Remembering and Honoring Clara Barton
"I believe I was born believing in the full right of women to all the privileges and positions which nature and justice accord her in common with other human beings."—Clara Barton, December 28, 1899
Clara Barton was born in North Oxford, MA, on Christmas Day 1821, the youngest in a Universalist family of five children. She is described as small and slender—just five feet tall—with dark brown eyes and silky brown hair. At age 16 she began to teach school in nearby Oxford. Later she attended a special course of study at a Clinton, NY, academy run by the Universalists, taught school in New Jersey, and founded another school before moving to Washington, DC, to live with relatives.
In Washington she worked as a copyist in the Patent Office. One of a handful of women employed by the federal government, she always demanded the same pay as the male employees. She was in Washington when the Civil War began in 1861. A 40-year-old unmarried woman in an era when many women died before reaching that age, she was about to begin the work that would make her the most famous woman in America.
Later that same year a Massachusetts regiment on its way south was attacked in Baltimore, suffering many wounded. Remembering the students she had taught and wondering about their fate, Clara Barton was there when the wounded arrived in the capital. Two Unitarian women, Dorothea Dix and Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, were working to create an organization of nurses, and Clara Barton joined their ranks. Instead of working in hospitals, she went directly onto the battlefields to attend badly wounded men. She learned early on the value of having supplies ready when needed, and thereafter devoted most of her energies to procuring and organizing the delivery of those supplies.
After the war she was appointed by President Lincoln to find solders still missing in action. She set up an office, hired assistants, and ran announcements in newspapers listing the names of the missing. She was able to bring news of their loved ones to thousands of worried wives and mothers of both Union and Confederate soldiers. She also took to the lecture circuit, reminding audiences that the war is unfinished as long as there are widows and children in need.
In 1869 she went to Europe and in Geneva encountered for the first time the Society of the Red Cross. In Bern during the Franco-Prussian War, which began in 1870, she realized the value of the Red Cross in having supplies and trained personnel ready to save lives and relieve suffering.
Returning to America, she organized the American Red Cross in 1877 and was appointed its president by President Garfield. She set about making the Red Cross useful in all kinds of natural disasters, as well as in war. She ran the organization out of her home in Glen Echo, MD. In 1892 she distributed food to Russian famine sufferers. In 1896, at age 75, she sailed with a cargo of supplies from Cuba to Turkey to help the victims of the Armenian Massacre. When asked by President McKinley, she took supplies to Cuba during the Spanish American War. She participated in relief efforts for victims of the Galveston Flood when she was 79 years old.
In 1904 she left the presidency of the Red Cross and went on to found the National First Aid Society, later a major Red Cross program. She lived the rest of her life at her home in Glen Echo, now a National Historic Site. She died there on Easter Sunday, April 12, 1912.
Last updated on Friday, April 18, 2008.
