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