Her childhood was unusual. She was born on December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts, and named Clarissa Harlowe Barton after an aunt, who in turn had been named for a popular novel of her day. Her parents, Capt. Stephen Barton and Sarah Stone Barton, had four other children, all at least 10 years of age by the time this child was born. Thus Clara—as she was always called—was born into a world of adults and, as she later recalled, “had no playmates, but in effect six fathers and mothers.” She might well have added “six teachers,” for she noted that “all took charge of me, all educated me according to personal taste.”
Sarah Stone Barton was a native New Englander and was born in 1787. She married at age 17, and in her first seven years of marriage, she gave birth to her first four children. The last, Clara, followed after a ten-year interval.
Sally Barton, her mother, was an erratic, nervous woman, with a reputation for profanity and a violent temper. She vented her frustrations in compulsive housework, and Clara Barton later recalled that her mother “never slept after 3 o’clock in the morning” and “always did two days work in one.” Sally Barton spent little time with her youngest daughter, preferring to leave her with other family members. Thus Clara Barton learned political and military lore from her father, mathematics from her brother Stephen, and horseback riding from brother David. Her two sisters, Sally and Dolly, concentrated on teaching her academic subjects. Besides this household instruction, she attended both private and public schools in the Oxford area.
She was a serious child, anxious to learn, but timid to try. Her later reminiscences of childhood were filled with stories of frightful thunderstorms, intimidating schools, encounters with snakes, and crippling illnesses. When she was six her sister Dolly, who had been an intellectual girl, became mentally unbalanced, and the family had to lock her in a room with barred windows. Once Dolly escaped and chased David’s wife, Julia, around the yard with an ax in her hand. Clara Barton never publicly mentioned her sister’s insanity, but she privately thought the illness had been brought on by Dolly’s unfulfilled desire to obtain a higher education. This rather frantic home-life and the presence of Dolly in the Barton household must have added greatly to her timidity and to her later emotional instability.
Barton developed great loyalty for her family, eccentric as they were. On one occasion she nursed her brother David for two years after he was seriously injured in a fall. Later she used her political influence to assist family members; for example, to defend a cousin’s job or to secure suitable military appointment for a relative. Throughout her life she was a faithful correspondent, continually interested in the affairs of nephews, nieces, cousins, brothers, and sisters. And in later years she described her family life in glowing terms, never mentioning her mother’s tantrums or Dolly’s insanity. Her devotion also extended to family friends.
The Bartons were quintessentially industrious. David and Stephen Barton were businessmen, successful pioneers of milling techniques. Clara Barton’s two sisters taught school; a cousin became the first woman Post Office official in Worcester County, Massachusetts. Such diligence was one of the great influences in Clara Barton’s life. “You have never known me without work,” she wrote when in her eighties, “and you never will. It has always been a part of the best religion I had.”
She began work early. She had been an intellectually precocious child and by her late teens was competent to teach. She first taught in the Oxford schools, and later she conducted classes for the children of workers in the Barton family mills. In these one-room schools she gained a reputation for first-rate scholarship and excellent discipline. She expelled and whipped students when necessary, but mostly she cajoled them into obedience through affection and respect. When her first school won the district’s highest marks for discipline, she remonstrated: “I thought it the greatest injustice ... [for] there had been no discipline.... Child that I was, I did not know that the surest test of discipline is its absence.”
Barton was introspective and keenly aware of herself as an individual, and this enabled her to view her students individually. She gave them such personal attention that scores of former pupils wrote to her in later years, confident that their uniqueness had touched her. Barton in turn called her pupils “my boys” and made no apologies for her loyalty. “They were all mine,” she recalled in the second part of her autobiography, “second only to the claims and interests of the real mother.... And so they had remained. Scattered over the world, some near, some far, I have been their confidant.... I count little in comparison with the faithful grateful love I hold today of the few survivors of my Oxford school.”
Teaching thus reinforced her loyalty and her sense of individuality. Her excellence as an instructor also had the effect of mitigating her introversion and strengthening her self-assurance. Indeed, she became confident enough to teach the roughest district schools and to demand pay equal to a man’s. “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing,” she told one school board, “but if paid at all, I shall never do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay.”