People call me a nurse—I scarcely know why. There were no nurses then… My work…chiefly has been to get timely supplies to those needing. It has taught me the value of things.
—Clara Barton (1821-1912), interview in the New York Sun
Clara Barton, the Universalist who founded the American Red Cross in 1881, earned the name “Angel of the Battlefield” for her determined first aid to soldiers wounded in the U.S. Civil War. To a bleeding soldier, perhaps half-conscious or delirious with pain and fear, Barton’s female face and healing hands may have seemed angelic. Yet the genius and the long-term impact of Barton’s Civil War work lay as much in her resourcefulness as in her kind touch.
In her girlhood in rural Massachusetts, Barton devoted a stretch of many months to the care of her brother, David, recovering from a serious fall. As a young woman, the theme of practical service carried her into work as a teacher, and then as a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. When a group of Massachusetts soldiers arrived in the nation’s capital after an ambush in Baltimore, Barton met the men at the train station and brought the seriously hurt home to nurse. From local merchants, she solicited the supplies and food the men needed.
As more troops arrived in the capital, Barton’s role expanded. She reached out to soldiers’ families and communities in New York, New Jersey, and other Northern states for more supplies. With the first Battle of Manassas, wounded men streamed into the city. Barton stepped up her solicitations. She wrote to the Worcester (Massachusetts) Ladies’ Relief Committee, advising exactly what the women could send.
On the battlefields, the need for food and medical supplies was intensely desperate. The U.S. Sanitary Commission, charged with the logistics of supply to the Civil War front, had neither the supplies nor the capacity to meet the need. Barton petitioned the War Department to bring six wagons full of supplies into the aftermath of battle at Culpeper, Virginia. Working for two days and nights without food or sleep, Barton tended to wounded Confederate prisoners. To Manassas, Antietam, and Fredericksburg, Barton brought supplies and the skills to put them to use.
Barton acted on her Universalist belief in every person’s equal value. She left a teaching job in New Jersey after the school she had made a success hired a male principal at almost twice her salary. Later, when she worked at the U.S. Patent Office, she lauded the fairness of her pay, equal to that of male colleagues. After the Civil War, she supported both woman suffrage and Negro suffrage, and gave lectures at the urging of Susan B. Anthony. To an audience of veterans, she would say, “Soldiers! I have worked for you and I ask you, now, one and all, that you consider the wants of my people … God only knows women were your friends in time of peril and you should be [ours] now.”
From 1870 on, Barton focused on the Red Cross movement. Inspired by a European effort, she envisioned an agency to do on a larger scale what she, herself, had done during the Civil War: mobilize first aid care and supplies to the front lines, be they battlefields, epidemics, or human-made disasters. Her persistence ultimately drove the U.S. Congress to charter the American Red Cross. Through the Red Cross, Barton’s zealous resourcefulness and gift for logistics helped victims of the Johnstown flood, the Sea Island and Galveston hurricanes, a typhoid outbreak in Butte, Pennsylvania, and yellow fever in Jacksonville, Florida.
Based on the article Clara Barton by Joan Goodwin in the Dictionary of UU Biography.
Additional Activities
Download a Coloring Sheet “Angel of the Battlefield, Clara Barton” (PDF)
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Originally published in the “Families Weave a Tapestry of Faith” insert in the The UUWorld.