It would be interesting to know just how Clara Barton received the news. Unfortunately, her diary affords us no information. She must have gone forth from the office of the Secretary of State with wings upon her feet. There still would be months before Congress could act, but she sent the glad news at once to President Moynier and received from him an official reply which she transmitted to the Secretary of State.
Geneva, June 13, 1881
To the Honorable the Secretary of State
James G. Blaine, Washington
Sir: Miss Clara Barton has just communicated to me the letter which she has had the honor to receive from you, bearing date of May 23, 1881, and I hasten to express to you how much satisfaction I have experienced from it. I do not doubt now, thanks to your favorable consideration and that of President Garfield, that the United States may soon be counted among the number of signers of the Geneva Convention, since you have been kind enough to allow me to hope that the proposition for it will be made to Congress by the Administration.
I thank you, as well as President Garfield, for having been willing to take into serious consideration the wish contained in my letter of August 19, 1877, assuredly a very natural wish, since it tended to unite your country with a work of charity and civilization for which it is one of the best qualified.
Since my letter of 1877 was written, several new governmental adhesions have been given to the Geneva Convention, and I think that these precedents will be much more encouraging to the United States from the fact that they have been given by America. It was under the influence of events of the recent war of the Pacific that Bolivia signed the treaty the 16th of October, 1879, Chili on the 15th of November, 1879, Argentine Republic on the 25th of November, 1879, and Peru on the 22d of April, 1881. This argument in favor of the adhesion of your country is the only one I can add to my request, and to the printed documents that Miss Barton has placed in your hands, to aid your judgment and that of Congress.
I now await with full confidence the final result of your sympathetic efforts, and I beg you to accept, sir, the assurance of my high consideration.
G. Moynier, President
There lies before me as I write a little pad of paper, about three by five inches in size, of which more than half the sheets have been used and torn off, and of the remainder all but the top six leaves are blank. Those six pages are filled with writing in pencil, and the writing is that of Clara Barton. It is just such a pad as she habitually kept by her hard and narrow cot, with a candle and a pencil at hand, so that when she woke in the night she might sit up and write the thoughts that came to her. She seldom retired before eleven o’clock, and was habitually up as early as five, but if she had waking hours between, and she often had them, she wrote down what was in her mind, put out the candle, and finished what was for her a good night’s rest by sunrise or before.
“In almost any part of the world except the United States,” the tablet begins, “the words Red Cross, and the emblem for which they stand, would be as familiar as are to us the words Internal Revenue or National Board of Health.”