Clara Barton’s diary displays utter freedom from cant. She was not given to putting her religious feelings and emotions down on paper. But in this period she gave much larger space to her own reflections than was her custom when more fully occupied. She was feeling in a marked degree the providential aspects of her own life; she was discussing with Christian officers their plans for what Colonel Elwell called his “soldier’s church.” Her religious nature found expression in her diary more adequately than she had usually had time to express.
Toward the end of her period of what since has been termed her watchful waiting, she received a letter from a friend, an editor, who felt that the war had gone on quite long enough, and who wished her to use her influence in favor of an immediate peace. Few people wanted peace more than Clara Barton, but her letter in answer to this request shows an insight into the national situation which at that time could hardly have been expected:
Hilton Head, S.C., June 24th, 1863
T. W. Meighan, Esq.,
My kind friend, your welcome letter of the 6th has been some days in hand. I did not get “frightened.” I am a U.S. soldier, you know, and therefore not supposed to be susceptible to fear, and, as I am merely a soldier, and not a statesman, I shall make no attempt at discussing political points with you. You have spoken openly and frankly, and I have perused your letter and considered your sentiments with interest, and, I believe, with sincerity and candor, and, while I observe with pain the wide difference of opinion existing between us, I cannot find it in my heart to believe it more than a matter of opinion. I shall not take to myself more of honesty of purpose, faithfulness of zeal, or patriotism, than I award to you. I have not, aye! never shall forget where I first found you. The soldier who has stood in the ranks of my country’s armies, and toiled and marched and fought, and fallen and struggled and risen, but to fall again more worn and exhausted than before, until my weak arm had greater strength than his, and could aid him, and yet made no complaint, and only left the ranks of death when he had no longer strength to stand up in them—is it for me to rise up in judgment and accuse this man of a want of patriotism? True, he does not see as I see, and works in a channel in which I have no confidence, with which I have no sympathy, and through which I could not go; still, I must believe that in the end the same results which would gladden my heart would rejoice his.
Where you in prospective see peace, glorious, coveted peace, and rest for our tired armies, and home and happiness and firesides and friends for our war-worn heroes, I see only the beginning of war. If we should make overtures for “peace upon any terms,” then, I fear, would follow a code of terms to which no civilized nation could submit and present even an honorable existence among nations. God forbid that I should ask the useless exposure of the life of one man, the desolation of one more home; I never for a moment lose sight of the mothers and sisters, and white-haired fathers, and children moving quietly about, and dropping the unseen, silent tear in those far-away saddened homes, and I have too often wiped the gathering damp from pale, anxious brows, and caught from ashy, quivering lips the last faint whispers of home, not to realize the terrible cost of these separations; nor has morbid sympathy been all,—out amid the smoke and fire and thunder of our guns, with only the murky canopy above, and the bloody ground beneath, I have wrought day after day and night after night, my heart well-nigh to bursting with conflicting emotions, so sorry for the necessity, so glad for the opportunity of ministering with my own hands and strength to the dying wants of the patriot martyrs who fell for their country and mine. If my poor life could have purchased theirs, how cheerfully and quickly would the exchange have been made; more than this I could not do, deeper than this I could not feel, and yet among it all it has never once been in my heart, or on my lips, to sue to our enemies for peace. First, they broke it without cause; last, they will not restore it without shame. True, we may never find peace by fighting, certainly we never shall by asking. “Independence?” They always had their independence till they madly threw it away; if there be a chain on them to-day it is of their own riveting. I grant that our Government has made mistakes, sore ones, too, in some instances, but ours is a human government, and like all human operations liable to mistakes; only the machinery and plans of Heaven move unerringly and we short-sighted mortals are, half our time, fain to complain of these. I would that so much of wisdom and foresight and strength and power fall to our rulers as would show them to-morrow the path to victory and peace, but we shall never strengthen their hands or incite their patriotism by deserting and upbraiding them. To my unsophisticated mind, the Government of my country is my country, and the people of my country, the Government of my country as nearly as a representative system will allow. I have taught me to look upon our “Government” as the band which the people bind around the bundle of sticks to hold it firm, where every patriot hand must grasp the knot the tighter, and our “Constitution” as a symmetrical framework unsheltered and unprotected, around which the people must rally, and brace and stay themselves among its inner timbers, and lash and bind and nail and rivet themselves to its outer posts, till in its sheltered strength it bids defiance to every elemental jar,—till the winds cannot rack, the sunshine warp, or the rains rot, and I would to Heaven that so we rallied and stood to-day. If our Government is “too weak” to act vigorously and energetically, strengthen it till it can. Then comes the peace we all wait for as kings and prophets waited,—and without which, like them, we seek and never find.
Pardon me, my good friend, I had never thought to speak at this length, or, indeed, any length upon this strangely knotted subject, so entirely out of my line. My business is stanching blood and feeding fainting men; my post the open field between the bullet and the hospital. I sometimes discuss the application of a compress or a wisp of hay under a broken limb, but not the bearing and merits of a political movement. I make gruel—not speeches; I write letters home for wounded soldiers, not political addresses—and again I ask you to pardon, not so much what I have said, as the fact of my having said anything in relation to a subject of which, upon the very nature of things, I am supposed to be profoundly ignorant.
With thanks for favors, and hoping to hear from you and yours as usual,
I remain as ever
Yours truly
Clara Barton
I am glad to hear from your wife and mother, and I am most thankful for your cordial invitation to visit you, which I shall (if I have not forfeited your friendship by my plainness of speech, which I pray I may not) accept most joyously, and I am even now rejoicing in prospect over my anticipated visit. We are not suffering from heat yet, and I am enjoying such horseback rides as seldom fall to the lot of ladies, I believe. I don’t know but I should dare ride with a cavalry rider by and by, if I continue to practice. I could at least take lessons. I have a fine new English leaping saddle on the way to me. I hope you will endeavor to see to it that the rebel privateers shall not get hold of it. I could not sustain both the loss and disappointment, I fear.
Love to all.
Yours
C. B.
While Miss Barton was engaged in these less strenuous occupations she issued a requisition upon her brother in the Quartermaster’s Department for a flatiron. She said: “My clothes are as well washed as at home, and I have a house to iron in if I had the iron. I could be as clean and as sleek as a kitten. Don’t you want a smooth sister enough to send her a flatiron?”
In midsummer, hostilities began in earnest. On July 11 an assault on Fort Wagner was begun from Morris Island, and was followed by a bombardment, Admiral Dahlgren firing shells from his gunboats, and General Gillmore opening with his land batteries. Then followed the charge of the black troops under Colonel R. G. Shaw, and the long siege in which the “swamp angel,” a two-hundred-pounder Parrott, opened fire on Charleston. It was then that Clara Barton found what providential leading had brought her to this place. Not from a sheltered retreat, but under actual fire of the guns she ministered to the wounded and the dying. All day long under a hot sun she boiled water to wash their wounds, and by night she ministered to them, too ardent to remember her need of sleep. The hot winds drove the sand into her eyes, and weariness and danger were ever present. But she did her work unterrified. She saw Colonel Elwell leading the charge, and he believed that not only himself, but General Voris and Leggett would have died but for her ministrations.
Follow me, if you will, through these eight months [Miss Barton said shortly afterward]. I remember eight months of weary siege—scorched by the sun, chilled by the waves, rocked by the tempest, buried in the shifting sands, toiling day after day in the trenches, with the angry fire of five forts hissing through their ranks during every day of those weary months.
This was when your brave old regiments stood thundering at the gate of proud rebellious Charleston.... There, frowning defiance, with Moultrie on her left, Johnson on her right, and Wagner in front, she stood hurling fierce death and destruction full in the faces of the brave band who beleaguered her walls.
Sumter, the watch-dog, that stood before her door, lay maimed and bleeding at her feet, pierced with shot and torn with shell, the tidal waves lapping his wounds. Still there was danger in his growl and death in his bite.”[10]
One summer afternoon our brave little army was drawn up among the island sands and formed in line of march. For hours we watched. Dim twilight came, then the darkness for which they had waited, while the gloom and stillness of death settled down on the gathered forces of Morris Island. Then we pressed forward and watched again. A long line of phosphorescent light streamed and shot along the waves ever surging on our right.
I remember so well these islands, when the guns and the gunners, the muskets and musketeers, struggled for place and foothold among the shifting sands. I remember the first swarthy regiments with their unsoldierly tread, and the soldierly bearing and noble brows of the patient philanthropists who volunteered to lead them. I can see again the scarlet flow of blood as it rolled over the black limbs beneath my hands and the great heave of the heart before it grew still. And I remember Wagner and its six hundred dead, and the great-souled martyr that lay there with them when the charge was ended and the guns were cold.
Vividly she went on to describe the siege of Fort Wagner from Morris Island, thus:
I saw the bayonets glisten. The “swamp angel” threw her bursting bombs, the fleet thundered its cannonade, and the dark line of blue trailed its way in the dark line of belching walls of Wagner. I saw them on, up, and over the parapets into the jaws of death, and heard the clang of the death-dealing sabers as they grappled with the foe. I saw the ambulances laden down with agony, and the wounded, slowly crawling to me down the tide-washed beach, Voris and Cumminger gasping in their blood. And I heard the deafening clatter of the hoofs of “Old Sam” as Elwell madly galloped up under the walls of the fort for orders. I heard the tender, wailing fife, the muffled drum and the last shots as the pitiful little graves grew thick in the shifting sands.
Of this experience General Elwell afterward wrote:
I was shot with an Enfield cartridge within one hundred and fifty yards of the fort and so disabled that I could not go forward. I was in an awful predicament, perfectly exposed to canister from Wagner and shell from Gregg and Sumter in front, and the enfilade from James Island. I tried to dig a trench in the sand with my saber, into which I might crawl, but the dry sand would fall back in place about as fast as I could scrape it out with my narrow implement. Failing in this, on all fours I crawled toward the lee of the beach, which was but a few yards off.... A charge of canister all around me aroused my reverie to thoughts of action. I abandoned the idea of taking the fort and ordered a retreat of myself, which I undertook to execute in a most unmartial manner on my hands and knees spread out like a turtle.
After working my way for a half-hour and making perhaps two hundred yards, two boys of the 62d Ohio found me and carried me to our first parallel, where had been arranged an extempore hospital. After resting awhile I was put on the horse of my lieutenant-colonel, from which he had been shot that night, and started for the lower end of the island one and a half miles off, where better hospital arrangements had been prepared. Oh, what an awful ride that was! But I got there at last, by midnight. I had been on duty for forty-two hours without sleep under the most trying circumstances and my soul longed for sleep, which I got in this wise: an army blanket was doubled and laid on the soft side of a plank with an overcoat for a pillow, on which I laid my worn-out body.
And such a sleep! I dreamed that I heard the shouts of my boys in victory, that the rebellion was broken, that the Union was saved, and that I was at my old home and that my dear wife was trying to soothe my pain....
My sleepy emotions awoke me and a dear, blessed woman was bathing my temples and fanning my fevered face. Clara Barton was there, an angel of mercy doing all in mortal power to assuage the miseries of the unfortunate soldiers.