There is no question that Clara Barton hugely enjoyed acclaim. She liked being in the inner elite of wartime politics, for it gave her the chance to shine as a personality, to be revered as an “Angel of the Battlefield.” In later life she enjoyed trips to Europe that amounted to triumphal tours.
Barton’s relief work benefitted her in another way. Throughout her life she was self-conscious and introspective, preoccupied with small personal incidents which she magnified out of proportion to their importance. She once described herself as “like other people ... only sometimes a ‘little more so,’” and the description is apt. She was inwardly pessimistic, and highly sensitive to criticism. She confided to her diary that she felt “pursued by a shadow” and spent years with “scarcely one cheerful day.” Periodically she became so depressed that she could not “see much these days worth living for; cannot but think it will be a quiet resting place when all these cares and vexations and anxieties are over, and I no longer give or take offense. I ... have grown weary of life at an age when other people are enjoying it most.”
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“They Saw in High Purpose a Duty to Do”[1]
Dorothea Dix (1802-87) started teaching Sunday School at the East Cambridge House of Corrections in Massachusetts in 1841. The appalling conditions she observed there spurred her to attempt to reform prisons and mental institutions. This work preoccupied her the rest of her life. She died in Trenton, New Jersey.
Clara Barton was not the only civilian who ministered to the wounded during the Civil War. The nature of this conflict was so personal and so immediate that many hundreds of volunteers gave enormously of their time in hospitals and on the field. In the North, Dorothea Dix interrupted her pre-war work with the insane to become superintendent of Female Nurses; Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Frances Dana Gage, and “Mother” Mary Ann Bickerdyke are a few of the other famous names connected with such service. Of especial importance were the Christian and Sanitary Commissions, organizations which worked with the government in camp and on the battlefield to improve the lot of the Union soldier. In the Confederacy, stringent financial conditions and widely scattered population prevented relief efforts from being as organized as those of the North. But charity had a deep-rooted meaning for the Southern cause, and self-denial became a matter of pride. “We had no Sanitary Commission in the South,” wrote one Confederate veteran, “we were too poor.... With us each house was a hospital.”
The United States Sanitary Commission was established in April 1861. It was originally designed for inquiry into the health of the troops and as an advisory board to the government on improvement of sanitary conditions in the army. In the early months of the war, the Sanitary Commission attempted to methodize the fragmented benevolent efforts of the Union. It fought favoritism to particular regiments with equitable distribution of supplies, administered from a network of regional and local auxiliaries. By 1863, however, the commission was, of necessity, drawn to the battlefield, where it established hospital and transport ships, supply stations, and gave direct aid to the wounded. Several million dollars were raised by the commission through “Sanitary Fairs,” large fund-raising bazaars. At one point the Sanitary Commission had more than 500 agents working in the field. By its impartiality and organization, the Sanitary Commission was the forerunner of the Red Cross in concept, if not in actuality.
Another organization, drawn along similar lines, was the United States Christian Commission. Established by a group of New York churches in 1862, its object was to “give relief and sympathy and then the Gospel.” Volunteers in the Christian Commission were called “Ambassadors of Jesus;” they were chosen largely from the ranks of clergymen and YMCA members but many women were among its workers. The Christian Commission did give battlefield relief, and sought to supply reading material, clothing, and medicine.
“They would stand with you now, as they stood with you then,
The nurses, consolers and saviors of men."
The Women Who Went to the Field