Personally appeared before me Francis Atwater, and made oath that the facts set forth in the above statement are true to the best of his knowledge and belief.
(Signed) Edward B. Whitney.
Notary Public.
Meriden, Conn., Oct. 21, 1921.
The probable motive of the “lone accuser” was the subject of much comment on Capitol Hill. Soon after the defamatory letter reached the Members of the National Legislature there came a near-explosion in the House that promised to rival that of the Petersburg mine explosion of Civil War days; and to which scene, in the blackness of night, midst thunder and lightning and blinding storm, and on her horse with one attendant taking her life in her hands, Clara Barton rushed to the scene of death and mangled bodies, to save the lives of her country’s patriots. Accompanying the near-explosion, there also was predicted a tidal-wave as destructive to the Red Cross management as was that at Galveston in 1900 to her stricken people; and hard-following which, from what was then thought to be her death-bed, Clara Barton was on that storm-swept coast, in charge of the life rescue station.
Especially tense was the consternation on the part of the members from fifteen or twenty states whose peoples respectively (from 1881 to 1900), had been the beneficiaries to the extent of thousands of lives saved and untold sufferings assuaged, at the hands of that “small American Red Cross.” What really quieted the five hundred legislators on Capitol Hill was the rumor that the sensation came from a luxurious summer resort in Canada, where there had been summering merely a harmless phenomenon—an incinerator with a “continuous performance” furnace-flame, containing no heat units. But just what happened, and why, at the Nation’s Capital with threats, impendent, of a criminal suit and in the “jungle of intrigue” following, is a story for the novelist, not a subject for this pen picture.
One patriot-Congressman, however, for days kept revolving in his mind the many awful scenes, in which Clara Barton was her country’s “Angel of Mercy”; of the Michigan forest fires of 1881; of the two Mississippi River floods of 1882 and 1883; of the Ohio and Mississippi River flood of 1884, in which Clara Barton came near losing her life; of the Charleston earthquake of 1886; of the Mt. Vernon cyclone of 1886; of the Florida Yellow Fever scourge of 1888; of the Johnstown flood of 1889; of the Cuban scourge of famine and war of 1898, where “The Angel of Mercy” again lay at death’s door; nor could he forget the many other national, and international, disasters in which the woman-patriot served her country.
Her fitful days of war were over; in far-away New England, she was sleeping her sleep of harmless peace; her character was being assailed in the very Capitol Building where fifty-five years before she had cared for the unfortunate boys of the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment, who had fallen in service to country. In all the world was there ever such tragedy? But the “assassin” lives to a purpose; he serves to perpetuate to posterity the virtues of his victim; in contrast, his victim seems the more glorious. In such atmosphere of near-treason, as did many other Congressmen, “Fighting Joe,” of Kansas, tried to be “reasonable,” but his “Fighting Irish” got the best of him. He was too chivalric to give his pent-up feelings vent to a woman; but he was less considerate of one of the most distinguished of his men compatriots, as is shown in the following letter (letter of record in “Sears’ Report to the Library Committee of Congress”—page [139], but text given by Taggart from memory):
September 6, 1916.
Major-General Arthur Murray, U.S.A., Retired,