend of many years. Her nieces believed that his death prevented their marriage. Her nephew, Stephen, says:

Their friendship was long and intimate, and it would not have been strange if they had cared for each other. In many respects their lives would have been well adapted to each other. But if their regard for each other ever expressed itself in terms of love, or approached the prospect of marriage, I do not know it. It may have seemed to either or both of them a pleasant possibility, but they were mature people, each with a great work to do; and if his death cut short what was growing from friendship into love, I do not know it. Such a feeling either one of them might very worthily have held toward the other. I know that she held him as a dear and trusted and honored friend, and he esteemed her likewise.

If Clara Barton loved this able and good man, she bore her disappointment as she was accustomed to bear her disappointments, in self-restrained and dignified silence. Her silence shall remain unbroken. If they loved, it was a love worthy of them both; if they were good friends and only good friends, it was a friendship honorable to both.

So far as the author has been able to learn from those who were closest to Clara Barton during her lifetime, and so far as it is disclosed by her diary and letters, this is all there is to be known concerning the love affairs of Clara Barton.

There were times when Clara Barton felt keenly her isolation. But, in 1911, she recorded in her diary some of the domestic trials of some of her friends, and added, “After all, Aloneness is not the worst thing in the world.”

While extremely modest, Clara Barton was far from being a prude. She was never terrified by appeals to respectability, nor could she be frightened by any warning concerning men or women whom gossip condemned.

In 1884, when she was on her steamboat, Joseph V. Throop, assisting in the Ohio River floods, the boat one night tied up at a landing, and a goodly number of people came on board. Among the rest were two young women. One of the prominent ladies of the town found opportunity to whisper to her that these were young women whose social standing was not above question. “Then they will need help all the more,” she said; and she gave those two girls an hour of her evening. Such warnings she often received, and, far from accepting them as her basis of discrimination, she invariably reacted in the other direction.

She never undertook any work without first carefully thinking it through in an effort to discover just where it was to end and how it was to be provided for. She had no sympathy with people who start good movements for other people to support when their well-meant but poorly reckoned endeavor fails. “They get hold of a log they can’t lift,” she said, “and they make a great call for some one to come and lift it for them.” That was never the way in which she did things. She thought them through in advance.

Clara Barton worked slowly. While she formed her decisions promptly in emergencies, she formulated them carefully and with painful precision. It was not by doing things easily she accomplished so much, but by rising early and working late and keeping constantly at the thing she wanted to do. She attempted to use stenographic assistance, but with only moderate success. She had to work out her letters and addresses in her own way. A certain kind of routine work her secretaries did for her, to her great relief, but her real work she had to do herself.

She coveted the ability to work more rapidly. She admired that ability, and perhaps overvalued it, in others. She once wrote to me: “Where do you find time to do so many things? One of the griefs of my life is to see other persons getting things done—really done—and I accomplish so little. I don’t see how they do it.”

No more could they see how she did it; but she did it by working with an industry and devotion that never found an easy way of accomplishing results.

A friend of hers was deeply interested in a movement for which he wished the endorsement of Clara Barton. She believed in the work he was doing, and was willing to commend it; but she wanted to know a little more about it, and then she wanted time to think out what she wanted to say about it. He became very desirous of having her commendation in time for a particular use; and his wife invited Clara Barton to their home to dine. She willingly accepted, and enjoyed the visit. She knew the family, and held them in high esteem. After dinner, and some conversation, the man produced a typewritten statement of some length which he had prepared, endorsing his work. This he read to her, and she liked it. But when she understood that he had prepared this for her to sign, she was shocked. She refused to sign it.

Her friend could not at first understand her scruples. Did she not believe in this work? She did. Had she not expressed to him her approval and signified her willingness to furnish him a statement which he would be at liberty to publish? She had. Had she not listened to his reading of this very statement with expressions of hearty approval? She had. Was there anything in it she would like to change? If so, she was at liberty to make any erasure or interlineation she desired. No; there was nothing she cared to change, except that she cared to change everything in it.

He assured her that he was asking nothing of her which men of the highest honor did not do constantly; that in a busy world people had to avail themselves of assistance such as he offered her; that his own standards of honor were high, and he would never think of asking her to sign a statement which did not fully express her own convictions.

All this she understood, and she did not censure him. But she could not do what he asked of her. The statement which he had prepared was not hers. The opinions expressed were in full accord with her own, and the language was as good as any she could have chosen, and there was nothing in the document to which she could object; but it was not hers.

Her idea of a document which she could sign as her own was one which she should have thought out on first wakening, perhaps in the middle of the night, and sketched in pencil on the pages of the little pad at the head of her bed, and then thoughtfully copied in her own hand with careful weighing of each word and phrase. That would have been her own.

Certainly that was a needlessly narrow conception of the extent to which she might honorably have employed the minds and willing hands of others in her own too heavy toil. But it was a conception grounded in the highest possible conviction of honor.

Clara Barton was a self-willed woman. So was Mother Bickerdyke. So was Dorothea Dix. So, most emphatically and uncomfortably for those who withstood her, was Florence Nightingale. If comparisons were in order, which they certainly are not, she was not the least considerate of the four of other people’s opinion, nor most reluctant to admit herself in the wrong. Like Florence Nightingale, she had opportunities of marriage in her youth, and resolutely turned to other work under force of a strong conviction, and that conviction had mighty impelling power. Lytton Strachey, in his remarkably penetrating sketch, says:

Every one knows the popular conception of Florence Nightingale. The saintly, self-sacrificing woman, the delicate maiden of high degree who threw aside the pleasures of a life of ease to succor the afflicted, the Lady with the Lamp, gliding through the horrors of the hospital at Scutari, and consecrating with the radiance of her goodness the dying soldier’s couch—the vision is familiar to all. But the truth was different. The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as facile as fancy painted her. She worked in another fashion, and toward another end; she moved under the stress of an impetus which finds no place in the popular imagination. A Demon possessed her. Now demons, whatever else they may be, are full of interest. And so it happens that in the real Miss Nightingale there was more that was interesting than in the legendary one; there was also less that was agreeable.

The disposition of Florence Nightingale lacked much of being angelic. When she encountered the stupidity of official red-tape or the brutality and indifference of army surgeons, her words blistered. She hurled invectives and she employed sarcastic nicknames, and she denounced everything and everybody who opposed her. But when she arrived in Scutari forty-two wounded men out of every hundred were dying, and when she left them her hospitals showed a death-rate of twenty-two out of every thousand. Clara Barton had a tongue less sharp than Florence Nightingale’s, but she had a will no less inflexible. Both women had soft voices, which they never raised. Men fled from the soft tones and vitriolic words of Florence Nightingale. When Clara Barton grew angry, she lowered her voice. Instead of a woman’s shrill falsetto, men heard a deep and determined tone quietly affirming that the thing was to be done in this way and in no other. Few men withstood that tone.

Some readers of this book, I am sure, have been shocked to read the opinion of Dr. Bellows of the Sanitary Commission concerning the uselessness and worse of the ordinary woman nurse in war hospitals. That opinion was shared by Dorothea Dix, by Clara Barton, and to an even greater degree by Florence Nightingale.

Not very long after Florence Nightingale had reached Scutari with her thirty-eight nurses, and about the time when she was having to ship some of them back, her official friends in England thought to win her eternal gratitude by sending to her forty-six additional nurses, under the personal direction of her old friend, Miss Stanley. But she refused to accept them, and sent in her resignation. She would not have these “women scampering through the wards” and upsetting all her regulations. “They are like troublesome children,” she said. Even the religious ones were given to what she called “spiritual flirtations” with the soldiers; and, as for those who had not the fear of God or the dread of hell-fire, there were drunken orderlies and dissolute officers and unmarried chaplains to be considered.

I have wondered what Dorothea Dix would have said if forty-six nurses not of her selection had been suddenly dumped upon her; I think she would have gone into hysterics and shipped them all back. Clara Barton, I believe, would have set them to emptying slops and scrubbing floors till she found the few out of whom she could make nurses. She would not have written the kind of letters about them which Florence Nightingale wrote. She would have scolded a little in her diary, and have written the committee who had sent them a letter of thanks, requesting them not to send any more until she asked for them, and meantime to send her some bandages and some lemons. But she would have felt much as Florence Nightingale felt. They were both self-willed women. They needed all their will-power. It was well they had it.

Many interesting parallels suggest themselves between the work of Clara Barton and that of Florence Nightingale.

They were contemporary in a remarkable degree. Florence Nightingale was a few months the older and died a few months sooner than Clara Barton, but both lived to be more than ninety years of age. Miss Nightingale was born May 12, 1820, and died August 13, 1910; Clara Barton was born December 25, 1821, and died April 12, 1912. They faced the question of marriage in much the same fashion, and each one gave herself in much the same spirit to her life-task. They were not unlike in their religious faith and in its practical expression. The long, confidential letters of Florence Nightingale, written painfully when she ought to have been in bed, remind us of the detailed epistles which Clara Barton found time to write, mostly late at night. Each had a love of humor which stood her in good stead; Miss Barton’s had less sting in it than that of Miss Nightingale, but otherwise it was not unlike, and it was a great help to both of them. Each had a gentle voice, and each knew how to use it effectively without raising it. Each protested to the end of her life that her real work was not that of the popular imagination, that of personally ministering to any considerable number of sick or wounded soldiers, but a work of direction and organization; and neither succeeded in making the public believe it. Not long before her death, Clara Barton relieved her mind in her diary concerning the sort of newspaper article which invented fairy-tales of this sort: “Oh, these women reporters!” she said in her diary. “They never get anything right. They are forever telling and inventing the same old kind of gush!” Florence Nightingale also had a profound distrust of the limitations of members of her own sex; but also she knew, as did Clara Barton, the brutality, the stupidity, and the inefficiency of men. Miss Nightingale often wondered if there were in all the army enough officers of sympathy and conscience to have saved Sodom. Sometimes she doubted if there was one.

All the women who went to the battle-front and were worth their carfare were women of strong will. Mother Bickerdyke, in her rough and great-hearted way, was a lady; but when she faced an incompetent surgeon and drove him out of the hospital and he appealed to General Sherman, the General confessed himself powerless: “She ranks me,” he said. Dorothea Dix was a lady to the very depth of her sensitive soul, a devoted, consecrated Christian lady; but she could be very properly disagreeable on occasion, and she brooked no interference with her authority. Florence Nightingale was a lady, born and bred; but vitriol was mild compared to some of her outbursts. Clara Barton was a lady to her very finger-tips; and she had had enough of experience in Washington among officials and men of influence so that she knew how on occasion to be much more diplomatic and gracious than most other women with her responsibilities. Moreover, she shrank from giving pain, and was careful of her words. But she had as strong a will as had Florence Nightingale, and, while she was as a rule more amiable than that lady in her more violent moods, she got things done. People sometimes found her arbitrary, impatient, and obstinate; had she been less so, it had gone hard with the interests which she cherished. She was capable of being arbitrary, impatient, and obstinate, and the same is true of each of the other women whom her name calls to mind. But among them she was not the least gentle, considerate, and self-forgetful. She required that things should move, and move in the direction of her decision; but she was at heart, and on most occasions in her demeanor, quiet, gentle, affectionate, and calm.

Clara Barton had many devoted and loyal friends. They were held by her in warm and enduring affection; and some of them, for her sake and her work’s sake, made generous sacrifices. She had other friends who came to her in bursts of generous enthusiasm. These also were in good part sincere, and if some of them found her habits so simple and her task so heavy as to afford them smaller share than they had hoped in personal association with her, they were none the less generally firm in their friendship. It was not to be expected that every one could live permanently on her high plane of single-mindedness. Some of her friends were a trial to her, for it was not easy for her to understand why, when they once knew the task she was working at, they did not manifest stability of purpose and perseverance in well-doing. But these she counted her friends. When one of these left her roof because the fare was too plain, Clara Barton said, “She is not willing to wash herself seven times in Jordan.”

There were others—and in the course of her long life there were a number of them—who came to her with ardent protestations of affection and of devotion to her cause, who in time wearied of the strain, or resented her strong hand in management, or who came to believe that they themselves could do better the work which she had undertaken. Some of them betrayed her most sacred confidences, and returned her evil for good.

Few women were so ill-fitted by nature to bear this kind of disappointment as Clara Barton. She was morbidly sensitive, and given to self-accusation. How unworthy she must be, she thought, if these persons did not continue to love her. The wounds of their defection went unhealed. Yet here was one of the finest triumphs of her nature. She never cherished permanent resentment.

One time a friend of hers recalled to her a peculiarly cruel thing that had been done to her some years previous, and Clara Barton did not seem to understand what she was talking about.

“Don’t you remember the wrong that was done you?” she was asked.

Thoughtfully and calmly she answered, “No; I distinctly remember forgetting that.”

Friends deserted Clara Barton, but she never deserted a friend. If a friend of hers was evil-spoken against, that only increased her loyalty. She would not believe evil unless compelled to do so, and, if compelled, she interpreted the wrong, if possible, in terms of charity. Only baseness and treachery and betrayal of trust won her scorn.

At one time, in connection with her relief work on the rivers, a man who had acted as her local agent was arrested for burglary. She was at a distance and wires were down. She refused to believe him guilty. When later details made it impossible to doubt that he had done essentially the deed with which he was charged, she still believed that there must be some explanation. Later it developed that the offense was technical, and grew out of a dispute as to the ownership of certain premises which he had entered, and the other claimant, instead of suing him for trespass, sought to do him the greater injury by having him arrested for burglary. How the question of the ownership of the property was ultimately settled, I do not know, but her confidence in the man as one incapable of willful crime was justified.

Consul-General Hitz, of Switzerland, long her friend, became a banker in Washington. Apparently he had little talent for the banking business, and undertook to finance the Swedenborgian Church, of which he was a member, out of the revenues of the bank. Of his guilt before the law there appears to have been no question; as to his essential honesty Clara Barton had no doubt. She did not condone the offense, nor question that the amount taken must be made good; but she did not believe that so good a man and so true a friend ought to remain in prison. After high influence had been exercised unavailingly on his behalf, she persisted, and he was released.

Her voice has already been mentioned. Its key was about the average pitch of a woman’s treble voice. In conversation it was flexible, and very pleasant. On the platform it was clear and penetrating. Her tones were not musical, but were distinctly agreeable. Her inflections were those of the gentlewoman of the old school. There was a soothing, conciliatory, almost caressing quality in her voice. It had no harsh notes. It was diametrically opposite to all that was harsh and strident. It was gentle, winsome, and in every accent suggestive of courtesy and good-breeding. When she lived abroad, no one accused her of a high, harsh, nasal American voice. It was a New England voice, but as soft as that of any Southern lady of the old days.

But when Clara Barton grew very much in earnest, her voice changed. That change was one of the most remarkable things about her. It did not rise. It did not grow harsh or self-asserting. It dropped a half octave or, as it sometimes seemed, a full octave. It was a deep, full voice. It was almost bass. Her eyes darkened as her voice went down, and flashed lightning to her tones’ quiet thunder. She had a temper, which she kept well under control, but when she spoke in a low tone, those who heard her knew that its fires were red.

She was modest in her dress, but she had an eye for bright colors. In her youth she was a painter, and she learned how to mix colors on her palette. She never felt so sure of her good taste in the matter of dress as she did of her ability to make pleasing contrasts on canvas. She trusted much to the good judgment of her friend, Annie Childs. When she followed her own judgment, she inclined to green, which she loved to set off with red. Red was her color, and she said, the Barton rose was the Red Rose, all the way from the Wars of the Roses down. She loved red roses. She loved red apples. She liked to wear red ribbons and trimmings. With a background of green, red was always safe. In her youth and young womanhood she often determined to vary her costume, and repeatedly went to the stores determined to buy something beside green. Her nieces said, “If Aunt Clara says she is going to town to buy a brown dress, we know that she will buy a brown dress; for Aunt Clara invariably does exactly what she says she will do. So we know that she will select and pay for a brown dress. But we also know that by the time she gets it home the color will have changed; when she opens the package, it is sure to have become green.”

In later years, dressmakers took her in hand, and widened the range of her choice. But she seldom appeared in any gown that did not lend itself to a little dash of red; and when she wore just what delighted her own eyes, her dress was green, with a complementary dash of red.

Something must be said about her habit of economy, and it must be said with some care lest it give a very wrong impression. Clara Barton was economical to a very marked degree. If a list of her actual economies were here given, it would produce on many minds the impression that she was stingy. This would be wide of the truth. If a valid distinction may be made between two words that are nearly synonymous, she was parsimonious, but was not penurious.

She was reared in a community and in a family where want was unknown, but where money was earned by hard work, and capital was accumulated by thrift and economy. It was part of her birthright and of her being. There was about her nothing that inclined her to waste or even extravagance.

She entered into life early as a teacher, at first at a small salary. She had opportunity to save, and she did save. Her necessary expenses were small, and she began at the outset to save money. She continued to save money. She had good business judgment, and, excepting for a few times when she permitted her sympathies or her friendships to get the better of that judgment, her investments, conservatively made, were remunerative.

When she first went abroad in 1869, she knew that she had money enough to support her as long as she lived. If she recovered her health, the lecture platform was still open to her, and she could earn and save above all expenses from four thousand dollars to six thousand dollars a year. If she returned an invalid, she had the income on about thirty thousand dollars, which was more than she needed. In no year of her life, probably, did she spend upon herself as much as eighteen hundred dollars. Even when she traveled abroad, her expenses were moderate, and she never drew on her principal for her own support. But eighteen hundred dollars or two thousand dollars a year, which was about what her investments brought her, did not invite reckless extravagance, She knew that she must exercise reasonable economy, and her tastes were such that this was no hardship.

When, therefore, she sat up at night rather than take a sleeping-car, it was not wholly that she was unwilling to pay for the price of the berth. She had been accustomed to doing so until an attempt was made to rob her, after which she was greatly disinclined to the use of the sleeper. Her prime reason for sitting up was that she disliked sleepers after that night. But she was not at all averse to saving two dollars. She slept few hours in the night, and was accustomed to sleeping under unfavorable conditions. She thought she rested quite as well sitting in a corner of her seat as lying in a stuffy and dark berth.

Her lunch at home was often a few crackers and a red apple, and the more nearly she regulated her diet when journeying in accordance with her custom at home, the better life went with her. So her bag often contained a little package of the kind of crackers which she liked, and one or more big red apples. If she sat in her seat and ate these, it was not primarily because she was unwilling to pay a dollar for her lunch; she had the dollar, and she had no ambition to leave any considerable sum of money behind her when she died. On the other hand, she was not unmindful of the good she could do with the dollar in some other way. And she did that good with it. She was parsimonious with herself; she was generous toward others.

To enumerate her economies would misrepresent her. It would seem that she was niggardly. The contrary was true. She abhorred waste. She could not tolerate extravagance. But she could draw her last dollar, and did draw her last dollar from investment, to put into her search for missing soldiers, and she could do it and did do it without whining and without fear. Even the possibility that she might die a pauper did not terrify her or win from her in her diary any more than a half-mirthful recognition. She economized in things she did not greatly care for that she might do the things that were to her of supreme importance.

She did not hoard money. The amount which she had at the end of her lecturing career, she did not greatly increase, nor, until she got deep into the work of the Red Cross, did it materially diminish. In order to support the Red Cross work in its earlier stages, she drew upon her principal, and she did not to the end of her life restore it to what it had been before. But she never complained of this, nor did it in the least worry her. Year by year she had sufficient income, with reasonable economy, to supply all her needs. Now and then she delivered an address and received a hundred dollars. Occasionally she replied to a request of newspaper or magazine for an article, and received a check in return. For a year she received a salary from the State of Massachusetts as matron of the Reformatory for Women at Sherborn. The annuity paid to her by the Massachusetts General Hospital gave her a little more margin. She was free from worry as to her own finances. I have not found in her diary or her letters a single sentence in which she expressed anxiety about her own financial future. There were several times when she was not sure what she ought to do next, and in her decisions she was not unmindful of financial necessities. But she did not keep in constant thought her own need of saving money for herself. She saved, because it was natural for her to save, and because she had causes at heart which she wished to save for.

Careful in her expenditures upon herself, Clara Barton lavished her love upon others. She cherished her friends, and there was little that she was not willing to do for them. More than once she jeopardized plans of her own for the sake of unselfish ministry to others, some of whom had little claim upon her. She received under her own roof, fed at her table, sheltered at her fireside, and assisted from her purse not a few people who later proved ungrateful; indeed, those who wrought her most pain were those whom she had befriended and of whom she later learned that they sought not her, but hers.

Yet it would not be fair to give any impression that the number of ingrates among her companions was large. Relatively, it was small. Those who loved her loved with a fervent loyalty; and there are few things more beautiful than the adoring and grateful affection which those bestow upon her memory who knew her longest and best. A strong individualist, she inspired in those who came to know her well that perfect confidence and grateful devotion which are the crowning test of leadership. There were those, who, for her sake and that of any cause which she held dear, would have gone with her singing to the stake, and she would never have permitted one of them to go there unless she went first.

The author was her relative, her friend of many years. He loved her and admired her; but he has felt his own praises weaken and pale and disappear in the presence of those who, working in intimate association with her through the years, proclaimed to him her virtues in terms that but for their sincerity and the knowledge of those who spoke would have seemed extravagant. The surest proof of her genuine goodness is the unfaltering devotion of those who knew her best, and for that reason loved her most.

Clara Barton was a woman of tact. She needed all the tact she had and more. In every field in which she labored, she was flooded with volunteer workers who wanted to help. Some of them were competent; more were not. I recently talked with my long-time friend, Father Field, sometime head of the Cowley Fathers, and learned that he was at the Johnstown flood, and saw much of Clara Barton. They rode together in a buggy over a road filled with trees and house-roofs and he feared she would be thrown out, but she told him to drive on; she had driven over worse roads, and with bullets besides. He said that her greatest difficulty as he saw it there was the number of people of good impulse but little discretion who rushed into Johnstown to help. Dr. Bellows said a blunt word about the women who made their journey to the battle-field, that most of them were in the way. This was unfortunately true of many of the well-meaning people who rushed to the assistance of Clara Barton in time of flood or fire. Assistance she must have, and must take what was offered. But the handling of this untrained force was a matter which called for the greatest tact as well as executive ability.

Not only so, but, when the work in a particular field was over, there were always those who had come as volunteer workers who insisted on bestowing themselves upon Clara Barton to make Red Cross work their life-work. Some of them were competent, and she was glad of them. But in the course of her years of experience she accumulated a series of misfit volunteer assistants, some of whom it was not easy afterward to get rid of.

She had little love of music. She did not sing or play any musical instrument. When traveling abroad, if forced to attend the opera, she saved the time from utter waste by writing a home letter while singers of world-wide repute performed and sang before her. Having a low and soft voice, she disliked the high notes of women’s voices. Good, melodious quartet music she heard with mild enjoyment, and if she can be said to have liked any music it was that of male voices. A chorus of men always pleased her. Some of the war songs always thrilled her, though more for the associations than the music. There was one song, popular during the later years of the Civil War, which she never heard often enough. It was the song of an old slave, who, dying years before the war, had believed that he would rise on the day when freedom came to his race. The author also remembers it, as it was taught to him almost before he could walk:

Nicodemus the slave was of African birth,
He was bought for a bagful of gold;
He was reckoned as part of the salt of the earth,
And he died years ago, very old.
’Twas the last word he said as we laid him away
In the stump of an old hollow tree,—
“Wake me up,” was his charge, “at the first break of day,
Wake me up for the great jubilee.”

Chorus:
Then run and tell Elijah to hurry up, Pomp,
To meet us at the gum-tree down in the swamp,
To wake Nicodemus to-day.

It was sung at the minstrel shows after the Emancipation Proclamation; but it was not as a minstrel show song that Clara Barton enjoyed it. There was a solemn dignity about the old slave’s faith that inspired her; and the authoritative tones of the words “Wake Nicodemus” thrilled her through and through.

Her lack of love of music reached its climax in her abhorrence of piano-drumming. For piano music she had some little love, but not enough to compensate for the annoyance for having a piano where it could be pounded by any visitor, skilled or unskilled. For many years she refused to have a piano in her house. At last she permitted one to be procured, and she gave it house-room, and sometimes heard it played with satisfaction. But when she was hard at work and wanted to concentrate her thought, she found no joy in the thoughtless hammering which an open piano seemed to invite. There was a time for all things, even for piano-playing, and in its proper time and place she could permit it and enjoy a part of it; but she did not want the menace of it from early morn till dewy eve and several hours thereafter. Her home was a very open place of entertainment, and she could not well inquire, before admitting a person who needed shelter, what were his or her habits and ability with respect to the torture of piano keys. So she would have preferred a home with only such music as was brought in where,and when it was wanted. But she accepted the piano as in some sort inevitable, and it did not annoy her as much as she had expected.

If Clara Barton did not care for music, she did dearly love poetry. From her earliest childhood she was reading it, committing it to memory, copying it, and writing original lines of her own. There lies before me, as I write, her first copy-book. The strokes and curves she learned to imitate are there, then the letters, lower case and capitals, then the first words, “thoughtful,” “Nation,” and “National,” and the sentence, chosen perhaps for its varied arrangement of letters with the simplest stem and curve, and partly because it was not well for a New England child at school to begin life with any illusion about its essential character, “Man was made to mourn.”

Who was the teacher who set her these copies we do not know, but she copied them well. The first poetic lines that she was given to transcribe were these, melodious but not precisely soothing to the juvenile mind:

Then rose the cry of females, shrill,
As goss-hawks whistle on the hill,
Denouncing misery and ill,
Mingled with childhood’s bubbling thrill
Of curses stammered slow;
Answering, with imprecation dread,
“Sunk be his home in embers red,
And cursed be the meanest shed
That e’er shall hide his houseless head
We doom to want and woe!”

This was rather strong sentiment for a timid and sympathetic little girl, and she would probably have shuddered at it in prose; but in verse she probably committed it to memory as she was in process of copying it.

This completed the childhood work, and the book is filled, in her more mature hand, with complete poems, “The Pilgrim Fathers,—where are they?” “The Burial of Arnold,” “The Hour of Prayer,” “Warren at Bunker Hill,” “The Indian’s Lament,” “The Fall of Tecumseh,” and other poems, heroic, patriotic, devotional, and ending with “Farewell to the Bride.”

Later she procured a bound volume, and in it she copied her favorite poems, and wrote others of her own, in her most careful and painstaking hand. Her “copper-plate” penmanship was never more exquisite than in this volume, in which her own poems and the poems she loved are written in order as she found or composed them.

No quality in Clara Barton was more marked than the breadth of her sympathies. She shuddered at the thought of needless pain. I have a crude little picture, a page out of a child’s book, which she found in her childhood and preserved to the end of her life. It is entitled “What came of firing a gun.” A dead bird lies on the ground, and is approached on the one side by a boy with a gun in his hand and on the other by a horrified girl. It is not a great work of art, but it tells its story and conveys its lesson.

She never gave needless pain. She regarded all life as akin to the life of God, and sacred with the imprint of God’s own image. She looked upon all life that can suffer or enjoy, the life of bird and beast and fish, as something on which it is a sin to inflict needless pain.

From the time she saw, in her little girlhood, the killing of an ox, and felt that the blow that struck and crushed its skull had struck her own head, she never saw pain without feeling it. She could have said with Whitman of the suffering she saw—

My wounds on me grow livid as I lean
Upon my staff and look.

She did not merely sympathize with suffering; she suffered. She not only was glad of other people’s joy; it was her joy. She rejoiced with those that did rejoice and wept with those that wept. Not often do her diaries record her weeping; and the tears she records as having shed are oftener for others’ sorrows than for her own. Her sympathy was genuine, and of the sort which can truly be called vicarious. She took it upon herself.

Her sympathies were so strong that she would have been useless in the presence of danger and pain but for her remarkable self-control. I asked her once how she acquired this, and she said it was simply by forgetting herself. She saw something that needed to be done, and went about the doing of it so promptly, so completely absorbed by the necessity of it, that she forgot to be horrified by the sight of blood, forgot to faint as timid females were supposed to do. Days and weeks and months and years of it she would endure and never once give way. Then would come a revulsion and a horror and a weakness and a collapse. Again and again she held herself in hand through nervous strain that would have crushed most women or men, and when it was all over went nervously to pieces.

It appears a pity that, being capable of maintaining her self-control till the end of the crisis, she could not still have maintained it when the need was over. But it was a part of her delicately strung organism to bear any manner of strain while the need lasted, and then to snap. The remarkable fact is, not that she ultimately gave way, but that she endured so long and so much.

Clara Barton was a woman to her finger-tips. Nothing that she saw or suffered ever coarsened her or made her oblivious to the finer things of life. Nothing that came of her association with men—and rough men at that—made her anything less than a woman and a lady. She was distinctly feminine. She had her own way of ignoring any incident occurring in her presence at which she might have been expected to be shocked, but of stickling at any trivial act which implied that she was indifferent to proprieties. Teamsters, with their wagons deep to the hubs in mud, might swear at their mules and she would never hear it; but at night by the camp-fire she could rebuke with a quiet and effective word or look the slightest approach to impropriety of word or deed. She was no prude when she had a duty to perform, and conventionalities meant little to her in the presence of human need. But on her return to home life, she was gentle, ladylike, and a stickler for proprieties.

She had no love for the mannish woman. She was much in the society of men. In many respects she preferred the society of men to that of women. She entered into their joys and experiences appreciatively. But in it all she was distinctly feminine. She was a woman always, a lady always. People who expected to meet in her a big, aggressive female, with a long stride and a heavy voice and a domineering attitude, were amazed. She was a little, undemonstrative gentlewoman of the old school.

One of Clara Barton’s most outstanding qualities was her almost complete disregard of precedent. The fact that a thing had always been done in a given way was evidence to her that it could be done again in that fashion, but was of almost no value to her as proving that that was the best way to do it. She always had faith in the possibility of something better. It irritated her to be told how things always had been done. She knew that a very large proportion of things that have been done since the creation have been blunderingly done, and she was always ready to listen to suggestions of better ways. Having once decided upon a course that defied the tyranny of precedent, she held true to her declaration of independence, and saw her experiment through.

In this she was not reckless or iconoclastic. She simply forbade herself the cheap luxury of a closed mind. If no better way presented itself, she was content with the old way of doing. But she was eager for any new thing that might improve upon the past. Hers was preëminently a forward-looking mind and a soul with face ever toward the sunrise.

CHAPTER XIX
CLARA BARTON’S LAST YEARS

Clara Barton lived for eight years after her retirement from the Red Cross. After her first disappointment and the giving-up of her dream of exile in Mexico, her heart turned to a form of work which already had been much upon her mind. In establishing the American Red Cross, she had determined from the outset that it should be of use in peace as well as in war. The conviction grew upon her that it should be broadened still further so that its activities should not be confined to periods of calamity, but that there should be established under its direction various forms of community service. Particularly did she desire that in every community there should be organizations for home nursing and first aid to the injured.

Before her retirement from the Red Cross, she had proposed to her associates the addition of a First Aid Department as a part of its activities. This did not seem to her board of control an advisable field for the Red Cross to enter at that time. After her resignation from the presidency of the American Red Cross, she organized the “National First Aid Association of America,” which was incorporated under the laws of the District of Columbia and had its general office in Boston. The plan included a large sustaining membership with a nominal fee of a dollar a year, and an active membership composed of those in every community who attended a course of lectures and passed a physical examination.

The plan of this new organization, as originally planned by her for the Red Cross, was fully set forth in a brief manuscript which she prepared:

During the entire period of the present differences among sections of the members of the American National Red Cross, I have never once felt that it was the desire of the American people that I should personally enter within the circle of disturbance, and I have consequently remained a silent and sorrowful spectator of a controversy that appeared to me to be leading where no true, loyal friend of the Red Cross would care to follow.

Every effort I have ever made on behalf of the people of the United States, during the long years of my work, has been met with friendly approval or thoughtful response. These efforts have always been made on behalf of suffering humanity, in times of dire distress and peril, and I have administered with a free but careful hand the benefactions of whatever nature that have been entrusted to me; and as freely I have given of all I possessed of strength, health, and private means.

Never once have I made a suggestion on behalf of myself or my difficulties, and I have therefore had the confidence to feel that nothing was expected of me but a straightforward advance along the natural path of my life-work. So certain have I been of this, and so confident in the firm loyalty, safe counsel, and moral support of the eminent help surrounding me, that I have felt free to devote my energies during the past months to perfecting a plan for so broadening and strengthening the organization of the Red Cross that it may enter on a new field of useful activity—on a work that will appeal directly to the people everywhere, and prepare them, in these times of peaceful well-being, to meet intelligently and successfully any emergency or disaster that may occur, either nationally or individually. It is my desire that this new work shall be the means of creating ample funds to meet any great national calamity, and that the Red Cross may hereafter enter the field fully equipped at the instant the call may come.

In times past urgent calls have come to us and precious time has been lost through lack of funds and suitable equipment. It is most desirable that this condition should be remedied, and it is to this end that I am making an appeal to the American people—not for their money nor their substance, but that they coöperate with me earnestly in this new work: this effort to benefit themselves, that I am endeavoring to inaugurate. It will be borne in mind that, in the twenty years of its existence, the American National Red Cross has never appealed, never asked for, or sought the control of, a dollar even for relief; but has, as it seeks to do in this, left the people free in the exercise of their own choice and intelligence. The only apparent suspension of this method took place during the active service of the Spanish-American War, when the great committees, formed at the instance of President McKinley, raised money for relief, in the name of the Red Cross, and applied it; the society itself holding its normal position under the attorneyship of the noble Cuban Relief Committee, which did honor to itself and the Nation.

Can it be too much to expect that this one appeal will meet a ready response at the hands of the people?

We are actively organizing a new branch of the Red Cross, to be known as “The First Aid Department” of the American National Red Cross, which department will be largely educational and will concern itself in instructing the people everywhere throughout the United States in the best modern methods of first aid treatment, in all cases of accident and emergency.

There will be two distinct branches of this work. For the first an emergency case, similar to that in use in England, Germany, and other Red Cross Treaty Nations, and this has been adapted to Red Cross needs and methods under the direct supervision of the Medical Board of the Red Cross Hospital. It contains material and surgical dressings of the best class known to modern surgery. A most valuable part of the permanent equipment of this emergency case is a series of emergency charts, arranged for instantaneous reference, giving simple brief instructions for dealing with every conceivable case of accident, pending the arrival of the doctor. This chart is the combined work of a committee of eminent physicians and surgeons; and, apart from the admirable manner of its arrangement, may be regarded as the highest standard of authority upon first aid methods of treatment known to the world.

The other branch of the department will undertake the formation of first aid emergency classes in every city in the country. Ambulance corps will be formed among the employees of mills and factories, industrial corporations, railroad employees, the police, and employees of public departments. These employees will be drilled and instructed in first aid methods, and, apart from the value of the knowledge they will obtain for local use and service, they will form an efficient force to draw from as helpers in great national calamities.

These methods are in no way experimental. In many European countries, as Germany, Russia, and even Asiatic Japan, they form one of the strongest features of the Red Cross. They are also in perfect accord with its first principles, viz., the voluntary help of the people for the Government, if in need, and the organized help of the people for each other in misfortune.

This practical work in the united hands of the whole American people should raise the organization far above the need of charitable gifts for its support. The Red Cross belongs to the people; they should be their own almoners and administer their own charities.

The intelligent thought of the philanthropists of the world is behind these methods; tried, well assured, and successful. Do we need to know more?

I make a strong appeal for the formation of local committees everywhere; to coöperate with the headquarters staff of the First Aid Department in the formation of classes. I appeal earnestly to physicians in every town in the United States to render their aid. Next to the stricken victim and immediate friends will the kind-hearted doctor appreciate this timely and intelligent help.

I appeal to every employer of labor throughout the country on behalf of this movement. I need not remind him that it is a duty, for his own kind heart will call him with a tender care to the welfare and safety of those whom circumstances and conditions have, for the time being, made his own. Their well-being is his, and protection from the inevitable dangers surrounding them will be his first care. My own convictions assure me that this appeal will be heard and responded to. I have known my country people—their good judgment, good hearts, and generous natures—too well to permit a moment’s doubt.

We have established headquarters for this department at 31 East 17th Street (Union Square), New York City, where all inquiries relative to the Red Cross Emergency Corps and the formation of classes should be addressed to the General Superintendent.

The plan of organization includes the formation of a finance committee, consisting of men of national reputation, who shall have entire charge of the funds of the Red Cross. This course is made necessary by the increased scope of the work contemplated, and also because it is desirable, when one returns, worn and weary, from a field of work, that no question shall arise as to the proper distribution of funds.

I offer no excuse for making this appeal, beyond the vast importance of the work and the strong, ever-present desire to see that work which has been a part of my life grow into a great beneficent institution that shall be worthy of this country and its people; to see the Red Cross a badge of honor and distinction, and to know that the time will come when the active members of the American Red Cross will form the Légion d’Honneur of the United States.

This peace-time and year-round activity of the Red Cross was a part of Clara Barton’s programme from the first. It was a distinctive feature of the American Red Cross, as she planned it, that its operation should not be limited to the battle-field. Her work in time of great calamity was taken over by European organizations, which in time went beyond the development of the Red Cross in America, and exhibited the full practicability of what she from the outset had believed. When she retired from the Red Cross, she took up this work as a separate activity; and she lived long enough to see the Red Cross, no longer under her direction, taking up a plan which she had long advocated. She made a little smiling comment upon it in her diary, and wished it success.

It would have gratified Clara Barton exceedingly could she have known that during and after the Great World War there would be organized throughout America, under the direction of the American Red Cross, classes for the training of people, especially women, in these and kindred lines of service. It is one more illustration of the wisdom and prevision of Clara Barton.

The years following her retirement found her active in the work of the Woman’s Relief Corps, of which she had long served as national chaplain. She was also a guest of honor at two or more National Grand Army encampments, and was everywhere hailed as the friend of the soldier. During these years she seemed to grow younger rather than older. When she was past eighty-four, a newspaper reporter described her as “a middle-aged woman.”

She made two visits to Chicago in her last years, and the visits did not greatly weary her. The last of these visits was in May, 1910. She was guest at a continuous round of engagements. At the May Festival of the Social Economics Club, she shook hands with nearly two thousand people. She attended a breakfast with eleven hundred guests and shook hands with nearly all of them.

The author of this volume holds this visit in happy memory. It occupied three weeks, one of which Miss Barton spent in the home of her cousin, the author. He accompanied her to a reception given in her honor at Abraham Lincoln Center, and saw her safely on her way to a number of other engagements which she had promised to attend. She met innumerable friends, many of whom called at the house to see her, and she answered scores of letters. She rose very early in the morning and sat at her desk until late at night, and was always calm, strong, and resolute.

She had promised to speak to the young people at their meeting on Sunday evening; but when this arrangement became known there was a demand for a wider hearing. She cheerfully consented to speak in the large auditorium of the church on Sunday evening. Her voice was clear, and filled the great room; every person present heard distinctly, although she was almost ninety years of age. Nor did she forget to tease her cousin a little over the fact that she spoke to more people in the evening than he in the morning; though his morning congregation was not a small one.

Between her engagements were frequent opportunities during that week for visits with her. She talked calmly about all her experiences. She reviewed her work on the battle-field during the Civil War, and spoke with deep interest of her experiences in Constantinople where she had been near to the scene of the earlier work of Florence Nightingale. She talked of her religious convictions, and of the faith with which she was facing the future. She spoke in detail about the American Red Cross. It is only just to her memory to record that in all her conversation there was no word of bitterness or resentment, or any approach to jealousy as she saw that organization moving forward under the direction of others.

She was happy, full of fun, gracious, considerate, and interested in all that was going on in the world. When she sat in her chair at the end of a strenuous day’s work, she rarely leaned back to touch the back of the seat; she had a back of her own, she said.

If the author could give to his readers a truthful impression of that visit, it would be the best possible insight into the character of Clara Barton. She combined in the rarest possible degree self-reliance and modesty. She knew that the work which she had done was a great work, but it confused her when any one told her so. She responded to every suggestion of appreciation, but she grew shy whenever she heard herself praised. Throughout the whole visit she manifested the finest quality of the cultured gentlewoman.

One thing she deeply regretted, and that was that her retirement had not yet brought her sufficient leisure to sort her papers and prepare for the writing of her biography. That such a book would be written she fully realized, and she cared much who wrote it. She was perfectly well in body and clear in mind, and what she hoped to do was to go through a vast accumulation of manuscripts and make the task of writing an easier one.

The author urged her to write the book herself, and she hoped to continue the work which she had begun and to write the story of her life in short sections. One such section she wrote and it is quoted in the first volume of this present work. But she found too much to do in helping the lives of others to pay very much attention to the record of her own life.

So the years went by and her life-work was completed and her biography remained unwritten. She was always thinking of another thing that needed to be accomplished, and saying concerning it, “Until that work is done, I cannot go to heaven.”

CHAPTER XX
CLARA BARTON’S DEATH AND RESURRECTION

Clara Barton died young. Even to those who were near her, she never seemed to grow old. At ninety there was no mark of physical infirmity upon her, nor was there any slightest slackening in the interest of the object for which so long she had cared. On her ninetieth birthday she wrote to the Reverend Percy H. Hepler:

Notwithstanding the much and more that has been said of “age” and all the stress laid upon it, I could never see and have never been able to understand how it came to be any business of ours. We have surely no control over its beginning, and, unless criminally, none over its ending. We can neither hasten nor arrest it, and how it is a matter of individual commendation I have never been able to see. I have been able to see painfully that the persistent marking of dates and adding one milestone to every year has a tendency to increase the burden of “age” and encourages a feeling of helplessness and release from activities which might be a pleasure to the possessor. I have given the exact age as recorded, lest I be suspected of trying to conceal it, but I have never, since a child, kept a “birthday” or thought of it only as a reminder by others.

Somehow it has come to me to consider strength and activity, aided so far as possible by right habits of life, as forming a more correct line of limitations than the mere passing of years.

Something similar to this she said to the author. She had no pride in her great age; she did not like to be thought of as an old lady. Years were to her merely opportunities of service, not measures of life. Notwithstanding this attitude, which prolonged her life and kept her young in spirit, Clara Barton was nearing the end of life’s journey. She had a heavy cold in the winter of 1908 and 1909, but fully recovered, and never seemed better in health than in the summer of 1910 when she made her journey to Chicago referred to in the last chapter. Unfortunately, she reached New England in a cold summer storm, which seemed almost like sleet, and her exposure seriously weakened her.

She returned to Glen Echo in August, but did not fully recover her strength. That winter she had double pneumonia, and her physician told her she had but one chance of life. “I will take that chance,” she said calmly. She took that chance and recovered.

But she did not grow strong again. The news of the death of her niece, Mrs. Riccius, was a great shock to her. Her heart almost ceased to beat. Always her concern for those whom she loved affected her more than anything that could happen to her.

In the summer of 1911 she made her last visit to Oxford. She made the journey with no ill effects, but the summer did not bring her permanent improvement. Long years of constant work and the serious illness of the winter had caused a slight weakness in the muscular action of the heart. Otherwise, her physicians could find no organic ailment.

When she was at work in Galveston in 1900, she was seriously ill. Her physician whispered to her nephew, Stephen, that she could live only a few hours. She overheard the word, and calling Stephen to her whispered to him, “I shall not die; don’t let them frighten you.” In that spirit she had met the numerous predictions of her death in the various illnesses of the years.

But it was not so after the summer of 1911. She went back to Glen Echo without her usual invigoration from her weeks in New England.

Still she did not give up. She had periods of old-time vigor. Here is an entry in her diary for Friday and Saturday, February 11 and 12, 1910:

At night I fold the wash of Monday for ironing to-morrow. Up at six: commenced ironing and continued till all was done, at one o’clock. At night took the clothes from the frames and put them in place, and felt that for once one thing was done as it should be. ’Twas finished before leaving.

She commented on the bad behavior of the Suffragettes, whom she believed to be injuring their cause by unwomanly conduct.

A week later:

We moved the large desk to my chambers from the dining-room below. A spacious desk it makes. One should be able to write a History of the World with such accommodations.

She was concerned for her old and faithful horse, Baba; and, when one night he was out in pasture and it turned somewhat cold, she could not sleep, but got up at four o’clock in the morning, fed Baba a full feed of corn, and some fruit from the table, and went back to bed.

Her diaries of 1907 had been neglected. She tried to bring them up to date from her pencil notes:

It seems to have been a hard year for me. It makes me tired to read it.

That spring she trimmed the rosebushes and set out flowers. A fire broke out in her room; the floor grew hot from the burning-out of the soot in a sheet-iron drum; and she got water and wet the floor till the chimney and pipe had burned out.

She mourned over the death of Mark Twain:

We have lost something very precious in his rich vein of humor. There are losses that are never made good. We have not another Whittier, or another Mark Twain.

The diary for 1911 begins with the multitude of Christmas greetings received and sent. The process took her several days and left her very weary. This led her to reflect that she was kept so busy with inconsequential writing that she had no time to do the writing she so much wanted to do, her Life and the story of her work.

She had an invitation from the “Review of Reviews” to write an article on “Hospitals and Hospital Nurses of the Civil War.” She declined, on the ground that she knew nothing about the subject! She had not been a nurse, and did not pretend to write as if she had been.

This was in January, 1911, and in February she had pneumonia, but recovered.

That summer she had two or more visits from a man who expressed himself with great emphasis on the subject of the immodesty of woman’s dress; she agreed with him, but felt it was hardly fair to talk to her as if she were to blame or needed to be convinced. “But really, he is not without provocation. Huge hats, dangerous hatpins, hobble and harem skirts, and the conduct of the Suffragettes are hard to defend.”

Most of her visitors just ran in from Washington, and ran away, hurrying back to the city. One day an old friend came and spent the afternoon and the night:

This day has been extremely social. It is really refreshing to see a man who has a little time, and not always in a rush with a watch in his hand to catch the next train. I fail to believe that these nervous persons accomplish the most, or are actually the best business men. Hurry is a habit with them. They make every one uncomfortable with their own selfish plans, and all are relieved to get them off and see them go.

In April she began to feel that she could take up and finish her History of the Red Cross.

In that month, Dr. Hubbell was grafting trees. She had always coveted the learning of that art; so she took lessons in tree-grafting. Also, she began to learn the use of the typewriter, at the age of eighty-nine.

She was interested in the trial of the Los Angeles dynamiters; in the activity of Mr. Bryan, whom she wished the Democrats might have sense enough to nominate; and, if a Democrat had to be elected, she, a Republican, wished it might be he.

She read a “Life” of the Brontë sisters. She read in good English translations “The Apology” of Socrates, the address of Xenophon to his army, some of the orations of Demosthenes, and other good old literature. She read the daily papers, and commented on all important current happenings.

She provided a final home for Baba, eighty miles away in Virginia, bade him a fond farewell, and sent money regularly to keep him well fed.

In May she wrote her will; the same will that was probated a few months later.

She commented on the great Suffrage parade in London, with satisfaction that the cause of Woman Suffrage was gaining, but with rather sad reflection that, fallible as men were, she had found women even more so; and she thought suffrage would be a blessing, but not an unmixed blessing.

She salted down eggs in early summer, and in the late fall they were candled and found good. She oversaw the management of her household, and part of the time she did her own cooking, in this, her last summer.

These citations are given, not because they are important in themselves, but because they give little glimpses of her life in her last few months. Certainly she did not permit herself to rust out in mind or body. A physical examination after her recovery from pneumonia in 1911 found her with every bodily organ sound, but with a pulse somewhat easily disturbed.

On Christmas, 1911, her ninetieth birthday, she sent to the world through the press this message:

Please deliver for me a message of peace and good-will to all the world for Christmas. I am feeling much better to-day, and have every hope of spending a pleasant and joyful Christmas, my ninetieth birthday.

Her hope was fulfilled and she celebrated her ninetieth Christmas with quiet but cheerful festivities.

As the rigor of winter came on, she was taken again with double pneumonia. In the weeks that followed, hope alternated with fear, until, on April 12, 1912, at nine o’clock in the morning, she cried out, “Let me go; let me go,” and the earthly life of Clara Barton came to its close.

A few days before she died, she talked with her nephew, Stephen, concerning her funeral, and chose for herself the principal speakers. She desired that her long-time and trusted friend, Mrs. John A. Logan, should say the principal words in a preliminary service to be held in Glen Echo, and that at the main funeral service to be held in Oxford, the chief speakers should be her friend the Reverend Percy Epler, and her cousin, the Reverend William E. Barton. She mentioned others as those whom she would be glad to have share in the services, and her wishes were carried out.

On Sunday afternoon a brief service was held at Glen Echo. The Reverend John Van Schaick, Jr., pastor of the “Church of our Father,” Universalist, of Washington, read the Scripture and offered prayer.

The Reverend W. W. Curry, a veteran of the Civil War, paid her a brief and heartfelt tribute, which was followed by three addresses, by Chaplain Coudon, of the House of Representatives, Mrs. John A. Logan, and the Honorable Peter V. De Graw.

The body reached Oxford in the early morning of April 16th, accompanied by Mr. and Mrs. Stephen E. Barton; Francis Atwater, of Meriden, Connecticut; Dr. Eugene Underhill, President of the Nurses’ College of Philadelphia; and Dr. Julian B. Hubbell. It had long since become apparent that no church in Oxford would contain the congregation. The service was held in Memorial Hall, which was filled to overflowing, and it was estimated that as many as five hundred people were unable to secure admission. Delegations were present from many cities, and representatives of various patriotic organizations were in attendance. Floral tributes had been received from many parts of the Nation, and a magnificent wreath was sent by the Grand Duchess of Baden. The casket was almost hidden with flowers. Above it was a great red cross made of carnations, and upon the casket was a large bouquet of red roses, the flowers which all her life she most had loved and which had belonged to her family since the days of the Wars of the Roses.

Appropriate music was rendered by the Schumann Quartet of Boston, who sang sympathetically Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar.” The opening words of Scripture, “I am the Resurrection and the Life,” and of the comforting sentences, “Let not your heart be troubled,” were recited by the Reverend William E. Barton.

The Reverend John P. Marvin read the Bible lesson. Mrs. Allen L. Joslyn read a beautiful tribute from the Town of Oxford, and Mr. J. Brainard Hall, of Worcester, a veteran of the Civil War, represented the Woman’s Relief Corps in a tribute which included the placing of a silk flag upon her breast as she lay in the casket.

The two formal addresses were then delivered by the ministers whom she had chosen, the Reverend Percy E. Epler, pastor of the Adams Square Congregational Church of Worcester, and the Reverend William E. Barton, of Oak Park, Illinois.

For an hour after the service, the people filed through the hall and past the casket for a last look at her face.

The body was then borne to the hearse, escorted by a guard of the Grand Army of the Republic, its chaplain, H. A. Philbrook, and the color sergeant leading the procession.

The North Oxford Cemetery has a beautiful and sightly elevation, containing the largest lot in the enclosure where for generations the Bartons have been buried. There her body was laid to rest, the hands of old soldiers lowering it to its last resting-place.

It was a glorious day in the spring. The services had begun at one o’clock, and, as the procession entered the cemetery, the sun was near its setting. The cemetery was thronged with people, the crowd containing many who had been unable to secure admission to the hall. The music in the hall had been rendered by a male quartet. Clara Barton had never cared greatly for music, but the music that she liked best was that rendered by male voices or sung heartily by a congregation. In the cemetery one hymn was sung, “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” the whole great congregation joining in the singing.

CLARA BARTON
“ANGEL OF THE BATTLEFIELD”
CIVIL WAR 1861-1865
FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR 1870-1871
SPANISH-AMERICAN WAR 1898
ORGANIZER AND PRESIDENT OF THE
AMERICAN NATIONAL RED CROSS
1881—1904
DEC. 25, 1821—April 12, 1912

IN THE CEMETERY AT OXFORD

A prayer was offered by a blind soldier, Chaplain Simmons, of Worcester.

The closing scene can hardly be described. Dr. Barton took his place at the head of the grave, holding in his hand a large bunch of red roses, and the place at the foot of the grave was taken by the Reverend Doctor Tyler, “Father Tyler,” a venerable and saintly man, who had buried the fathers and mothers of the Barton family in Oxford. He stood with his long white beard and silver hair irradiated by the sunset; and, in a voice tender, and reverent and comforting, spoke the following words:

In the few words with which I am to close this service, I shall indulge in no repetition of what has been said, and so well said, by the principal speakers on this occasion, eulogistic of the life and the life-work of the most celebrated woman of the world, whose mortal remains we have here deposited in the resting-place of her choice, among the beloved of her family. My thought will lead you in another direction, which has hardly been alluded to, if at all, in the eloquent addresses to which we have listened.

As we look into the grave and bid farewell to the mortal remains of Clara Barton, we instinctively are led to ask ourselves, “Where is Clara Barton who for more than ninety years made them the agencies of her great work in the world?” The life, the spirit, the soul—has that been destroyed by death? Does utter annihilation follow the development and growth of such a life?

As a Christian minister I feel I give a voice to the scriptural revelation of life and immortality when I say emphatically, “No!” She still lives! She has entered the pearly gates of the Holy City and is now walking the golden streets of the New Jerusalem! She has been born again into the newer life, as Christ taught the inquiring Pharisee, and our aged friend is now among the youngest of the Immortals!

I feel that while the Nation mourns because of her going, all heaven is rejoicing because of her coming! This great gathering of friends who sorrowfully bid her good-bye is but typical of the greater multitude of friends who have gone before her, and who, with smiling faces and extended hands, have given her a heavenly welcome. In a little while, after the pain of our grief has softened, we shall be glad, and bless God that He has taken her to Himself.

Now we know nothing, or but little, of the vocations and employments of the eternal life; except concerning the angels as “ministering spirits” they are nowhere revealed; but reasoning from analogy I am convinced that as doing is necessary to our happiness here, so a busy activity must be essential to the happiness of Heaven. In this regard we may be assured that Clara Barton will not be found wanting.

And so by faith beholding her as a happy spirit in the glorious life to which she has been promoted, we may all join in giving to these relics of her earthly life, as they peacefully rest for always in their last home, a heartfelt, loving

Good-Bye!

At the close of this brief and touching address, Dr. Barton spoke the words of committal; and, as he uttered, “Dust to dust, ashes to ashes,” dropped upon the lowered casket the large red roses, and pronounced the benediction.

Just then a mother stepped up and whispered, “My little girl was born in Clara Barton’s birthplace; in the very room where she was born. Will you baptize her, and will you do it now?”

“Bring her to me,” said the minister, “and I will christen her ‘Clara Barton.’”

So the name was bestowed in that hour upon another little girl, whose parents sought that the spirit that had lived in Clara Barton might live again in the life of their own daughter.

Two years from the following summer, the world witnessed a desolating war, and the months that followed wrought their inevitable destiny by plunging America into the seething conflict. Long before America formally entered the fight, the American Red Cross was active in measures of relief for the sorrowing nations of Europe. When, at length, the United States itself entered the war, the Red Cross blazed forth in every community between the oceans. Churches and town halls and private homes became dépôts where supplies were collected, bandages rolled, and workers trained. Hospitals, in our own country and along the battle-front, were erected and equipped. To them went thousands of American young women, each one of them wearing, on her arm or cap, the symbol which Clara Barton brought back to her own land after the close of the Franco-Prussian War. In their heroism and their deeds of mercy, Clara Barton lived again.

THE END