She immediately set about feeding the men in the stalled wagons, but another, more appalling situation arose. Some “heartless, unfaithful officers” decided that it was, in fact, a hardship on the refined citizens of Fredericksburg to be compelled to open their homes as hospitals for “these dirty, lousy, common soldiers.” Always a champion of the “army blue” against the “gold braid,” she hurried to Washington to advise her friend Henry Wilson of the predicament. Wilson, chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, swiftly warned the War Department. One day later the homes of Fredericksburg were opened to Union soldiers. She returned to the battlefield with additional supplies and continued to help the wounded. “When I rose, I wrung the blood from the bottom of my clothing before I could step, for the weight about my feet.”
After the Wilderness Campaign she served as a supervisor of nurses for the Army of the James, under Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, until January 1865. She organized hospitals and nurses and administered day-to-day activities in the invalid camps that received the wounded from Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and other battles near Richmond. Many of these soldiers remembered her thoughtfulness. If a wounded man requested codfish cakes “in the old home way,” he most likely got them; a young soldier, wasted to a skeleton, was tenderly cared for until his relatives arrived to take him home; requests to have letters written were never too much trouble.
Throughout the Civil War Benjamin Butler (1818-93) was a controversial figure as he invariably was at odds with the national administration on the treatment of the civilian population and the black slaves. Leaving the Army, he went into politics and served in the U.S. Congress and one term as governor of Massachusetts. It was as governor that he appointed Clara Barton superintendent of the Women’s Reformatory at Sherborn.
At the end of the Civil War an exhausted Clara Barton felt certain of one thing: “I have labored up to the full measure of my strength.” And she labored without pay and often used her own funds to buy supplies. In the field she shared the conditions of the common soldier: “I have always refused a tent unless the army had tents also, and I have never eaten a mouthful ... until the sick of the army were abundantly supplied.” Her pragmatic judgment and ability to work under the most dangerous and awkward of conditions earned her the respect of surgeons and generals who ordinarily considered they had “men enough to act as nurses” and did not want women around to “skeddadle and create a panic.” General Butler described her as having “executive ability and kindheartedness, with an honest love of the work of reformation and care of her living fellow creatures.”
Barton’s perceptive and sympathetic nature led her to foresee innumerable social problems after the Civil War. A champion of the underdog, she was concerned with the precarious situation of the newly freed slaves. What she saw on her travels to the South was alarming: uneducated, dependent blacks were being duped by their former masters, and freedom was, in many cases, a burden, not a blessing. Few blacks knew of the laws passed for their benefit and many did not understand that they must continue to work. She observed that the former “owners were disposed to cheat [a] great many.” Wherever she went, Barton tried to explain the law and the meaning of freedom to the blacks, many of whom walked great distances to ask her advice.
Frederick Douglass (1817?-95) was born in Talbot County, Maryland, the son of a white man and a slave woman. He was an eloquent spokesman for American blacks before and after the Civil War and spent his life fighting for equality. He was appointed U.S. minister to Haiti in 1889.
Barton, however, did more than advise. She consulted with Senator Wilson about the best possible personnel for the Freedman’s Bureau and lobbied Congress for a bill allowing blacks to use surplus army goods. She attended meetings of the Freedman’s Aid Society and sent reports on blacks’ conditions to the Freedman’s Bureau. She also worked for the extension of suffrage through “Universal Franchise” meetings and the American Equal Rights Association; she spoke at their rallies and formed lifelong attachments with such prominent leaders as Frederick Douglass and Anna Dickenson. During October of 1868, she began to formulate a plan for helping “the colored sufferers.” The plan, modelled on the work of Josephine Griffing, apparently involved the use of abandoned barracks and former hospitals near Washington for “Industrial Houses.” Here Freedmen could learn a trade and be “provided with the means of self-support and so command the respect of [their] former masters.” She discussed her ideas with several people, but unfortunately, the project was dropped because of her failing health.
Barton remained a staunch ally of blacks during her lifetime. Blacks employed by her received wages consistent with those of whites and generally received additional training and education. When few other charitable groups were willing to aid blacks who were the victims of natural disasters, such as the storm that hit the Sea Islands of South Carolina in 1893, Barton’s Red Cross never hesitated. And those who denied the bravery or competence of black troops in the Civil or Spanish-American Wars found her an outspoken opponent. Made honorary president of a society honoring soldiers of the Spanish-American War, she resigned when she found that it was open only to whites.