Clara Barton

Clara Barton 1821-1912, American humanitarian, organizer of the American Red Cross, b. North Oxford (now Oxford), Mass. She taught school (1839-54) and clerked in the U.S. Patent Office before the outbreak of the Civil War. She then established a service of supplies for soldiers and nursed in army camps and on the battlefields. She was called the Angel of the Battlefield. In 1865 President Lincoln appointed her to search for missing prisoners; the records she compiled also served to identify thousands of the dead at Andersonville Prison. In Europe for a conference at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War (1870), she went to work behind the German lines for the International Red Cross. She returned to the United States in 1873 and in 1881 organized the American National Red Cross , which she headed until 1904. She worked successfully for the President's signature to the Geneva treaty for the care of war wounded (1882) and emphasized Red Cross work in catastrophes other than war. Among her writings are several books on the Red Cross.

Bibliography: See biographies by I. Ross (1956) and W. E. Barton (1969); S. B. Oates, A Woman of Valor (1994).

Barton, Clara (1821–1912), Civil War nurse, relief worker, and founder of the American Red Cross.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 one‐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.

As the Civil War, especially early on, afforded few official roles for women, Barton could carve out an independent niche and use her status to bypass the formidable military bureaucracy. Throughout, she sought to bring humanity and personal dignity to the war; to counteract the brutal and dehumanizing affects of modern, large‐scale carnage. Although her relief activities abated somewhat later in the war, she began in February 1865 the herculean effort of identifying missing men. Much of her attention focused on the unknown dead of Andersonville Prison, securing the identification of nearly 11,000 in that infamous pen.

When the Civil War ended, Barton continued her mission of humanizing the horrors of military suffering. She worked tirelessly for U.S. ratification of the Geneva Conventions of 1864 (conferring neutrality on wounded and hospital personnel in war), and in 1881, organized the American Association of the Red Cross. In 1898, she personally led Red Cross relief efforts in Cuba during the Spanish‐American War.

Bibliography

Rev William E. Barton ., Life of Clara Barton, 2 vols., 1922.
Stephen Oates , A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War, 1994.

Nina Silber

Barton, Clara (1821–1912)Civil War nurse, relief worker, and founder of the American Red Cross, born Clarissa Harlowe Barton in North Oxford, Massachusetts. Barton tended wounded Union soldiers and ran medical supply lines at Antietam, Fredericksburg (both 1862), the Wilderness campaign (1864), and other battles. Barton publicized the work of the International Red Cross, lobbied tirelessly for Senate ratification of the Geneva Conventions (signed in 1882), and was the American National Red Cross's first president (1882–1904).

Clara Barton was an early feminist; in her work as a teacher and clerk at the Patent Office, she demanded—and got—pay equal to what men in the same position were getting.