Clara Barton

Clara Barton was an American teacher, government clerk and self-taught nurse who became famous for bringing supplies and care to wounded soldiers in the American Civil War, and who went on to found the American Red Cross in 1881. At a time when women in the United States could not vote, she led its relief work for over two decades.

Clarissa Harlowe Barton was born on 25 December 1821 in Oxford, Massachusetts, a small farming town. She was a painfully timid child, and her first experience of nursing came at the age of eleven, when she spent two years caring for her brother David after a serious fall from a barn roof.

Her parents hoped teaching would draw her out. She qualified in 1839 and taught for about a decade around Oxford. In 1852 she opened a free public school in Bordentown, New Jersey, the first in that state. When it grew and the town built a new schoolhouse, the board appointed a man as principal over her, and she left.

In 1855 Barton moved to Washington, where she took a clerkship at the Patent Office, an unusually senior post for a woman. Dismissed in 1858 for her Republican sympathies, she returned in 1860.

When the war began in April 1861, wounded men of the 6th Massachusetts Militia were brought to the city after the Baltimore riot. Barton nursed them and began collecting food, clothing and bandages, at first storing them in her own rooms. In August 1862 she won permission to work at the front. She brought supplies and care to field hospitals at Cedar Mountain, Second Bull Run, Antietam and Fredericksburg, treating Confederate as well as Union wounded, and was nicknamed the "Angel of the Battlefield".

As the war ended, with Abraham Lincoln's approval, Barton set up an office in Washington to trace missing soldiers. She and her assistants answered 41,855 letters and helped locate over 22,000 men, and in 1865 she worked to identify and mark the graves of some 13,000 prisoners who had died at the Confederate camp at Andersonville, Georgia. On lecture tours after the war she met Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass and became a supporter of women's suffrage and civil rights.

Barton sailed for Europe in 1869. In Geneva she learned of the International Red Cross movement. During the Franco-Prussian War she helped prepare military hospitals with the Grand Duchess of Baden and in 1871 organised relief for the poor of Strasbourg and Paris.

Back home, she spent years lobbying the government, arguing that a national society could help in floods, fires and epidemics as well as wars. The American Red Cross held its first meeting in her Washington apartment on 21 May 1881, with Barton as president, and its first local branch opened that August in Dansville, New York.

Under her leadership the society answered floods on the Ohio River in 1884 and famine in Texas in 1887. Its biggest early test came in 1889 with the Johnstown flood in Pennsylvania, in which more than 2,200 people died. In 1896 she went to Constantinople to arrange aid for Armenian victims of massacres in the Ottoman Empire, and during the Spanish–American War of 1898, then in her seventies, she worked in hospitals in Cuba. Her last field operation was after the Galveston hurricane of 1900.

Barton's personal, improvised style of leadership, and criticism that she mixed her own and the society's resources, led to her forced resignation in 1904. She spent her last years at her house in Glen Echo, Maryland, which had served as Red Cross headquarters, and died there of pneumonia on 12 April 1912, aged 90. The house became, in 1975, the first National Historic Site devoted to a woman's achievements.

Our 1880 map shows the United States on the eve of the founding of the American Red Cross, and the 1900 map shows the country after the Spanish–American War, at the end of Barton's field career.