Oblivious of titles, epaulettes, clothes, rank and race, Lincoln saw only the weak mortal; not less so Clara Barton. Lincoln was an orator,—clear, sincere, natural, convincing. In her hundreds of lecture engagements, made through the same literary bureau, speaking from the same platform, Clara Barton was classed with Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, John B. Gough, and Henry Ward Beecher, the greatest orators of half a century ago.
Lincoln broke the shackles of the blacks in bondage; Clara Barton broke the shackles of education in America, as Pestalozzi in Europe, and transformed “pauper schools” into public schools. She broke the shackles of her sex, and her name was placed on the payroll as the first woman in the government’s service at the nation’s capital. She broke the shackles of war-ethics, and was the first woman “angel” on the battlefield.
She broke the shackles as to national lines, and was the first woman to traverse the ocean to minister to the war stricken of another continent. She broke the shackles as to national disasters, and was the first human being to organize a system to relieve human distress in times of peace, this now the system of every Red Cross organization in the world. She broke the shackles of women in educational life, in military life, in social life, in humanitarian life. Through the centuries Clara Barton, as Abraham Lincoln, will stand as the sentinel on the parapet between the warring forces of humanity and inhumanity.
Lincoln advocated the admitting of “all whites to the right of suffrage who pay taxes or bear arms, by no means excluding females.” Clara Barton advocated “the admission of women of whatever race to all the rights and privileges—social, religious and political—which as an intelligent being belongs to her.” Lincoln directed the greatest political organization of his time; Clara Barton, the greatest humanitarian organization. Lincoln bore malice toward none,—charity for all; equally so Clara Barton. Lincoln is the strongest tie that binds together all classes of Americans; Clara Barton is the strongest, tenderest tie that binds together humanitarians. Lincoln was the grandest man in the Civil War, is now receiving the highest homage; Clara Barton, the grandest woman, and now the most beloved.
Lincoln was denounced a failure, inefficient as an executive and disloyal to the Union. Clara Barton was accused of “inharmony, unbusinesslike methods and too many years.” Lincoln passed without warning and could make no defense; in her own words Clara Barton says: “When it becomes necessary for me to defend myself before the American people, let me fall.”
Fleeing the scene of his crime, and referring to Lincoln, there emitted from the lying tongue of the assassin: “Sic semper tyrannis”; in answer from the regions of the dead to the woman with the serpent’s tongue, Clara Barton replies: “Truth is eternal; evil conspiring and their kindred are doomed to die at last—my own shall come to me.” If Lincoln dead may yet do more for America and Americans than Lincoln living, so Clara Barton dead may yet do more for America and world humanity than Clara Barton living. Abraham Lincoln and Clara Barton, humanity’s martyrs, the two immortals.
A score of “the Immortals” lost to memory in any nation and that nation might well exclaim: “I have lost my reputation, I have lost the immortal part of myself.” Efface from memory the twenty, or fewer, immortals of Carthage, of Greece, of Rome, of Italy, of France, of Germany, of England, of America, then in the centuries hence over the tomb of every such nation only could be written “Nation Unknown.” In all the world destroy a score of “the Immortals” respectively in religion, in literature, in science, in art, in the heroic,—a hundred names and their influence,—and wealth greater to the human race shall have been destroyed than if were destroyed every public structure possessed by one billion six hundred millions of people now living.
Whether real or imaginary, the heroes of Homer and Virgil are worth more to the literature of that ancient period than all the physical wealth of Greece and Rome. What legacy to a nation could be greater than to have inherited the name and influence of a Homer, a Socrates, a Michael Angelo, a Queen Victoria, a Washington, a Franklin, a Lincoln, a Florence Nightingale, a Clara Barton? In the long centuries ago, of fame it was decreed: “Fame (’tis all the dead can have) shall live.” Through the centuries, Church and State have fought for their respective heroes and heroines not unlike Peter the Hermit and his followers, in the cause of Him on whom depended their future happiness. Now, as in all the past, the chiefest of a nation’s enduring wealth are the immortal names that were not born to die.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
(Picture taken in June, 1860)
The President, March 4, 1861–April 15, 1865
Miss Barton, I will help you. A. Lincoln (in 1865).
President Lincoln was good and kind to me in whatever I tried to do for the soldiers. Clara Barton.