The spring is opening well here. We have had a succession of charming days, followed now by a rain which is bringing up the green grass and swelling the buds almost to bursting, but we have no leaves yet. Some wild trees which precede their leaf life by their flowers are out in spring dress; a kind of woods willow, which bedecks itself in deep yellow, is very gaudy just now; the peach trees are pushing out their little soft gray pussy toes all over their red branches, and the horse-chestnuts, with their blunt ends tipped with swollen round buds, look as if they had doubled up their fists for fighting and said to all their more tapering, slender neighbors, Come on, we are ready! We are yet a month too early for the first roses.
Perhaps I told you that I removed to a snug brick city-built house for the winter. I have changed it this spring for a much older and country-like wood house, which has some trees, grass, and shade, a garden, and perhaps some flowers if the sunshine brings them up. I am, of course, all too unpretending and simple in my life to have a gardener, so shall lack the beauties which such assistance would develop. I was once a very tolerable gardener myself among flowers, but I have no longer strength to spend on the strong lap of Mother Earth, much as I love her and her dear little nurslings of cowslip and violets, but good sturdy old dame, she does a great deal without help, and knows very well how to dress herself without the aid of a fille de chambre.
But here I am on this fourth large page, and not even yet noted the contents of your letter. The photograph! I am sorry that you withheld it, I should have been very glad to receive it, if you would entrust it to me, and I still hope you will decide to do so. I should prize it, but I cannot say when I should be able to return the favor. I have no photographs either good or bad. I am never able to go to a gallery to sit for one. The last time was in Paris. All I ever had have been picked away long ago. I am the debtor of all my friends for pictures, some of them several times over, but they know how it is, and I hope excuse me. If I should ever again be in condition to sit, and can get a result that my friends will accept, I will take them by the hundred and relieve myself from embarrassment, but you should know that as a picture my photograph is not at all to be coveted. If natural, it must be uncomely. I was never what the world calls even “good-looking,” leaving out of the case all such terms as “handsome,” and “pretty.” My features were strong and square, cheek-bones high, mouth large, complexion dark; my best feature was perhaps a luxuriant growth of glossy dark hair shading to blackness, but that is comparatively thin now, and silver gray, all within the last three years. It changed from its original blackness to its present shade in the first six weeks of this present illness in 1874. I never cared for dress, and have no accomplishments, so you will find me plain and prosy both in representation and reality if ever you should chance to meet either. I beg you to believe this and to remember it to avoid any disappointment which might possibly occur. Not that I think it could change the friendship of a sensible person, but I like people, and especially my friends, to know me as I am, and not hold a false estimate of me.
Of poor Miss R. (Lorraine Raymond) I never hear a word. It is charitable to attribute her silence to want of scholarship, but I am inclined to disbelieve the verity of this. I believe her to be a very fair scholar, and an average (to say the least of it) correspondent; but she seldom writes, I know. She wrote me a few letters from Europe years ago, none of late years. She has a kind heart, and I am so so sorry for her.
I hope the trial of your brother will not result disastrously to him. Perhaps one cannot easily control a dislike, but he has certainly chosen a most powerful foe, and the odds seem unequal. I agree with you in more than word, when you declare the Imperial Family of Germany to be a respectable one; it is all of that, nothing in Europe stands before it, and those of it whom I have known personally are of the highest excellence and purest worth. I am sure the more intimately they are known, the better they must be beloved. The Grand Duchess of Baden is to me the loveliest woman on the earth; in this term I mean to combine all qualities of both mind and body; both nature and culture have made her a Princess. And I cannot see why she is not as good a Republican as if she had been born a peasant, or a Suisse, or American citizen; in no position would she knowingly do a wrong or commit an act of tyranny to the lowest human being whether subject or not. “Tired of Republics,” you say. Perhaps if you study your own meaning closely you will find that you are rather tired of politics than Republics. And, my esteemed and valued friend, let me in all childlike simplicity suggest what does not perhaps clearly appear to you, viz., that the standpoint one occupies, the surroundings one has, the outlook one takes, have a great deal to do in forming the opinion and swaying the judgment. I am sorry that you must perforce see our country, its political, moral, and social sides, through the slum, and mire, and haze of a lens like New York City. Out on our millions of acres of hills, valleys, and plains is a better, purer, nobler population, the force of whose earnestness and honesty will save our Nation long ages after the pollution of its cities would have turned it into a Sodom and Gomorrah. There is a true, steady, honest pulse beating in the veins of the yeomanry of this land that never throbbed a second in a city like New York, and never will; but when the trial comes, it is the pulse that will tell. Tweed and his “ring” didn’t go to the farmers sweating in their hay-fields with their bargains. They went to the politicians, and burrowed in the cities and made their nests like the bats and owls, under the eaves of churches and in halls and steeples; they can plan, and connive, and twiddle and fiddle with the lines a long time while the farmers work in their fields, but when real danger appears, when the load topples and is likely to upset, stouter hearts than theirs will come to the front, stronger hands than theirs will take the reins, and bring out the load in safety. We are not so near destruction as it would seem from your standpoint, and because a few poor, vain, foolish women, with little money and less brains and shriveled hearts, have betaken themselves to the boarding-houses of New York City, and are living false, empty, silly, idle lives for show, it does not make it that this is the character or life of all the women of America, nor that well-regulated homelife is not the rule of the country, for it is; and I, who am a part of it, and have lived it, and over and among it, all my lifetime, know it well. Shall we judge France and its whole people by the courtesans of Paris, or Germany by Berlin? Oh! my friend and brother, do, I beseech of you, get another standpoint, and a wider outlook and a clearer, purer atmosphere than New York City with its floodtide of immigration before you judge, in final judgment, the whole population, male and female, of this great country.
I thank you very much for the hope expressed that we may meet in Paris in ’78, but there is small prospect of this. I shall scarcely cross the ocean again. I have much to do to save my strength with no unnecessary waste, but the hope expressed that we may meet before that time is something nearer home, and more within the range of possibilities. I should never dare by any means to invite you to visit me, and I never go to your part of the country, so the prospect of our meeting is small. Perhaps I ought to explain the above remark, having very incautiously made it, and I will. I am a so much more simple person in my mode of life than you have probably ever seen (except those whom poverty compelled to simplicity) that you would not feel happy or homelike in my house. I am simple in my tastes, and plain, avoiding luxuries from choice and principle, both about my house and in its dress, and my table and its furnishings. My living is simple as a hermit’s, heavy meats, and wines, teas, and coffees are unknown at my table, my rooms plain. I have only my housekeeper—no retinue of servants at all, no show, no ornaments, no excuses; but with all this there is great peace and quiet, no worry, no fret, no fears of what the world will think or say, no pressure in any direction, abundant supplies for all necessities, no scandal either spoken or listened to, no backbiting, and no “skeleton in the closet,” not even the shadow of one. Now, all this simplicity and plainness, and the absence of excitement and luxurious surroundings and living, must be so different from all that you are accustomed to that you could not be happy or even comfortable among it, so I should never dare invite you to visit me, even if you were journeying near me, and so, when you see that I do not, you will understand the true reason and assign the right motive on my part and not feel piqued or slighted, or that I am cold, or eccentric, or reserved, or in any way unaccountable, or any other thing, but just what I am, a plain woman with enough of common sense to perceive that our modes of life are so different that you could not enjoy visiting me, and fearless candor enough to tell you so.
Your sincere friend
Clara Barton
How Clara Barton was regarded at Dansville is shown in many ways, as in the following cutting from the Dansville “Advertiser” of June 7, 1877, giving account of an exercise on the previous Memorial Day:
Ovation to Miss Clara Barton