CHAPTER XV

CLARA BARTON

1821-1912

Clarissa Harlowe Barton was born on December twenty-fifth, in an old farmhouse in Worcester County, Massachusetts. Her grandfather had fought through the Revolution, her father in Mad Anthony Wayne’s campaigns against the Indians. Clara listened to many a stirring story of the dangers they had met. As they fought their battles over again, she learned her country’s history and loved it passionately.

The older Barton children were her teachers and very rapidly indeed she learned. For she went to school at three, able to spell words of three syllables, but so shy she could not answer questions. Her athletic brother David, whom she admired greatly, taught her to ride.

“Learning to ride is just learning a horse!” said he.

“How can I learn a horse?” asked the little sister.

“Just feel the horse a part of yourself, the big half for the time being. Here, hold fast by the mane,” and David lifted her up to a colt’s back, sprang on another himself and away they galloped down the pasture--a mad ride which they repeated often, till she learned to stick on. In after years when she rode strange horses in a trooper’s saddle, for all-night gallops to safety, she was grateful to David for those wild rides among the colts.

Strong in body, alert in mind, Clara Barton grew up, never free from shyness unless she was busily at work. “The only real fun is doing things,” she would say. She helped milk and churn, she learned to drive a nail straight, to deal with a situation efficiently, with quick decision.

When she was eleven David was seriously injured by a fall from the roof of a new barn, and was for two years an invalid. At once Clara took charge, her love and sympathy expressed in untiring service. In a moment she was changed from a lively child, fond of outdoor sports, to a nurse calm and cheerful, full of resources, no matter how exacting the doctors’ orders were, no matter how much David was suffering. The sickroom was tidy and quiet. Clara was clear-headed, equal to every emergency, always at her post, nothing too hard for her to do well and promptly, if it would make her brother more comfortable. For those two years she had not even one half-holiday, so her apprenticeship was thoroughly served.

“That child’s a born nurse,” the neighbors would say. And the doctors, agreeing, praised her tenderness and patience. Years later thousands of men echoed David’s words when he spoke of her loving care.

But these two years made her more sensitive and self-conscious. Her shyness and unhappiness made her a real problem to her mother.

“Give her some responsibility,” advised a wise family friend, “give her a school to teach. For others she will be fearless.”

Far ahead of girls of her age in her studies, at fifteen Clara Barton put up her hair and lengthened her skirts and went to face her forty pupils. “It was one of the most awful moments of my life,” she described it long afterward. “I could not find my voice, my hand trembled so I was afraid to turn the page. But the end of that first day proved I could do it.”

Her pluck and strength won the respect of the big rough boys, who tried her out on the playground and found she was as sturdy as they. That school was a great success, and for sixteen years she taught, winter and summer.

In Bordentown, New Jersey, no school was possible, she heard, because of the lawless children who ran wild on the streets. The town officials were convinced it was hopeless, no use to make the experiment. Here was something to be done, it challenged her!

“Give me three months, and I’ll teach for nothing,” she proposed, her eyes flashing with determination.

In a tumbledown old building she began with six gamins, each of whom at the end of the day became an enthusiastic advertisement for the new teacher. At the close of the school year she had an assistant, six hundred children on the roll, and a fine new building was erected, the first public school in the state. For Clara Barton had a gift for teaching, plus a pioneer zeal.

When her voice gave out she went to Washington for a rest and secured a position in the patent office. So she was at the capital when the conflict long threatening between North and South developed into civil war. Sumter was fired on. The time for sacrifice had come.

In response to Lincoln’s call for volunteers Massachusetts sent men immediately, and on the historic nineteenth of April one regiment was attacked in the streets of Baltimore by a furious mob. With a good many wounded their train finally reached Washington and was met by a number of sympathetic women, Clara Barton among them. In the group of injured soldiers she recognized some of her old pupils and friends. At the infirmary she helped dress their wounds. Nothing was ready for such an emergency. Handkerchiefs gave out. Women rushed to their homes and tore up sheets for bandages. This was Clara Barton’s first experience in caring for wounded soldiers.

She wanted them to have the necessities, and all the comforts possible. So she put an advertisement in a Worcester paper, asking for supplies and money for the wounded men of the sixth regiment, and stating that she would receive and give out whatever was sent. Overwhelming was the response of Massachusetts. The food and clothing filled her apartment to overflowing and she had to rent space in a warehouse.

This work made a new person of the shy Clara Barton who had been a bundle of fears. This was no time to be self-conscious. Here was a great need, and she knew that she had the ability to meet it.

South of Washington battles were going on. Transports left each day with provisions for the army of the Potomac, returning with a load of wounded soldiers. Clara Barton went to the docks to meet them. She moved about, bandaging here, giving medicine there, feeding those weak from the long fighting and lack of nourishment, writing letters home, sick at heart when she saw men who had lain on the damp ground for hours, whose fever had set in, for whom her restoratives and dressings and tender care were too late.

If only wounds could be attended to as soon as the soldiers fell in battle, she knew that hundreds of deaths could be prevented. She must go to the front, to the very firing line, though it was against all tradition, against all army regulations, against public sentiment. For many weeks she met only rebuffs and refusals, always the same reply: “No, the battle-field is no place for a woman. It is full of danger!”

True--but how great was the need of the men at the front, how great the need of each soldier’s life for the nation! Help must be brought to them when they fell. She laid her plan before her father who said, “If you believe that it is your duty, you must go to the front. You need not fear harm. Every true soldier will respect and bless you.”

Without a doubt then she determined to persist until she received permission. At last she was able to put her request to Assistant-Quartermaster General Rucker and asked him for a pass to the battle front.

“I have the stores, give me a way to reach the men.”

“But you must think of the dangers this work will bring you. At any time you may be under the fire of the enemy’s guns.”

“But,” was her answer, “I am the daughter of a soldier, I am not afraid of the battle-field.” She described to him the condition of many of the men when they reached Washington and added earnestly, “I must go to the front, to care for them quickly.”

The passport was given her and through the weary years of the war she stayed at her post--giving medicine to the sick, stimulants to the wounded and dying, nourishing food to men faint from loss of blood. Working under no society or leader she was free to come and go. On sixteen battle-fields, during the hot, muggy summer days of the long siege of Charleston, all through the Wilderness campaign, in the Richmond hospitals, there was no limit to her service. And from her first day on the firing line she had the confidence of the officers and their help and encouragement. Wherever there were wounded soldiers who had been under her care, Clara Barton’s name was spoken with affection and with tears.

In as far as was possible, word of coming engagements was sent her in advance, that she might be ready with her supplies. At Antietam while shot was whizzing thick around the group of workers, she ordered her wagons driven to an old farmhouse just back of the lines. Between the tall rows of corn, into the barnyard, the worst cases were carried. For lack of medical supplies the surgeons were using bandages of cornhusks.

Her supplies quickly unloaded, Clara Barton hurried out to revive the wounded, giving them bread soaked in wine. The store of bread ran out, she had left only three cases of wine. “Open them,” she commanded, “give us that, and God help us all!” for faster and faster soldiers were coming in. She watched the men open the cases. What was that around the bottles? Cornmeal! She looked at it closely; yes, finely ground and sifted. It could not have been worth more if it had been gold dust. In the farmhouse they found kettles. She mixed the cornmeal with water and soon was making great quantities of gruel. All night long they carried this hot food up and down the rows of wounded soldiers.

On one of these trips, in the twilight, she met a surgeon tired and disheartened. He had only one short candle left, and if men’s lives were to be saved, the doctors must work all night. “Heartless neglect and carelessness,” he stormed. But Miss Barton had four boxes of candles in her stores, ready for just such an emergency.

Near that battle-field she remained until all her supplies were gone. “If we had had more wagons,” she reported to General Rucker, “there would have been enough for all the cases at Antietam.”

“You shall have enough the next time,” he responded. And the government, recognizing the value of her service, gave her ten wagons and sixty mules and drivers.

Her work succeeded because she had initiative and practical judgment and rare executive ability and the power of managing men. When her drivers were rebellious and sulky, showing little respect for orders that put them under a woman, she controlled them just as she had the rough boys in her school. Once she prepared a hot dinner and asked them to share it. After she had cleared away the dishes and was sitting alone by the fire, awkward and self-conscious they came up to her.

“Come and get warm,” she welcomed them.

“No’m, we didn’t come for that,” said the leader. “We come to tell you we’re ashamed. Truth is, lady, we didn’t want to come. We knew there was fightin’ ahead, an’ we ain’t never seen a train with a woman in charge. Now we’ve been mean and contrary all day long, and here you’ve treated us like we was the general and his staff, and it’s the best meal we’ve had in two years and we shan’t trouble you again.”

The next morning they brought her a steaming hot breakfast and for six months remained with her, through battles and camps and marches, through frost and snow and heat, a devoted corps of assistants, always ready for her orders. They helped her nurse the sick and dress the wounded and soothe the dying, and day by day they themselves grew gentler and kinder and more tender.

Once Clara Barton worked for five days and nights with three hours of sleep. Once she had a narrow escape from capture. Often in danger it seemed as though she had a special protection that she might save the lives of others. Stooping to give a wounded soldier a drink of water, a bullet whizzed between them, tearing a hole in her sleeve and ending the boy’s life.

She gave her help to men who had fought on either side. They were suffering, they needed her, that was enough. No man is your enemy when he is wounded. She leaned over a dying officer in a hospital; a Confederate looked up into her kind face and whispered:

“You have been so very good to me. Do not cross the river, our men are leading you into an ambush. You must save yourself.”

But his warning was unheeded when later that day the hero-surgeon who was opening an emergency dressing-station across the river, asked her help. She went over to Fredericksburg where every stone wall was a blazing line of battle. A regiment came marching down the street. She stepped aside. Thinking she must be a terrified southerner, left behind in their hurried flight, the general leaned from his saddle to ask:

“You’re alone and in great danger, madam. Do you want protection?”

“Thank you, but I think”--Clara Barton looked up at the ranks of soldiers marching past--“I think, sir, I’m the best protected woman in the United States!”

“That’s so, that’s so,” cried out the men and gave her a great cheer that was taken up by line after line till it sounded like the cheering after a victory.

“I believe you’re right, madam,” said the general, bowing low, and galloped away.

Over the battle-field a sharp wind was blowing. The suffering men lay shivering and half frozen in the bitter cold. Some were found famished under the snow. Clara Barton had all the wounded brought to one place and great fires built up. But that was not heat enough to warm them. What to do? She discovered an old chimney not far away. “Tear it down,” she ordered, “heat the bricks and place them around the men.” Soon she had kettles of coffee and gruel steaming over the fires, and many a life she saved at Fredericksburg.

As the war drew to an end President Lincoln received hundreds and hundreds of letters from anxious parents asking for news of their boys. The list of missing totaled sixty thousand. In despair the president sent for Miss Barton, thinking she had more information than any one else, and asked her to take up the task. A four years’ task it proved to be. She copied infirmary and burial lists. She studied records of prisons and hospitals. At Andersonville she laid out the national cemetery and identified nearly thirteen thousand graves. She succeeded in tracing and sending definite word of thirty thousand men. From Maine to Virginia the soldiers knew her. Through the whole country her name became a household word.

Her strong will had held her body to its work during the long war and for this tracing service afterward. Then the doctors insisted she must rest and sent her to Switzerland for change of scene. After a month when she was beginning to feel some improvement, she had callers one day representing the International Red Cross Society.

“What is that?” asked Clara Barton.

And they explained--how a Swiss, visiting the battle-field of Solferino and seeing thousands of French and Austrians wounded, inadequately cared for, had planned a society for the relief of soldiers. Its badge, a red cross on a white ground, would give its workers protection from both armies, and they would help all persons without regard to their race or religion or uniform--exactly the principle on which she had been working, and to-day the very heart of the Red Cross plan. Already, they said, the society was formed and twenty-two nations had joined it. But the United States, though invited twice, had done nothing. They asked her help.

Three days afterward the Franco-Prussian War began and soon Clara Barton was again at the front. With the German army she entered Strasburg after the siege. On every hand were sick and wounded soldiers, women and children homeless and ragged and starving. Relief work started, she went to Paris on the outbreak of the revolution there. And this work made her enthusiastic about the Red Cross. For at once she felt the difference--she saw the new society accomplish in four months, with system and trained workers, what our country had failed to do in four years. What a contrast--supplies in plenty, wounds dressed at once, cleanliness, comfort, wherever the white flag with the red cross was flying, instead of mistakes, delays, needless suffering, lives sacrificed. She said to herself, “If I live to return to America, I will try to make them understand what the Red Cross and the Geneva Treaty mean.”

She succeeded, though it was a task of years. She found officials indifferent, hard to convince, clinging to the tradition and prejudice that forbade any alliance with foreign countries, and saying, “Why make plans for another war? We’ll never have it!”

But in March, 1882, the treaty was signed. Clara Barton became the first president of the American Red Cross Society, an office she held for twenty-two years. It was her suggestion that they be prepared to meet any emergency and give relief in time of peace as well as war. It was her influence that carried this American amendment in the International Red Cross Congress.

Many have been the calamities where the Red Cross has given aid--two wars, floods in the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, the Texas famine, the Charleston earthquake, the disaster at San Francisco, Florida’s yellow fever, the Johnstown flood, forest fires--these are a few of the urgent calls in our own land; and abroad the sufferers in the Russian and Chinese famines, in Armenia and South Africa, bear witness to her care.

Eighty years old, she went herself to Galveston. At seventy-seven McKinley sent her to carry relief to the starving Cubans. And during the Spanish War she nursed American and Cuban and Spanish soldiers, once in a storm repeating her Antietam experience with hot gruel!

Vast sums of money, poured out by the generous American people, were placed at her disposal for relief to the suffering and destitute. A sufficient sum in ready cash she always kept on hand, in case a telegram came when the banks were closed; for there must be no delay in the Red Cross’s starting on its mission of mercy.

The world over Clara Barton was known and loved and honored. The German emperor gave her the order of the iron cross, which at that time had been awarded only for heroism on the battle-field. Queen Victoria herself pinned an English decoration on her dress. The Duke of Baden, Serbia, the Prince of Jerusalem all gave her honors; and her home was decorated with the flags of all the nations.

Dying at ninety, Clara Barton, retiring and bashful, had given fifty years of service to suffering humanity, working always on the firing line. David’s born nurse became head nurse to all the nation. The angel of the battle-field, as the soldiers loved to call her, became the country’s angel of mercy.

And in the Red Cross Society, building perhaps better than she knew, Clara Barton gave the opportunity for every American citizen, man or woman or little child, to share in her work of love and mercy.

EPILOGUE

Thus ends the story of these women who helped to make the history of our country. It is a record of courage and of service, of splendid achievement. And these fifteen women by no means tell the whole story. The contribution of each could be duplicated, in less degree, many times. They are but typical of countless women who have been true American patriots.

The exploring and settling of our country lasted for three centuries, the building of the nation is not yet finished. There is work for the women of to-day, if they would be worthy inheritors of these fifteen, to shape the present true, for the generations to come after. Making history offers a wide range of service, for heroism wears many forms, as these brief stories show. But it is of the greatest importance to the nation that its ideals of heroism shall be high and true.

Every woman can be a soldier faithful, brave and loyal. We of to-day and of to-morrow must stand shoulder to shoulder with the inspired women of the past, to express the best in womanhood, to work for the highest ideals.

BIBLIOGRAPHY