From the Archives: Clara Barton, Act III–the American Red Cross
For the next little while, I’m juggling revisions with prepping for a talk about Civil War nurses. (I love giving talks, but I was overly optimistic when I agreed to do this one last September.) It makes for an interesting mix of tough broads competing for my attention.
Working on the theory that if I’m thinking about Civil War nurses, you should be too, I offer you a three part series from back in 2016. If you’re coming in late to the story, you can read part one and two here and here.
Clara Barton in 1904
When we last saw Miss Barton, she was in Switzerland, recovering from the exhaustion of her war efforts. She didn’t rest for long. When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in 1870, Barton leapt back into action. Constrained by her lack of political connections in Europe, she did not try to work on her own the way she had in the American Civil War. Instead she traveled to Strasbourg as a volunteer of the International Red Cross, wearing a cross she improvised from a red ribbon and a Red Cross pin given her by the Grand Duchess Louise, daughter of Kaiser Wilhelm I.
The International Red Cross had been founded several years before. In 1863, while the United States was locked in its internal struggle, Swiss businessman Henry Dunant, who had witnessed the aftermath of the Battle of Solfierno in the Italian War of Independence several years before, called a conference of thirty-nine delegates from sixteen nations to Geneva to discuss questions of battlefield relief and humanitarian aid. The group met again in 1864 and created the set of recommendations that would become the Geneva Treaty, now the Geneva Convention. The guidelines called for the humane treatment of wounded soldiers and universal recognition of the neutrality of medical personnel, ambulances, and hospitals in time of war. The convention adopted a reverse Swiss flag, a red cross on a white ground, as an emblem of medical neutrality that would be easily recognized. They also urged each country to create its own national society of volunteers to provide battlefield relief when needed. Twelve European governments ratified the treaty. The United States refused to sign on the grounds that it was a possible “entangling alliance.”*
Barton’s experience in the Franco-Prussian War was very different from her experience in the American Civil War. Instead of caring for wounded soldiers, she worked with the war’s civilian victims. For her first several days in Strasbourg, she dutifully served soup and distributed supplies to survivors. But as she spent more time in the burned-out city, she realized that more than soup and soap were needed. She organized women into sewing workrooms as a first step in reestablishing the city’s economy. She organized a similar relief effort in Paris the following year.
When she returned home in 1873, Barton took on the task of lobbying for the United States to ratify the Geneva Treaty. It took her nine years and three presidents to convince the government. President Chester Arthur signed the treaty in 1882, and the Senate ratified it several days later.
Barton founded the American Red Cross in 1881 and led it for the next twenty-three years. At her initiative, the American Red Cross proposed an amendment to the Geneva Treaty calling for the expansion of Red Cross relief to include victims of natural disasters. The so-called American Amendment, perhaps more accurately the “Barton Amendment,” was passed in 1884.
Under Barton’s leadership, the American Red Cross helped victims of the Johnstown flood,** hurricane victims in the Sea Islands of South Carolina, both Armenian and Turkish victims of ethnic unrest in the Ottoman empire,***and famine victims in Russia. (If you can’t be described as a victim or something, you probably don’t need the Red Cross.) She traveled with nurses to Cuba during the Spanish-American War in 1898 to nurse the wounded and provide supplies. Her last relief operation with the Red Cross was distributing supplies and financial assistance to survivors of the hurricane that wiped out Galveston, Texas, in 1900.
After she retired from the American Red Cross in 1904 at the age of 82, she founded an organization to teach basic first aid and emergency preparedness, wrote several books, and went on a speaking tours.**** She died at home on April 12, 1912 at the age of 90.
A life well-lived by any standard.
If you’re interested in learning more about Clara Barton– including the slightly scandalous bits that I didn’t have room for in either these blog posts or Heroines of Mercy Street–I strongly recommend Stephen Oate’s excellent biography, A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War.
*The same reason we failed to join the League of Nations after World War I.
**The 68 year old Barton personally led fifty volunteers on the first train into town following the disaster
***In 1896, well before the Armenian genocide of 1915. Obviously a long-standing conflict.
****Do you feel like a slacker yet?
From the Archives: Clara Barton, Act 2–Finding the Missing
For the next little while, I’m juggling revisions with prepping for a talk about Civil War nurses. (I love giving talks, but I was overly optimistic when I agreed to do this one last September.) It makes for an interesting mix of tough broads competing for my attention.
Working on the theory that if I’m thinking about Civil War nurses, you should be too, I offer you a three part series from back in 2016. If you’re coming in late to the story, you can read part one here.
Clara Barton helped identify graves at Andersonville Prison
When the Civil War ended, most of the women who had volunteered to serve as nurses went home and stepped back into their old roles as daughters, seamstresses, schoolteachers, and wives. (Not to mention factory workers, New York socialites, reformers…) Nursing had been a temporary event in their lives, just like being a soldier was a temporary part of the lives of most of the men who served in the war.
Clara Barton was one of the exceptions. (Does this come as a surprise to anyone?)
After the end of the war, women wrote to Barton asking her to help them find missing husbands and sons, whom they feared had ended up in Southern prisons. The anguish in their letters convinced her that locating missing soldiers was the most important thing she could do now that peace had come. Barton opened the Office of Correspondence with Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army, which operated out of her own rooms in Washington. She put together lists of missing soldiers, organized by location and unit, posted them in army hospitals, and had them printed in local and national newspapers, with the request that any information about the missing men be sent to her to pass on to their families.
Eventually she received official sanction for her new mission. Shortly before his assassination, President Lincoln wrote a letter to the public informing them to contact Barton with information about missing soldiers. When her own resources were exhausted, Congress appropriated $15,000 to complete the project—close to $3 million today. The search for missing soldiers led to an effort to identify graves, beginning with the unmarked graves of the 13,000 Union soldiers who died in the prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia. Between 1865 and 1869, she and her assistants received and answered more than 63,000 letters and helped locate 22,000 missing soldiers.
Her grueling work in the war had left Barton physically exhausted; her efforts after the war imposed a new kind of strain. In 1869, she was near collapse. Her doctors ordered her to Europe for a rest cure.** She did not rest for long. While in Switzerland she became aware of a little organization called the International Red Cross. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?
*A standard medical prescription for exhausted Americans** in the nineteenth century, which has sadly fallen out of favor. Personally, I think taking a rest cure soon would be a fine idea.
**At least for those with the time and money to spare. My guess is that no one suggested an exhausted small farmer or factory girl take several months in Switzerland.
From the Archives: Clara Barton–Nursing Outside the Box
For the next little while, I’m juggling revisions with prepping for a talk about Civil War nurses. (I love giving talks, but I was overly optimistic when I agreed to do this one last September.) It makes for an interesting mix of tough broads competing for my attention. It is possible that punches will be thrown before it’s over. (Sigrid Schultz learned to box when she was a child.)
Working on the theory that if I’m thinking about Civil War nurses, you should be too, I offer you a three part series from back in 2016 to amuse you while I try to keep the ladies under control
Clara Barton, ca. 1866
When I first began talking to Little Brown and PBS about writing Heroines of Mercy Street, most of what I knew about nurses in the American Civil War could be summed up in two words: Clara Barton.*
Barton first caught my imagination when I was seven or eight, thanks to a child’s biography that belonged to my mother. ** Coming back to her as an adult, I found that her story was more complex, and more amazing that I had realized. Instead of being the archetypical Civil War nurse, Barton was an original who worked outside the system. She avoided any alliance with the official nurses, though she did not hesitate to alternately charm and kick men in high places to get the support and permission she needed in order to provide comfort and medical care to “her boys” on the battlefield.
When the Civil War began in April, 1861, Barton was working as a clerk at the United States Patent Office , one of only four women employed by the federal government before the war. (In short, she was already a shin-kicker.) After Bull Run, she visited the wounded in the improvised hospital on the top floor of the Patent Office every day, bringing them delicacies and helping where she could.
Barton soon became a one-woman relief agency. She developed a personal supply network of “dear sisters” who sent her packages of food, clothing, wine, and bandages to distribute to the troops. In fact, she received so many boxes that she had to rent warehouses to store them.
Over time she became convinced that she was needed on the battlefield, where she could help men as they fell. When the Army of the Potomac was mobilized in the summer of 1862, Barton convinced the head of the Quartermaster Corps depot in Washington to assign her a wagon and a driver.
Armed with a pass signed by Surgeon General Hammond that gave her “permission to go upon the sick transports in any direction for the purpose of distributing comforts to the sick and wounded, and nursing them, always subject to the direction of the Surgeon in charge,” Barton delivered her supplies to the field hospital at Falmouth Station, near Fredericksburg. But she still felt she was not doing enough. When she heard that fighting had broken out at Cedar Mountain, she headed for the battlefield. Thereafter, in battle after battle, Barton ran soup kitchens, provided supplies, nursed the wounded, and tried to keep track of the men who died so she could tell their families what had happened to them. In between battles, she returned to Washington, where she collected the latest batch of supplies, wrote impassioned letters thanking the women who provided them, and fought with bureaucrats to be allowed to continue her work.
She became a such a familiar figure of comfort to wounded men, that scores of the men she helped on the battlefields named their daughters “Clara Barton” in her honor. But that wasn’t her only legacy after the war…
[This is known in the trade as a cliffhanger. Don’t touch that dial.]
*Okay, six words: Clara Barton and Louisa May Alcott.
** I know I’ve mentioned them before, but I owe a debt of gratitude to the authors who wrote biographies for young girls about smart and/or tough women who sidestepped (or kicked their way through) society’s boundaries and accomplished stuff no one thought they could accomplish. (Now that I think of it, a lot of those biographies were set in and around the American Civil War–which like WWI and WWII opened doors to women that had previously been closed.) To those of you writing similar biographies today, you’re making a difference. Thank you.