REPRESENTATIVE MASSACHUSETTS STATESMEN

CHARLES SUMNER
Clara Barton has the brain of a statesman, the command of a general, and the heart and hand of a woman.—Charles Sumner, U. S. Senate, 1851–1857; 1863–1869.

GEORGE F. HOAR
Clara Barton is the greatest “man” in America. Where will you find a man to equal her?—George F. Hoar, U. S. Senate, 1877–1901.

She achieved through nature’s endowments—a head to think, a heart to feel and hands to work. From her hard-working Barton forbears she inherited the sentiment in the Roman adage—“There is no easy way to the stars from the earth”;—all things are conquered by labor. For her to labor was to worship; to her the dignity of labor was greater than queenly dignity; labor, “wide as earth,” became her passport from the farm, the field of war, fire, flood, drouth, famine and pestilence, into every country of earth; her “labor of love,”—the open sesame to the White House, to the palaces of kings and emperors.

The illustrious author of “The True Grandeur of Nations,” a personal friend of Clara Barton, says: “No true and permanent fame can be founded, except in labors which promote the happiness of mankind.” Clara Barton learned lessons in manual training before manual training became a science; she learned to use her hands in the kitchen, in the garden, in the factory, in the sick room. She not only knew how to sew and spin and weave and cook and care for the sick, but she organized women for such work throughout two continents. Labor organized by her among the poor, the sick and wounded in Germany, France, Russia, Sea Islands, Turkey, Armenia, Cuba and other countries, attesting her appreciation Luise, the Grand Duchess of Baden, writes: “Clara Barton possesses the ever powerful mind and ready love for suffering mankind;—faithful gratitude follows her for ever.”

In person she was not a Queen of Sheba arrayed for kings to admire; not a Cleopatra bejeweled in richest splendour to beguile military heroes; not an Elizabeth with a new dress for every day in the year to impress millions of subjects—she was a “working-woman.” Her raiment was homespun or commonplace, by her ‘made over,’ raiment which would put to shame for economy the average rural housewife, and yet she could but be envied for her artistic taste by the heiress to millions. Simple in dress she lived close to Nature, a Nature-child of perennial growth;—“a passion for service,” she developed through the years an identity all her own. Her identity thus developed, she became a landmark in her own country for humanity, as in Switzerland became Dunant who first caught the spirit of the Red Cross work on the bloody fields of Solferino.

Most unusual were Clara Barton’s physical and mental powers. If her powers were portrayed by the imaginative mind of a Homer, Clara Barton would be a composite being possessed of attributes as to the head, of a Jupiter; as to the heart, of a Venus; as to the shoulders, of an Atlas; as to the hands, of a Vulcan. But she was human, intensely human, a “frail woman,”—in her own words, a “Poor little me.” Her weakness was her strength; her courage, a woman’s heart.

She dwelt not on a Mount Olympus, not in a palace;—when on the “firing-line,” “rolled in her blankets” she camped under the wagon, or on the ground within a canvas tent. In the days of rest through her closing years, she “camped” in a warehouse of thirty-eight rooms, with seventy-six closets; in her “house of rough hemlock boards,” a house stored with food and clothing and she ready “to set in motion the wheels of relief at a moment’s warning over the whole land.” She lived on the banks of the quiet Potomac, in the midst of Nature’s foliage, in the presence of the oak, the elm, the cedar, the poplar,—within “God’s first temples,”