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Clara Barton
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Clara Barton was working as a recording clerk in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C. when the first units of federal troops poured into the city in 1861. The war had just begun, the troops were newly recruited, and residents in the capital were alarmed and confused. Barton perceived an immediate need in all this chaos for providing personal assistance to the men in uniform, some of whom were already wounded, many hungry, and some without bedding or any clothing except what they had on their backs. She started by taking supplies to the young men of the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry who had been attacked in Baltimore, Maryland, by southern sympathizers and were temporarily housed in the unfinished Capitol building. Barton quickly discovered that many were "her boys," as she put it; she had grown up with some of them and some she had even taught. Like a few other women, Barton provided clothing and assorted foods and supplies to the sick and wounded soldiers on behalf of such organizations as the U.S. Sanitary Commission, although she never formally affiliated with any agency or group.
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When Clara Barton was sixteen, phrenologist Lorenzo Fowler advised her to become a teacher to cure her shyness. For ten years, Barton taught in a small Massachusetts town, where her brother owned a factory. After she was invited to teach in a private school in Bordentown, New Jersey, Barton recognized the community's need for free education, and despite opposition, set up one of the first free public schools in the state. When officials appointed a male principal in her place, Barton resigned. In 1854, she moved to Washington, where she became the first woman to work at the Patent Office. Barton's war work began in April 1861.
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Raised in a quiet New England family, Clara Barton taught, founded a public school in New Jersey, and in 1854 became a copyist in the U.S. Patent Office. In 1861, the Civil War catapulted her to national prominence. During the first two years, Barton functioned as a oneâ€woman relief agency. Relying on the assistance of a few sympathetic politicians and friends, and shunning official channels of the U.S. Sanitary Commission and Dorothea Dix's nursing corps, Barton brought supplies and relief to thousands of suffering Union soldiers on fields in the Eastern theater. Her timely arrivals from Fredericksburg to Antietam earned her the nickname “Angel of the Battlefield.†In June 1864, she agreed to serve as head nurse in the Army of the James.
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Civil War nurse Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross. Barton was a teacher and a U.S. Patent Office clerk before devoting herself to nursing in the American Civil War (1861-65). She earned the nickname "the angel of the battlefield" and in 1864 was named superintendent of all Union nurses. In the 1870s, officials of the International Red Cross invited her to help form a branch of the service in the U.S.; she agreed, and led the American Red Cross for its first 26 years. read more
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Clara Barton (1821-1912) was born in North Oxford, Massachusetts, where she taught school as a young woman. In the fall of 1851, she visited friends in Hightstown and was asked to teach in the Cedar Swamp school there. Realizing there were few free public schools in New Jersey, Barton became interested in encouraging the development of free schools throughout the state. In 1852 she traveled to Bordentown where she received the reluctant approval of the town school committee to open a free public school where she would teach. School attendance grew under her direction to include 600 by the end of the first year.
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Clara Barton was born on December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts. She was the youngest child of Stephen Barton, a farmer and state law maker who had served in the American Revolution (1775–83), and his wife, Sarah. She later recalled that his tales made war familiar to her at an early age. Barton acquired skills that would serve her well when, at age eleven, she helped look after a sick older brother. In return her brother taught her skills that young women did not usually learn, such as carpentry.
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Clara Barton