7th hour
Clara Barton
Clarissa "Clara" Harlowe Barton was born December 25, 1821, in North Oxford,
Massachusetts, to Captain Stephen and Sarah (Stone) Barton. Her father was a prosperous businessman and community leader who served in the Indian wars and regaled Clara with war stories. Educated mainly at home by her older siblings—she was the youngest of five children—
Clara was acutely shy.
When her brother David became seriously ill following a barn-raising accident, 11-year old Clara nursed him for two years. The family enlisted the help of a doctor who used hydrotherapy to cure David within a few weeks. Following David’s recovery, Captain Barton sent Clara to a private boarding school and though she was able to keep up …show more content…
academically, her shyness affected her health and she returned home. Finally, her mother had her examined by a noted phrenologist, who recommended she become a teacher to overcome her shyness.
Clara took the teacher’s exam—a brief oral exam given by a minister, a lawyer, and a judge— and began teaching in May 1838 in North Oxford. As a teacher, she enthralled her students and refused to discipline them physically, though corporal punishment was a common practice in
19th-century schools. She later wrote, "Child that I was, I did not know that the surest test of discipline is its absence." Six years later, she opened her own school.
In 1850, to further her own education, Clara enrolled at the Clinton Liberal Institute in Clinton,
New York. After a year of study, she moved with a friend to Bordentown, New Jersey. At the time, New Jersey had no free public schools, but with support from the local community Clara opened a free public school. Although enrollment was initially low, by the end of the year she
had about 200 pupils. Her project was such a success that the community built a new school and, much to Clara’s surprise, hired a man to run it— at twice her salary.
Clara resigned and moved to Washington, D.C., where she became the first female clerk at the U.S. Patent Office. After President James Buchanan took office in 1857, her position …show more content…
was eliminated and she was dismissed. She went home to North Oxford but later returned to the
Patent Office and was in Washington, D.C. when the American Civil War began.
On April 19, 1861, a mob of Southern sympathizers attacked soldiers from the 6th Massachusetts
Regiment in Baltimore.
The Baltimore Riot killed and wounded several soldiers and civilians. A makeshift hospital had been set up for the soldiers at the new U.S. Capitol building in
Washington, D.C. As soon as she heard about the riots, Clara left the Patent Office to tend the wounded, some of whom she knew personally. She collected food, medicine, clothing, and other supplies for the troops, many of whom arrived with just the clothes they were wearing. Clara wrote friends in Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey urging them to help, soon building a volunteer supply network that would last the entirety of the war.
Clara wanted to help with the war effort as much as she could and offered to do the work of two clerks at the Patent Office, drawing only the salary of one, so that two male clerks could be released to fight in the war. With no precedent, the Patent Office refused and Clara resigned, dedicating herself to help with the war by any means she could, initially collecting and dispersing supplies and eventually nursing the wounded.
She met and was one of the first to tend to the routed multitudes from the First Battle of
Bull Run in July 1861 and, in October, the soldiers returning from the Battle of Ball’s Bluff,
who included soldiers she knew from Massachusetts. During the Peninsula Campaign of 1862 she
went down to the docks to meet the transports returning from the field, tending the wounded and helping to bring them to the hospitals.
In late 1861, she went home to North Oxford to tend her dying father, returning to Washington in
March,1862 with renewed conviction to help her country win the war. The neglected wounds of the men, which had weighed on her mind since Bull Run, led her to campaign for the ability to travel to the field hospitals, which were restricted to male-only staffs by both military regulations and societal mores. She finally received official permission on August 3, 1862, to transport supplies to battlefields and arrived in the Union camps four days after the Battle of Cedar
Mountain, Virginia. She stayed two days and nights to tend the wounded. On September 1 she arrived at Fairfax Station and tended the wounded from the Second Battle of Bull Run; on
September 14, she was on hand in Maryland to tend the wounded from the battles of Harpers
Ferry and South Mountain.
Clara then traveled with the army to Antietam Creek outside Sharpsburg, Maryland.
Arriving on the field with four wagons before the Battle of Antietam began, she provided surgeons with badly needed supplies and stayed with the army as it pursued the Confederates into Virginia. During the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, she assisted in a hospital at
Chatham, known as the Lacy House, tending wounded from both sides. To assist a physician, she even traveled into Fredericksburg itself to tend the wounded and was able to set up a soup kitchen, returning to Chatham the next day to continue helping the wounded. Because the physicians were too busy to keep records, Clara wrote the names of the men who died at
Chatham and where they were buried in her diary.
Being so close to the battlefields, Clara narrowly escaped death herself many times. While tending to a wounded soldier during the Battle of Antietam, she felt her sleeve move—a bullet