Originally aired on May 16, 1997 - In part 142 of our Civil War series, Virginia Tech history professor James Robertson profiles the career of Clara Barton, founder of the American Red Cross.
#142 – Angel of the Battlefield
She was born on Christmas Day, 1821, in Oxford, Massachusetts. Much younger than her four brothers and sisters, she grew up along, strong-willed, and often uncooperative. At the age of fifteen, she began teaching school. That ended in anger 18 years later when she resigned after a principal’s position she thought she should have went instead to a man. In 1854, the dark-haired, dark-eyed lady went to work for the Patent Office in Washington.
No one at that time saw anything extraordinary about this spinster, whose name was Clara Barton. Then civil war came.
Miss Barton, immediately sensed a need. She became a one-woman soldiers’ aid society. She gathered medicines and supplies; she turned up at battle sites and field hospitals not only to comfort the wounded but also to goad into action army surgeons she considered careless or indifferent to their duties.
While Barton’s friendship with influential congressmen helped bring political pressure to bear for reforms in army medicine, she declined offers of authoritative positions. This tireless woman purchased her own supplies and nursed in the field without affiliating herself with any organization. She worked alone because she was incapable of functioning as a member of a team.
One instance of her service on the battlefield came after the 1862 fighting at Manassas, Virginia. Miss Barton wrote this of injured soldiers arriving at a railhead: “The men were brought down from the field and laid on the ground beside the tracks and so back up the hill ‘till they covered acres”. Volunteer nurses opened hay bales and spread the straw on the ground for bedding. “By midnight”, she noted, “there must have been three thousand helpless men lying in that hay…All night we made compresses and slings – and bound up and wet wounds, when we could get water, fed what we could, travelled miles in that dark over those poor helpless wretches, in terror lest some one’s candle fall into the hay and consume them all.”
In 1864 the plucky little individualist from Massachusetts hesitatingly accepted the post of superintendent of nurses for the Army of the James. She continued as a self-appointed auxiliary to the commissary and quartermaster departments. Barton had an uncanny capacity for turning up in emergencies and making a relatively small amount of supplies perform miracles in the way of sudden comfort. One might say that Clara Barton was a modern, natural supplier of loaves and fishes. By war’s end, she was known to countless soldiers who received her kindnesses as the “Angel of the Battlefield”.
Her greatest contributions to humanity actually came after the Civil War. She visited Andersonville Prison in 1865 and painstakingly recorded the name on every soldier-grave. For the next four years, she compiled records of deceased Union soldiers. Hundreds of grief-stricken parents gained information on a dead son’s demise and place of burial through Miss Barton’s efforts.
She then went to Switzerland on vacation but quickly became caught up in the Franco-Prussian War. Her voluntary work on foreign fields brought her into contact with the International Red Cross agency. Barton returned to America with decorations from two emperors. She set the honors aside to work unceasingly until she has established the American Red Cross. She was its first president, as well as the author of its first published history.
Clara Barton died at her home in Glen Echo, Maryland, at the age of ninety-one. She was only five feet tall, but she bore herself with a strength and resolution no one underestimated. One eulogist declared: “Her initiative, inflexible will…and devotion to human welfare lifter her out of the obscurity of a farm where she had had few advantages and enabled her to do a great work that gave her a worldwide reputation.”
Her logo will forever be the Red Cross seen wherever disaster strikes ore need is evident.