The author was her relative, her friend of many years. He loved her and admired her; but he has felt his own praises weaken and pale and disappear in the presence of those who, working in intimate association with her through the years, proclaimed to him her virtues in terms that but for their sincerity and the knowledge of those who spoke would have seemed extravagant. The surest proof of her genuine goodness is the unfaltering devotion of those who knew her best, and for that reason loved her most.
Clara Barton was a woman of tact. She needed all the tact she had and more. In every field in which she labored, she was flooded with volunteer workers who wanted to help. Some of them were competent; more were not. I recently talked with my long-time friend, Father Field, sometime head of the Cowley Fathers, and learned that he was at the Johnstown flood, and saw much of Clara Barton. They rode together in a buggy over a road filled with trees and house-roofs and he feared she would be thrown out, but she told him to drive on; she had driven over worse roads, and with bullets besides. He said that her greatest difficulty as he saw it there was the number of people of good impulse but little discretion who rushed into Johnstown to help. Dr. Bellows said a blunt word about the women who made their journey to the battle-field, that most of them were in the way. This was unfortunately true of many of the well-meaning people who rushed to the assistance of Clara Barton in time of flood or fire. Assistance she must have, and must take what was offered. But the handling of this untrained force was a matter which called for the greatest tact as well as executive ability.
Not only so, but, when the work in a particular field was over, there were always those who had come as volunteer workers who insisted on bestowing themselves upon Clara Barton to make Red Cross work their life-work. Some of them were competent, and she was glad of them. But in the course of her years of experience she accumulated a series of misfit volunteer assistants, some of whom it was not easy afterward to get rid of.
She had little love of music. She did not sing or play any musical instrument. When traveling abroad, if forced to attend the opera, she saved the time from utter waste by writing a home letter while singers of world-wide repute performed and sang before her. Having a low and soft voice, she disliked the high notes of women’s voices. Good, melodious quartet music she heard with mild enjoyment, and if she can be said to have liked any music it was that of male voices. A chorus of men always pleased her. Some of the war songs always thrilled her, though more for the associations than the music. There was one song, popular during the later years of the Civil War, which she never heard often enough. It was the song of an old slave, who, dying years before the war, had believed that he would rise on the day when freedom came to his race. The author also remembers it, as it was taught to him almost before he could walk:
Nicodemus the slave was of African birth,
He was bought for a bagful of gold;
He was reckoned as part of the salt of the earth,
And he died years ago, very old.
’Twas the last word he said as we laid him away
In the stump of an old hollow tree,—
“Wake me up,” was his charge, “at the first break of day,
Wake me up for the great jubilee.”
Chorus:
Then run and tell Elijah to hurry up, Pomp,
To meet us at the gum-tree down in the swamp,
To wake Nicodemus to-day.
It was sung at the minstrel shows after the Emancipation Proclamation; but it was not as a minstrel show song that Clara Barton enjoyed it. There was a solemn dignity about the old slave’s faith that inspired her; and the authoritative tones of the words “Wake Nicodemus” thrilled her through and through.
Her lack of love of music reached its climax in her abhorrence of piano-drumming. For piano music she had some little love, but not enough to compensate for the annoyance for having a piano where it could be pounded by any visitor, skilled or unskilled. For many years she refused to have a piano in her house. At last she permitted one to be procured, and she gave it house-room, and sometimes heard it played with satisfaction. But when she was hard at work and wanted to concentrate her thought, she found no joy in the thoughtless hammering which an open piano seemed to invite. There was a time for all things, even for piano-playing, and in its proper time and place she could permit it and enjoy a part of it; but she did not want the menace of it from early morn till dewy eve and several hours thereafter. Her home was a very open place of entertainment, and she could not well inquire, before admitting a person who needed shelter, what were his or her habits and ability with respect to the torture of piano keys. So she would have preferred a home with only such music as was brought in where,and when it was wanted. But she accepted the piano as in some sort inevitable, and it did not annoy her as much as she had expected.
If Clara Barton did not care for music, she did dearly love poetry. From her earliest childhood she was reading it, committing it to memory, copying it, and writing original lines of her own. There lies before me, as I write, her first copy-book. The strokes and curves she learned to imitate are there, then the letters, lower case and capitals, then the first words, “thoughtful,” “Nation,” and “National,” and the sentence, chosen perhaps for its varied arrangement of letters with the simplest stem and curve, and partly because it was not well for a New England child at school to begin life with any illusion about its essential character, “Man was made to mourn.”
Who was the teacher who set her these copies we do not know, but she copied them well. The first poetic lines that she was given to transcribe were these, melodious but not precisely soothing to the juvenile mind: