Clara Barton began with one of these schools where she had at first only six poor children to teach. But she was such a good teacher that before long six hundred came there to be pupils under her charge. She tried very hard to help everyone she could; at the end of eighteen years’ service as a teacher she had become almost an invalid and had lost her voice.
Still she could not bear to be idle while she had the use of her hands. From early girlhood her handwriting had been plain and neat. This, with her great desire to work, helped her to find a place in the Patent Office in Washington. Clara Barton was one of the first women to hold a position in the employ of the United States government. This gave offense to some of the men in that department. In those days most people thought it improper for a woman to work in an office; so these men stared at the new clerk, making remarks in her hearing about “brazen, strong-minded, ‘woman’s-rights’ women,” adding that such a creature was not fit to associate with gentlemen like themselves.
Sensitive and shrinking though she was, Miss Barton kept on. She was soon promoted to a position of trust. It was not long before she found that some of the very men who had insulted her were “patent thieves,” guilty of selling government secrets. Her duty to the country, rather than a wish for revenge, obliged her to report the wrongs that these ungallant “gentlemen” had done, and they were promptly dismissed from the service they had betrayed.
During the years of her humdrum life as a government clerk, Miss Barton was thrilled by the stories she read in the newspapers of the noble work of Florence Nightingale, the famous nurse in the Crimean War between Great Britain and Russia. It was said that the English soldiers adored Nurse Nightingale almost as if she were an angel from heaven, and some of them kissed her shadow when it fell upon their pillows as she passed by.
When Fort Sumter was fired on and President Lincoln began calling for soldiers to defend the country, Clara Barton was soon found at the front, in places of great danger. Fitting up a house or even an old barn for a hospital, she went about on the battlefields looking for wounded men, and doing all she could to relieve and help them. She ministered to the dying, writing many a last letter to give comfort to the sorrowing ones at home. Corresponding with newspapers in the north, she did wonders in obtaining medicines, hospital supplies, and comforts for her sick and wounded brothers in the army. She was appointed “lady manager” of all the hospitals at the front in Virginia. Those who knew most about her great work declared that her services to her country were wider reaching even than those of Florence Nightingale, the greatest nurse the world had yet known. Then it was that the grateful soldiers called Clara Barton “the Angel of the Battlefield.”
During the last weeks of his life, President Lincoln sent for Miss Barton and asked her to undertake the difficult task of finding out in as many cases as possible what had become of the eighty thousand soldiers reported missing from the Union army. At this memorable meeting the Great Heart of the White House stood face to face with one of the greatest-hearted women in the world of that day.
Clara Barton spent four years more tracing out the fate of thirty thousand missing men. To her great joy she learned that thousands upon thousands of those who had been reported as deserters had bravely given their lives for their country.
Miss Barton then went to Europe to rest awhile and regain the health she had lost by overwork. While there she studied the work of a Swiss who was trying to found a new society for nursing and caring for the sick and wounded soldiers of all nations. Because it had a red cross on a white ground for badge and flag, it was named the Red Cross Society.
When war broke out between France and Prussia, Clara Barton became known as “the Angel of the Battlefields” of France. After her return to the United States she began to organize the American Red Cross Society, which has since become the greatest power in the world for the relief of suffering.
Wherever there was a calamity or a pestilence—the great forest fire in Michigan; the earthquake at Charleston, South Carolina; yellow fever in Florida; the Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania; the Turkish massacres in Armenia—there Clara Barton, though now an old woman, was always “the first to come and the last to go.”