Clara Barton

Clara Barton
Carte-de-visite album
Tintype, ca. 1862
Prints & Photographs Division
(LC-USZC4-6307)

Twenty years before founding the American Red Cross, Clara Barton came to the aid of soldiers fighting in the Civil War. At the war's outbreak, Barton worked as a U.S. Patent Office clerk and collected provisions and medical supplies for the Union Army. Restless with her limited role and undeterred by War Department regulations and prevailing stereotypes, Barton became known as the "Angel of the Battlefield" as she distributed supplies and tended to the wounded and dying. Barton kept these notes during the course of the war, which documented the appalling carnage and medical conditions of the wounded transported to Fredericksburg from the Wilderness campaign.