During the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania, while the Federals lay again in Fredericksburg, Clara Barton one evening went to the hotel which from ground to garret was filled with wounded men. Five hundred of these were lying upon the bare floors. They had no food to eat, nor was there any food to give them. Clara Barton was struck with their fine soldierly figures and features, remarkable even in their terrible extremity, and stopping near one she asked: “Where are you from?” “Michigan,” he said. On to another—“Michigan,” and so on “Michigan”—“Michigan”—“Michigan.” Up one flight of stairs, then another, still “Michigan.” At length in her surprise, she said somewhat humorously and without reflection, “Did Michigan take up this hand and play it alone?” “Yes,” answered a poor fellow lying on the floor nearby, seriously wounded but one who evidently understood the game better than she did, “Yes, and got euchred.”
XVIII
With a strong, brilliant, cultivated mind was united a gentle, tender, loving heart, and nothing was too great, nothing too small to enlist Miss Barton’s earnest thought and tender sympathy.
Harriette L. Reed,
Past National Secy. Woman’s Relief Corps.
Men are what their mothers make them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
All I have, and am, I owe to my mother. A. Lincoln.
All that I am my mother made me. John Quincy Adams.
Work and words are for the individual soldier—what he does, sees, feels or thinks in the dread hours of leaden rain and iron hail.