Clara Barton, a mover in American history
Kathleen Snyder, The American Red Cross
Culpeper Star Exponent
Monday, December 26, 2005
Clara Barton, born on Christmas Day in 1821, is still honored as one of the great women in the history of America. Education, prison reform and women’s suffrage are only a few of her fields of interest and involvement. Miss Barton had a talent for words. She wrote persuasively and was a skilled speaker. She was also a true pioneer. In an era when most teachers were men, she began teaching. Although women who performed clerical duties were required to carry their work home, Clara Barton won the right to have a desk job in an office of the federal government in Washington, DC. And at the outbreak of the Civil War, when she was nearly 40 years old, she began her greatest pioneering.
In 1861 Miss Barton was working in Washington when the first federal troops poured into the city. Some were wounded, most were hungry, and many had no bedding or clothing other than what they wore on their backs. She recognized the needs of people in distress and quickly envisioned ways in which she and other volunteers could provide help. That vision dominated the rest of her long life, causing her to set a personal example of volunteer service that is unparalleled.
Clara saw the need for immediate personal service to the men in uniform and joined with other women who gave service on behalf of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. She collected necessary articles, appealed for more supplies and learned how to store and distribute them. She also gave attention to personal services that were so important in keeping up the soldiers’ spirits: she read to the men, wrote letters for them, listened to their personal problems and prayed with them.
By constantly badgering leaders in the government and the army, Clara finally received permission to take volunteer services to the battlegrounds and field hospitals. After the Battle of Cedar Mountain, she showed up at a field hospital at midnight with a four-mule-team load of supplies. In his report the surgeon wrote, "I thought that night if heaven ever sent out a holy angel, she must be the one, her assistance was so timely." Afterward she became known as "the Angel of the Battlefield"-personally nursing, comforting and even cooking for the wounded.
Delivering a supply wagon filled with food, medical dressings and lanterns to medical staff near Sharpsburg, Miss Barton ordered her driver to "follow the cannon". At Fredericksburg, as she crossed the Rappahannock on a bridge under artillery fire to help a surgeon, a bursting shell tore her clothing. Yet, on reaching the field hospital, she proceeded to give comfort to the wounded and dying through that night and the next day. Clara wrote that she felt obligated to help the wounded until medical aid and supplies could reach them. "I could run the risk; it made no difference to anyone if I were shot or taken prisoner."
Her interest in her "soldier boys" as individuals, and the many services she performed for them during the long years of war, naturally created a fund of information about the men and their various regiments. Again seeing a need, she set out to do something about it: toward the end of the war she was writing responses to families who had inquired about men reported as missing. President Lincoln published the following announcement: "To the Friends of Missing Persons: Miss Clara Barton has kindly offered to search for the missing prisoners of war. Please address her at Annapolis, giving her the name, regiment, and company of any missing prisoner."
The service thus set in motion is now one of the operations of today’s International Red Cross. As a climax to her Civil War activity, Miss Barton proposed that a national cemetery be created around the graves of men who died in Andersonville Prison and that graves be marked where names were known. She also proposed that the unknown be memorialized, anticipating the honor now symbolized by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. After Clara helped raise the flag over the Andersonville grounds at their 1865 dedication, she wrote, "I ought to be satisfied. I believe I am." However, future events would show that she would never be satisfied except by responding again and again to the call of human need. In the 1880s she appealed to veterans to support women’s rights, asking them to stand by her as she had stood by them. Miss Barton sailed for Europe in 1869 in search of rest. But once there she found a wider field for service: friends in Geneva, Switzerland, introduced her to the Red Cross idea. And she read the famous book "A Memory of Solferino" written by Henri Dunant, founder of the Red Cross movement. That movement called for international agreements for the protection of the sick and wounded during wartime without respect to nationality and for the formation of voluntary national societies to give aid on a neutral basis. The first treaty embodying Monsieur Dunant’s idea-called variously the Geneva Treaty, the Red Cross Treaty, and the Geneva Convention-had been drawn up in Geneva in 1864. Later, Miss Barton would fight hard and successfully for the signing of the treaty by the United States.
But with the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 Clara Barton heard a more immediate call to action. Though she wasn’t yet allied with the Red Cross, she knew the misery caused by war and went to the war zone with volunteers of the International Red Cross. She used a red ribbon she was wearing and made a cross to pin on her coat to protect herself with the internationally accepted symbol of neutrality. Clara helped distribute relief supplies to the conquered city of Strasbourg and elsewhere in France. She also opened workrooms where the destitute inhabitants of the city could help themselves by making new clothes, presaging the provision of great quantities of clothes and comfort articles by the American Red Cross in later years.
Miss Barton kept in touch with Red Cross officials in Switzerland after her return to the United States, and they felt she was a natural leader for carrying the Red Cross movement to this country. The International Committee also felt she was the right person to influence the American government to sign the Geneva Treaty. It took 5 years of determined lobbying on her part, but her efforts paid off-with President Arthur’s signature and the Senate’s ratification of the treaty in 1882.
At the same time, Miss Barton and a group of supporters were forming the American Association of the Red Cross. The Red Cross flag flew officially for the first time in this country in 1881 when Clara was appealing for funds and clothing in Dansville, New York, to aid victims of forest fires. In 1884 she chartered steamers to take supplies down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to help flooded families. In 1889 she helped relieve Johnstown, Pennsylvania residents, after their great flood. In 1892, in her seventies, she directed disaster relief operations in Turkey and Armenia.
On resigning as president of the organization in 1904, Clara Barton left a foundation of outstanding service to humanity for others to build on.
