Senator Wilson was still interested in what she wanted to do, but was preoccupied. “He had labored all night on Miss B.’s bill.” In fact Clara Barton read the probable fate of her own endeavor. Senator Wilson had given himself with such ardor to the cause of her guest that he had no time to help her. She had borrowed a set of furs to wear when she went to the President. She took them back that afternoon and wrote in her diary: “Very tired; could not reconcile my poor success; I find that some hand above mine rules and restrains my progress; I cannot understand, but try to be patient, but still it is hard. I was never more tempted to break down with disappointment.”
On Thursday, March 2, two days before the inauguration, she went again to see the President. Just as she reached the White House in the rain, she saw Secretary Stanton go in. She waited until 5.15, and Stanton did not come out. She returned home “still more and more discouraged.” Her guest, also, had been out in the rain, but was overjoyed. Her bill had passed the Senate without opposition, and would go to the House next day, if not that very night. Miss Barton wrote in her diary: “I do not tell her how much I am inconvenienced by her using all my power. I have no helper left, and I am discouraged. I could not restrain the tears, and gave up to it.”
It is hardly to be wondered that she almost repented of her generosity in loaning Senator Wilson to her friend when she herself had so much need of him. Nor need she be blamed for lying awake and crying while her guest slept happily on the pillow beside her. She did not often cry.
Just at this time she was doubly anxious, for Stephen, her brother, was nearing his end, and Irving Vassall, her nephew, was having hemorrhages and not long for this world, and her day’s journal shows a multiplicity of cares crowding each day.
Stephen died Friday, March 10. She was with him when he died and mourned for her “dear, noble brother.” She believed he had gone to meet the loved ones on the other side, and she wondered whether her mother was not the first to welcome him. His body was embalmed, and a service was held in Washington, and another in Oxford. Between the time of Stephen’s death and her departure with his body, she received her papers with the President’s endorsement. General Hitchcock presented them to her. She wrote:
We had a most delightful interview. He aided me in drawing up a proper article to be published; said it would be hard, but I should be sustained through such a work, he felt, and that no person in the United States would oppose me in my work; he would stand between me and all harm. The President was there, too. I told him I could not commence just yet, and why, and he said, “Go bury your dead, and then care for others.” How kind he was!
President Johnson later endorsed the work and authorized the printing of whatever matter she required at the Government Printing Office. Her postage was largely provided by the franking privilege. Her work was a great success and the time came in the following October, when it seemed certain her department was to have official status with the payment of all its necessary expenses by the Government. On Wednesday, October 4, she wrote:
Of all my days, this, I suspect, has been my greatest, and I hope my best. About six P.M. General Butler came quickly into my room to tell me that my business had been presented to both the President and Secretary of War, and fully approved by both; that it was to be made a part of the Adjutant-General’s department with its own clerks and expenses, and that I was to be at the head of it, exclusively myself; that he made that a sine qua non, on the ground that it was proper for parents to bring up their own children; that he wished me to make out my own programme of what would be required; and on his return he would overlook it and I could enter at once upon my labor. Who ever heard of anything like this—who but General Butler? He left at 7.30 for home. I don’t know how to comport me.
On that same night she had a very different call, and the only one which the author has found referred to in all her diaries where any man approached her with an improper suggestion. Mingling as she did with men on the battle-field, living alone in a room that was open to constant calls from both men and women, she seems to have passed through the years with very little reason to think ill of the attitude of men toward a self-respecting and unprotected woman. That evening she had an unwelcome call, but she promptly turned her visitor out, went straight to two friends and told them what had been said to her, and wrote it down in her diary as a wholly exceptional incident, and with this brief comment, “Oh, what a wicked man!”
The plan to make her department an independent bureau seemed humanly certain to succeed. When, a few days later, General Butler left Washington without calling to see her, she was surprised, but thought it explained, a few days later, when the Boston “Journal” published an editorial saying that General Butler was to be given a seat in the Cabinet and to make his home in Washington.