Clara Barton

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Clara Barton
Born Clarissa Harlowe Barton
(1821-12-25)December 25, 1821
North Oxford, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died April 12, 1912(1912-04-12) (aged 90)
Glen Echo, Maryland, U.S.
Resting place North Cemetery, Oxford Massachusetts
Nationality American
Occupation Nurse, Humanitarian, Founder and first president of the American Red Cross
Signature

Clarissa Harlowe "Clara" Barton (December 25, 1821 – April 12, 1912) was a pioneer American teacher, patent clerk, nurse, and humanitarian. At a time when relatively few women worked outside the home, Barton built a career helping others. One of her greatest accomplishments was founding the American Red Cross. This organization helps victims of war and disasters.


Contents

[edit] Early life

Clara was the youngest child of Stephen Barton, veteran of the Indian Wars in Ohio and Michigan and a selectman in Oxford, Massachusetts; and his wife, Sarah. Her siblings were Dorothy, Sally, Stephen and David.[1]

Barton always had a passion for being a nurse. She took care of her dog when he hurt his leg. But the best example was her brother, David Barton. When Clara was 11, David was fixing the barn roof and fell off. The doctor said that he would die in time. But young Clara was determined to save him, and nursed him back to health.

[edit] Early professional life

Clara Barton became a school teacher in 1838 teaching in the area for a dozen years in schools at Oxford, N. Oxford, Charlton, and West Millbury. In 1850, Barton decided to further her education by pursuing writing and languages at the Clinton Liberal Institute in New York. Following these studies, Barton opened a free school in New Jersey. The attendance under her leadership grew to 603, but instead of hiring Barton to head the school, the board hired a man. Frustrated, in 1855 she moved to Washington D.C. and began work as a clerk in the US Patent Office;[2] this was the first time a woman had received a substantial clerkship in the federal government and at a salary equal to a man's salary. Subsequently, under political opposition to women working in government offices, her position was reduced to that of copyist, and in 1856, under the administration of James Buchanan, eliminated entirely.[3] After the election of Abraham Lincoln, having lived with relatives and friends in Massachusetts for three years, she returned to work at the patent office in the autumn of 1861, now as temporary copyist, in the hope she could pioneer to make way for more women in government service. She was probably the first woman to hold a government job.[2]

[edit] American Civil War

Clara Barton circa 1866.

In 1864 she was appointed by Union General Benjamin Butler as the "lady in charge" of the hospitals at the front of the Army of the James. Among her more harrowing experiences was an incident in which a bullet tore through the sleeve of her dress without striking her and killed a man to whom she was tending. She is known as the "Angel of the Battlefield."

[edit] American Red Cross

After the war, she ran the Office of Missing Soldiers, at 437 Seventh Street, Northwest, Washington, D.C. in the Gallery Place neighborhood.[4]

Barton then achieved widespread recognition by delivering lectures around the country about her war experiences. She met Susan B. Anthony and began a long association with the woman's suffrage movement. She also became acquainted with Frederick Douglass and became an activist for black civil rights. In 1869, during her trip to Geneva, Switzerland, Barton was introduced to the Red Cross and Henry Dunant's book A Memory of Solferino, which called for the formation of national societies to provide relief voluntarily on a neutral basis.

At the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, in 1870, she assisted the grand duchess of Baden in the preparation of military hospitals, and gave the Red Cross society much aid during the war. At the joint request of the German authorities and the Strasbourg Comité de Secours, she superintended the supplying of work to the poor of Strasbourg in 1871, after the Siege of Paris, and in 1871 had charge of the public distribution of supplies to the destitute people of Paris. At the close of the war she was decorated with the golden cross of Baden and the iron cross of Germany.[5]

When Clara Barton returned to the United States, she inaugurated a movement to gain recognition for the International Committee of the Red Cross by the United States government.[6] When she began work on this project in 1873, most Americans thought the U.S. would never again face a calamity like the Civil War, but Barton finally succeeded during the administration of President Chester Arthur, using the argument that the new American Red Cross could respond to crises other than war.

Barton naturally became President of the American branch of the society, which held its first official meeting at her I Street apartment in Washington, DC May 21, 1881. The first local society was founded August 22, 1882 in Dansville, Livingston County, New York, where she maintained a country home.[7]

The society's role changed with the advent of the Spanish-American War during which it aided refugees and prisoners of the civil war. In 1897, responding to the humanitarian crisis in the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the Hamidian Massacres, Barton sailed to Constantinople and after long negotiations with Abdul Hamid II, opened the first American International Red Cross headquarters in the heart of Turkey. Barton herself traveled along with five other Red Cross expeditions to the Armenian provinces in the spring of 1896, providing relief and humanitarian aid. Barton also worked in hospitals in Cuba in 1898 at the age of seventy-seven.[8] Barton's last field operation as President of the American Red Cross was helping victims of the Galveston hurricane in 1900. The operation established an orphanage for children. As criticism arose of her management of the American Red Cross, plus her advancing age, Barton resigned as president in 1904, at the age of 83. After resigning, Barton founded the National First Aid Society. On April 12, 1912 at the age of 90 she died in Glen Echo, Maryland with her friends by her side. The cause of death was tuberculosis, which she had contracted two years earlier and with which she had been bedridden for a month.

[edit] Religious beliefs

Although not formally a member of the Universalist Church of America,[9] in a 1905 letter to the widow of Carl Norman Thrasher, she identified herself with her parents' church as a "Universalist”.[10]

[edit] Clara Barton National Historic Site

 

In 1975, Clara Barton National Historic Site, located at 5801 Oxford Road, Glen Echo, Maryland, was established as a unit of the National Park Service at Barton's home, where she spent the last 15 years of her life. One of the first National Historic Sites dedicated to the accomplishments of a woman, it preserves the early history of the American Red Cross, since the home also served as an early headquarters of the organization. The North Oxford, Massachusetts, house in which she was born is now also museum.

The National Park Service has restored eleven rooms, including the Red Cross offices, the parlors and Barton's bedroom. Visitors to Clara Barton National Historic Site can gain a sense of how Barton lived and worked. Guides lead tourists through the three levels, emphasizing Barton's use of her unusual home. Modern visitors can come to appreciate the site in the same way visitors did in Clara Barton's lifetime.[11]

[edit] Places named for Clara Barton

Clara Barton – steel engraving by John Sartain

[edit] Published works

  • Barton, Clara H. The Red Cross-In Peace and War Washington, D.C.: American Historical Press, (1898)
  • Barton, Clara H. Story of the Red Cross-Glimpses of Field Work New York: D. Appleton and Company, (1904)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Clara Barton Birthplace Museum. "Clara's Family". http://www.clarabartonbirthplace.org/life/family.html. Retrieved 7 April 2012.
  2. ^ a b Clara Barton, Dictionary of Unitarian & Universalist Biography
  3. ^ Clara Barton, www.civilwaracademy.com
  4. ^ Clara Barton. dcwriters.poetrymutual.org
  5. ^ Wikisource-logo.svg This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: "Barton, Clara". Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. 1900.
  6. ^ Epler, Percy Harold (1915). The Life of Clara Barton. Macmillan. http://books.google.com/books?id=LC5x31cCf_sC. Retrieved 2010-09-28.
  7. ^ Marks, Mary Jo. "History". American Red Cross Clara Barton #1. http://www.redcrossclara.com/History.html. Retrieved 2009-01-11.
  8. ^ Oates, Stephen B. (1994). A Woman of Valor. Macmillan. p. 382. ISBN 0-02-923405-0.
  9. ^ Russell E. Miller -The larger hope: the first century of the Universalist Church in America 1386 "Although not formally a Universalist by church membership, she had come of a Universalist family, was sympathetic to the tenets of the denomination, and has always been claimed by it.124 Known as "the Florence Nightingale of our war",
  10. ^ "Positive Atheism website". http://www.positiveatheism.org/mail/eml8886.htm. Retrieved 2007-05-25. source taken from The Universalist Leader 120/49 1938 My dear friend and sister: Your belief that I am a Universalist is as correct as your greater belief that you are one yourself, a belief in which all who are privileged to possess it rejoice. In my case, it was a great gift, like St. Paul, I 'was born free', and saved the pain of reaching it through years of struggle and doubt. My father was a leader in the building of the church in which Hosea Ballow preached his first dedication sermon. Your historic records will show that the old Huguenot town of Oxford, Mass. erected one of, if not the first Universalist Church in America. In this town I was born; in this church I was reared. In all its reconstructions and remodelings I have taken a part, and I look anxiously for a time in the near future when the busy world will let me once more become a living part of its people, praising God for the advance in the liberal faith of the religions of the world today, so largely due to the teachings of this belief. Give, I pray you, dear sister, my warmest congratulations to the members of your society. My best wishes for the success of your annual meeting, and accept my thanks most sincerely for having written me. Fraternally yours, (Signed) Clara Barton.
  11. ^ "Clara Barton NHS – The House". National Park Service. http://www.nps.gov/archive/clba/house.htm. Retrieved 2007-05-25.

[edit] References

  • Barton, William E. The Life of Clara Barton Founder of the American Red Cross New York: AMS Press, (1969)
  • Hutchinson, John F. Champions of Charity: War and the Rise of the Red Cross Boulder: Westview Press, Inc., (1996)
  • Joyce, James Avery. Red Cross International and the Strategy of Peace New York: Oceana Publications, Inc., (1959)
  • Pryor, Elizabeth Brown. Clara Barton: Professional Angel Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, (1987)
  • Ross, Ishbel. Angel of the Battlefield: The Life of Clara Barton New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, (1956)
  • Deady, Kathleen,W. "Clara Barton" Mankato:Capstone Press, (2003)
  • Numbering All the Bones by Ann Rinaldi features Clara Barton and Andersonville Prison, a Civil War prison with terrible conditions.
  • Safranski, Debby Burnett, "Angel of Andersonville, Prince of Tahiti: The Extraordinary Life of Dorence Atwater," Alling-Porterfield Publishing House, 2008

[edit] External links

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