Gritty Details About Clara Barton’s Life That Were Left Out Of The Popular Narrative

Although she worked as a nurse during the Civil War, Barton was never one to stay safe in dressing stations to the rear of the actual battlefields. She was accustomed to getting close to the fighting, where she could treat Union soldiers almost as they fell. One such experience of frontline action came in September 1862 at the bitter Battle of Antietam in Maryland.

Arriving at the battlefield, Barton got straight to helping the wounded as the fighting raged around her. At one point, as she was giving one wounded soldier a drink of water, she felt a strange flutter in her sleeve. She quickly realized that a bullet had passed right through the fabric. Not only that, it had killed the man to whom she was tending. 

Barton lived to the grand old age of 90, dying in 1912. Although she certainly lived an extraordinary life packed with incident and achievement, there was one thing she never tasted — marriage. This was despite the fact that women of her era were very much expected to marry. Still, that’s not to say that she never experienced the excitement of romance.

Barton is said to have had a relationship of some kind with a senior Union officer, Lieutenant Colonel John J. Elwell. That was despite the fact that Elwell was a married man. How far this affair went is a matter of speculation. In a letter written years later by Elwell he said that, “[he had loved her] all the law allows (and a little more besides).” So it’s left to us to guess the exact nature of their relationship.

In the various jobs Barton had during her life, she came up against blatantly sexist discrimination more than once. After a spell teaching at a school in Oxford, Massachusetts, she went on to found a free school in New Jersey. Faced with the runaway success of the new school, the local authorities decided to act. 

But instead of supporting Barton, they appointed a male headmaster above her at double her pay, so she duly resigned. Then in 1854 she took the position of clerk with the U.S. Patent Office, where she was initially paid $1,400 a year — exactly the same as her male colleagues. But that wasn’t to last. Robert McClelland, Secretary of the Interior, was hostile to women working in government and redeployed Barton as a lowly copyist on a measly ten cents per 100 words. 

After passing the teachers’ exam — actually an interview conducted by a judge, a lawyer, and a minister — Barton’s first post aged 18 was at a school in Oxford, Massachusetts, near her home. She worked there for six years and then went on to found an entirely new school in Bordentown, New Jersey. The school had an undistinguished start with few pupils on the roll — just six on the first day.

But Clara was a talented and determined teacher, ahead of her time in many ways, since she forswore the corporal punishment commonly used in the 19th century. Barton’s school was free to attend — an important factor when most schools charged so that the poor couldn’t afford formal education. As a direct result of her dedication, the school became a great success with hundreds of students attending.

After her outstanding and all-consuming work during the Civil War, Barton had time to support other causes that were close to her heart. It’ll come as no surprise that one of those causes was women’s rights. She embarked on a lecture tour around the northern states after the war and shared platforms with distinguished suffrage campaigners such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Barton was a stalwart in the campaign to give women the vote but she also believed in a raft of other rights. The Clara Barton Museum website quotes her belief that a woman should have “the right to her own property, her own children, her own home, her just individual claim before the law, to her freedom of action, to her personal liberty.”

The fact that Clara Barton was brought up on a farm may well go a long way to explaining her lifelong love of animals. Her very first pet was a dog called Button. In her book The Story of My Childhood published in 1907 she described Button as “a sprightly, medium-sized, very white dog, with silky ears, sparkling black eyes and a very short tail.”

Despite that vivid description of Button, Barton was in fact a dyed-in-the-wool cat lover. Her favorite cat was a black-and-white moggie called Tommy who lived to be 17. Her friend Antoinette Margot, a fellow American Red Cross worker, painted a striking portrait of Tommy in oils. Interestingly another famous 19th-century nurse, Florence Nightingale, was a fellow cat lady.

An unfortunate accident involving a family member meant that Barton had experience of nursing from a very young age. Barton had four siblings, and she was the youngest of them by a decade. In 1832 her brother David, 13 years her senior, fell from a barn roof, was badly injured and almost died. 

Even though she was only 11 years old, it fell to Clara to nurse her brother through a lengthy convalescence, all of two years. Involving as it did the application of leeches, it wasn’t a task for the squeamish. No doubt nursing her brother provided the young girl with valuable experience for her later vocation. 

The Spanish-American War broke out in 1898 with fierce fighting taking place in Cuba, where locals had been campaigning for independence from Spain. By now Barton was in her late 70s but even so President McKinley asked her to go to Cuba to provide humanitarian aid to Cuban civilians, many of whom were suffering severely.

While Barton was in Cuba, America declared war on Spain and she now began direct involvement in nursing wounded soldiers. In her work she did not distinguish between American and Spanish casualties. At the same time she kept up her humanitarian work with civilians, which continued after the war’s end. It seems that nobody had told her that most people tended to slow down a bit in their 70s!

Clara — or Clarissa as she was christened — was born into a rather strange household. For a start, she was so much younger than her two brothers and two sisters. As the Clara Barton Museum puts it, “Her siblings were more parents than playmates.” But it was her relationship with her mother Sarah that was the trickiest aspect of her childhood. The matriarch had a reputation as an eccentric with a fiery temper.

Barton’s parents’ relationship was stormy, and perhaps as a result of this she was a painfully shy and withdrawn child. Her mother was so worried about her that she called in a phrenologist to examine her daughter. The fake science of phrenology — studying the contours of the skull — is essentially worthless. But this phrenologist got one thing right: he said she had a future in teaching, an accurate prediction as it turned out. 

Clara Barton met Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts in the spring of 1861. It seems they had much in common — both were New Englanders and committed Republicans, and the two became close friends. In fact, Wilson’s political clout and connections were very useful to Barton, since he helped to get her official permission to work on the Civil War battlefields.

But it seems that their close working and personal relationship got tongues wagging, with rumors of romantic involvement. Wilson was married but his wife Harriet was ill for several years and died in 1870. Apparently some, even including relatives of Barton’s, thought the two might marry after Harriet’s death. Of course that never happened and no concrete evidence exists for anything but a warm friendship between Barton and Wilson.

After the Civil War had ended, Barton needed other ways to fill her time. One of her pet projects was a mission arising directly from the horrors of the war. Once hostilities were over, there were thousands upon thousands of soldiers whose whereabouts remained a mystery. In many cases, relatives did not even know if the men they’d seen off to battle were alive or dead.

Barton’s solution to this heartbreaking problem was to set up the Missing Soldiers Office. In this enterprise she secured the support of no other than the president of the day, Abraham Lincoln. The new organization was able to pinpoint the location of some 22,000 men. In most cases, although not all, these soldiers had lost their lives. But it was still a comfort for their families to have confirmed information about their relatives. 

In April 1861 as the Civil War was getting under way after the battle of Fort Sumter, an especially ugly incident erupted in Baltimore, Maryland. Union troops from the 6th Massachusetts Infantry were changing trains in the city when they were met by an angry mob of Confederate supporters. In the ensuing melee, three soldiers were killed and others were wounded.

The Massachusetts soldiers extricated themselves and traveled on to Washington D.C. Barton, working at the U.S. Patent Office at the time, had heard news of the ugly Baltimore riot and was on hand in Washington to meet the wounded troops. She quickly sprung into action, treating the wounded men, some of whom she knew. And so began her career as a Civil War nurse.

Having earned her nickname “Angel of the Battlefield” during the hostilities of the Civil War, Barton did not simply rest on her laurels at the end of the conflict. Instead she embarked on the massive task of identifying the thousands of war dead who had met their end with no memorial. 

Aided by a former Union soldier called Dorence Atwater, she began to scour what records there were of the dead at Andersonville, Georgia. That was the site of a former prisoner-of-war camp where Atwater himself had been held. Barton campaigned for the establishment of a cemetery for the war dead. Her efforts resulted in the creation of the Andersonville National Cemetery.

Many people start to take things a little bit easier once they’re into their 60s. But a life of leisure was not for the indomitable Clara Barton. For example, she campaigned vigorously for the establishment of the American Red Cross Society, a goal she achieved in 1881, the year she turned 60. She served as the organization’s president right up until 1904 when she resigned her post — aged 83.

She continued working on relief missions in war zones such as Cuba during the Spanish-American of 1898. Barton also went to the scene of various natural disasters in America such as the 1899 Johnstown Flood and the Galveston Hurricane of 1900  — more about those shortly. And remember, she was born in 1821. Then in 1907, she published an autobiography, The Story of My Childhood. She died five years later in 1912.

In the 1830s Barton’s cousin Jeremiah Larned died leaving behind his wife and four children. Barton’s father decided to buy the Larned homestead and then moved his family into the house to live alongside the widow and her children. Naturally, the property needed substantial remodeling to accommodate this enlarged group, and his youngest daughter became fascinated by the works going on around her. 

One Sylvanus Harris was employed as decorator and Barton soon took on the role of his willing assistant, learning the trade at Harris’ elbow. Remembering this episode, she later wrote, “I never wearied of my work for a day, and at the end of a month looked on sadly as the utensils, brushes, buckets, and great marble slab were taken away.” Her formidable work ethic was already evident.

When Barton decided that it was her calling and duty to help wounded Union troops during the Civil War, there were many obstacles in her way. There were social barriers — after all, respectable women were not supposed to hang around at army encampments. And all too often officialdom was far from helpful. 

Government officials often displayed a marked reluctance to give Barton permission to go anywhere near the front line to deliver supplies and nursing care. Still, Barton’s determination almost always won the day. But her other problem was over-work. When she did reach a camp, she would toil relentlessly to fulfill her mission, often to the point of collapse. This became almost routine throughout the war — arriving at battlefields and working until she was utterly spent.

Once the Civil War was over Barton’s mission to help those in dire straits did not end — far from it. When she traveled to Europe at the end of the Civil War, ostensibly to recuperate, she ended up working for the Red Cross tending to soldiers and civilians during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Then there was her humanitarian work in Cuba during the Spanish-American War of 1898.

Natural disasters in her homeland also attracted Barton’s attention. In 1889 a dam failed near the town of Johnstown in Pennsylvania. The resulting deluge killed more than 2,000 and devastated the town. Barton was there to help in the aftermath. Then there was the hurricane that flattened Galveston in 1900, resulting in over 8,000 deaths. Despite her advanced years, Barton was soon on the spot, doing what she could for the survivors. 

Barton is undoubtedly one of the best-known nurses in American history, yet the truth is that she had absolutely no nursing qualifications. There were courses for nurses available in the years before the Civil War broke out, but they were few and far between. And Barton never went on any of those that did exist. 

As previously mentioned, despite not having qualifications, Barton’s nursing experience had started in childhood when she had looked after her brother after he’d had a serious accident. So she had actually learnt her nursing skills on the job — it took her brother two years to make a full recovery. In fact she was not unusual in her lack of training. Most Civil War nurses were volunteers with few if any formal qualifications.

After the rigors of The Civil War, Barton’s doctors recommended a trip to Switzerland where she could convalesce and regain her strength. But this is Clara Burton we’re talking, about so her time in Europe was soon consumed by another of her projects. In the Alps she came across one Dr. Louis Appa, a senior official with the International Red Cross, which had been founded in 1863.

Enthused by what she’d learned about the work of these humanitarian medics, Barton returned to the U.S. determined that there should be an American version. So what had started out as a vacation in Europe actually provided Barton with the inspiration to campaign for an American chapter of the philanthropic organization. Thanks to her tireless lobbying, the American Red Cross was launched in 1881. 

Just about everybody has heard of Clara Barton’s heroic nursing work in the Civil War and her subsequent humanitarian missions around the world. But it wasn’t only her fellow humans that received Barton’s care. Unlikely though it may seem, strawberries also have a place in the impressive catalog of her achievements. 

The terrible hurricane that ravaged Galveston and the south of Texas in 1900 was not only a humanitarian disaster. It also had a massive impact on a crop for which the area was famous: strawberries. Barton saw the damage to the fields and successfully appealed for donations of replacements, eventually sourcing in the region of 1.5 million new plants. And so the Texas strawberry fields were able to return to their former fruity splendor.