But General Butler’s plans failed. He fell into disfavor, and all that he had recommended and was still pending became anathema to the War Department. The bureau was not created, and Clara Barton’s official appointment did not come.
During all this time she had been supporting her work of correspondence out of her own pocket. The time came when she invested in it the very last dollar of her quick assets. Her old friend Colonel De Witt, through whom she had obtained her first Government appointment, had invested her Oxford money. At her request he sent her the last of it, a check for $228. She wrote in her diary: “This is the last of my invested money, but it is not the first time in my life that I have gone to the bottom of my bag. I guess I shall die a pauper, but I haven’t been either stingy or lazy, and if I starve I shall not be alone; others have. Went to Mechanics’ Bank and got my check cashed.”
She certainly had not been lazy, and she never was stingy with any one but herself. Keeping her own expenses at the minimum and living so frugally that she was sometimes thought parsimonious, she saw her last dollar of invested money disappear, and recorded a grim little joke about her poverty and the possibility of starvation. But she shed no tears. In the few times when she broke down and wept, the occasion was not her own privation or personal disappointment, but the failure of some plan through which she sought to be of service to others.
This is a rather long retrospect, but it explains why Clara Barton, when she wanted to publish a book, contemplated the cost of it as an item beyond her personal means. She could have published the book at her own expense had it not been for the money she had spent for others.
Congress did not permit her to lose the money which she had expended. In all her diary and correspondence no expression of fear has been found as to her own remuneration. She thought it altogether likely she could get her money back, but there is no hint that she would have mourned, much less regretted what she had done, if she had never seen her money again.
Sad days came for Clara Barton when she found that General Butler was worse than powerless to aid her work. Heartily desirous of assisting her as he was, his name was enough to kill any measure which he sponsored. When Senator Wilson came to see her, just before Christmas, and told her that the plan was hopeless, she was already prepared for it. He suspected that she was nearly out of money, and tried to make her a Christmas gift of twenty dollars, but she declined. She wakened, on these mornings, “with the deepest feeling of depression and despair that I remember to have known.” But this feeling gave place to another. Waking in the night and thinking clearly, she was able to outline the programme of the next day’s task so distinctly and unerringly that she began to wonder whether the spirit of her noble brother Stephen was not guiding her. She did not think she was a Spiritualist, but it seemed to her that some influence which he was bringing to her from her mother helped to shape her days aright. It was such a night’s meditation that made plain to her that Dorence Atwater, released but not pardoned, must get his list published immediately, and that he must do it without a cent of compensation so that no one should ever be able to say that he had stolen the list in order to profit by it. She found that she did not need many hours’ sleep. If she could rest with an untroubled mind, she could waken and think clearly.
Gradually, her plan to publish a book changed. Instead she would write a lecture. She went to hear different women speakers, and was gratified whenever she found a woman who could speak in public effectively. A woman preacher came to Washington, and she listened to her. Even in the pulpit a woman could speak acceptably. When she traveled on the train, she was surprised and gratified to find how many people knew her, and she came to believe that the lecture platform offered her a better opportunity than the book.
There was one other consideration,—a book would cost money for its publication and the getting of it back was a matter of uncertainty. But the lecture platform promised to be immediately remunerative.
She conferred with John B. Gough. She read to him a lecture which she prepared. Said he, “I never heard anything more touching, more thrilling, in my life.” He encouraged her to proceed.
Thus encouraged, Clara Barton laid out her itinerary, and prepared for three hundred nights upon the platform. Her rates were one hundred dollars per night, excepting where she spoke under the auspices of the Grand Army Post, when her charge was seventy-five.