At that time Clara Barton took a brief vacation and went to Oxford where she prepared a new wardrobe, including a white satin dress. To her niece Mamie she confided that an occasion of unusual significance was in prospect, and that more would be known of it later.
Just at this time this distinguished statesman died. His death was a great shock to Clara Barton. She made no public lamentation; she never hinted even to those who were nearest to her that her grief was other than that which she might properly feel for an honored friend of many years. Her nieces believed that his death prevented their marriage. Her nephew, Stephen, says:
Their friendship was long and intimate, and it would not have been strange if they had cared for each other. In many respects their lives would have been well adapted to each other. But if their regard for each other ever expressed itself in terms of love, or approached the prospect of marriage, I do not know it. It may have seemed to either or both of them a pleasant possibility, but they were mature people, each with a great work to do; and if his death cut short what was growing from friendship into love, I do not know it. Such a feeling either one of them might very worthily have held toward the other. I know that she held him as a dear and trusted and honored friend, and he esteemed her likewise.
If Clara Barton loved this able and good man, she bore her disappointment as she was accustomed to bear her disappointments, in self-restrained and dignified silence. Her silence shall remain unbroken. If they loved, it was a love worthy of them both; if they were good friends and only good friends, it was a friendship honorable to both.
So far as the author has been able to learn from those who were closest to Clara Barton during her lifetime, and so far as it is disclosed by her diary and letters, this is all there is to be known concerning the love affairs of Clara Barton.
There were times when Clara Barton felt keenly her isolation. But, in 1911, she recorded in her diary some of the domestic trials of some of her friends, and added, “After all, Aloneness is not the worst thing in the world.”
While extremely modest, Clara Barton was far from being a prude. She was never terrified by appeals to respectability, nor could she be frightened by any warning concerning men or women whom gossip condemned.
In 1884, when she was on her steamboat, Joseph V. Throop, assisting in the Ohio River floods, the boat one night tied up at a landing, and a goodly number of people came on board. Among the rest were two young women. One of the prominent ladies of the town found opportunity to whisper to her that these were young women whose social standing was not above question. “Then they will need help all the more,” she said; and she gave those two girls an hour of her evening. Such warnings she often received, and, far from accepting them as her basis of discrimination, she invariably reacted in the other direction.
She never undertook any work without first carefully thinking it through in an effort to discover just where it was to end and how it was to be provided for. She had no sympathy with people who start good movements for other people to support when their well-meant but poorly reckoned endeavor fails. “They get hold of a log they can’t lift,” she said, “and they make a great call for some one to come and lift it for them.” That was never the way in which she did things. She thought them through in advance.
Clara Barton worked slowly. While she formed her decisions promptly in emergencies, she formulated them carefully and with painful precision. It was not by doing things easily she accomplished so much, but by rising early and working late and keeping constantly at the thing she wanted to do. She attempted to use stenographic assistance, but with only moderate success. She had to work out her letters and addresses in her own way. A certain kind of routine work her secretaries did for her, to her great relief, but her real work she had to do herself.