When President Lincoln issued his call for volunteers to maintain the Union, the response was immediate and troops began heading for Washington. Some Massachusetts volunteers passing through Baltimore, which was decidedly Southern in sentiment, were attacked by local citizens.
In late April 1861, less than two weeks after the bombardment of Fort Sumter in South Carolina, the Massachusetts Sixth Regiment arrived in Washington, D.C., from Massachusetts. This regiment hailed from the Worcester area and many of the men were friends or former pupils of Clara Barton. Their train was mobbed while passing through Baltimore, and Barton, concerned that one of her “boys” might have been injured, rushed to their temporary quarters in the Senate Chamber. She found the Regiment unharmed, but sadly lacking in basic necessities—“towels and handkerchiefs ... serving utensils, thread, needles ... etc.” She bought and distributed as many of these items as she could, then wrote to the anxious families in Massachusetts to send preserved fruits, blankets, candles, and other supplies to supplement the unreliable army issues. “It is said upon proper authority, that ‘our army is supplied,’” she wrote to a group of ladies in Worcester, “how this can be so I fail to see.” When the generous New Englanders inundated her with useful articles and stores, Barton’s home became a virtual warehouse. “It may be in these days of quiet idleness they have really no pressing wants,” she observed, “but in the event of a battle who can tell what their needs might grow to in a single day?” Such garnering of supplies against unforeseen disaster eventually became a central characteristic of her relief work in the years to come.
Barton’s earliest concern with aiding the Union army stemmed from her loyalty to the Massachusetts men. She felt a personal involvement with those who “only a few years ago came every morning ... and took their places quietly and happily among my scholars” and an allegiance to others from her home state. “They formed and crowded around me,” she noted. “What could I do but go with them, or work for them and my country? The patriot blood of my father was warm in my veins.”
Her patriotism also was aroused by the Union cause. Although she maintained that the purpose of the war was not solely to abolish slavery, she also held little sympathy for the Southern way of life and aligned herself with such Republicans as Henry Wilson who believed that historically the Southern states had conspired to tyrannize the North. “Independence!” she once scoffed, “they always had their independence till they madly threw it away.” She was exhilarated. “This conflict is one thing I’ve been waiting for,” she told a friend, “I’m well and strong and young—young enough to go to the front. If I can’t be a soldier I’ll help soldiers.” And feeling even more exalted, she declared that “when there is no longer a soldier’s arm to raise the Stars and Stripes above our Capitol, may God give strength to mine.”
For a year Barton contented herself with soliciting supplies. Then, as the horrible effects of battle were reported in Washington, she began to think of aiding soldiers directly on the battlefield. She had visited hospitals and invalid camps, but what disturbed her most were the tales of suffering at the front. Soldiers often had wounds unnecessarily complicated by infection due to neglect, or died of thirst while waiting for transportation to field hospitals. Nurses were urgently needed at the battlefield, but she wondered if it was seemly for a woman to place herself directly in the lines of battle: “I struggled ... with my sense of propriety, with the appalling fact that I was only a woman whispering in one ear, and thundering in the other [were] the groans of suffering men dying like dogs.”
Her father encouraged her to go where her conscience directed. When Captain Barton died in March 1862, she felt that her duties to the family had closed. She petitioned Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew and other government officials for permission to join General Burnside’s division at the front. Late in the summer of 1862, at the Battle of Cedar Mountain, Virginia, she “broke the shackles and went to the field.”
At Cedar Mountain, and the subsequent second battle of Bull Run, she began a remarkable service which continued to the end of the war. Here, for the first of many times, Barton and her “precious freights” were transported in railroad cars or by heavy, jolting army wagons to a scene of utter desolation and confusion. When she arrived at Bull Run, 3,000 wounded men were lying in a sparsely wooded field on straw, for there was no other bedding. Most had not eaten all day; many faced amputations or other operations. She was unprepared for such carnage, but she distributed coffee, crackers, and the few other supplies she had brought. With calico skirt pinned up around her waist, she moved among the men and prayed that the combination of lighted candles and dry straw would not result in a fire that would engulf them.
Andersonville prison camp in Georgia
