A short life of the author
Clara Barton was the most famous American woman of the nineteenth century after Harriet Beecher Stowe — a self-taught nurse who carried supplies to the front lines of the Civil War, tended wounded soldiers under artillery fire at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and the Wilderness, organised the search for missing prisoners of war at Andersonville, and then, at the age of sixty, founded the American Red Cross and ran it for twenty-three years, directing relief operations for floods, famines, hurricanes, and wars from Johnstown to Galveston to the Spanish-American War. She was not a writer by profession, but her books, speeches, and voluminous correspondence document an extraordinary life of service and constitute important primary sources for the history of American humanitarianism.
Oxford, Massachusetts
Clarissa Harlowe Barton was born on Christmas Day 1821 in Oxford, Massachusetts, the youngest of five children of a farmer and state legislator. She was shy, anxious, and prone to depression — qualities she struggled with throughout her life — but she was also fiercely independent and remarkably capable. She began teaching school at fifteen, established one of the first free public schools in New Jersey (at Bordentown), and worked as a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington — one of the first women to hold a regular federal government appointment.
The Civil War
When the Civil War began, Barton was forty years old and working in Washington. She immediately began collecting and distributing supplies to Union soldiers and, by 1862, had obtained permission to bring supplies directly to the battlefields. At Antietam (September 1862), she arrived with a wagonload of supplies while the battle was still raging and spent the day tending wounded soldiers in a field hospital — a bullet passed through her sleeve and killed the man she was treating. At Fredericksburg, she worked in a hospital located in a mansion under constant Confederate shellfire.
After the war, she organised the Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army, compiling lists of missing soldiers and attempting to identify the dead — a project that led her to Andersonville, the notorious Confederate prison camp, where she supervised the identification and marking of nearly thirteen thousand graves.
The Red Cross
Barton learned about the International Red Cross during a trip to Europe in 1869–1873. She served with the International Red Cross during the Franco-Prussian War and became convinced that the United States needed its own national Red Cross society. She spent nearly a decade lobbying for American ratification of the Geneva Convention, which was finally achieved in 1882, and founded the American Red Cross in 1881.
Under Barton’s leadership, the American Red Cross conducted disaster relief operations that established the organisation as a permanent national institution: the Michigan forest fires (1881), the Ohio River floods (1884), the Johnstown Flood (1889), the Sea Islands hurricane (1893), the Armenian massacres (1896), the Galveston hurricane (1900), and the Spanish-American War (1898). Barton personally directed many of these operations, traveling to disaster sites and supervising relief distribution well into her seventies.
Her leadership style was autocratic and her financial management was chaotic — she kept the books in her head and resisted all attempts at organisational reform. She was eventually forced out of the Red Cross presidency in 1904 by a reform faction that wanted professional management. She was eighty-three years old and deeply embittered by the experience.
The Writings
Barton was not a polished writer, but her books have the force of direct testimony. The Red Cross in Peace and War (1899) was her account of the organisation’s first two decades — part institutional history, part memoir, part plea for continued support. A Story of the Red Cross (1904) was a shorter, more popular account. The Story of My Childhood (1907) was her autobiography of her early years, written in her eighties.
Her most important writings are her diaries and correspondence, much of which is held at the Library of Congress. These papers reveal a woman of extraordinary courage and determination who was also plagued by depression, insomnia, and the physical toll of decades of gruelling humanitarian work.
Legacy and the Problem of Hagiography
Barton has been the subject of more children’s books and inspirational biographies than almost any other American woman, and this flood of hagiography has paradoxically obscured the real person — who was more interesting, more flawed, and more impressive than the plaster saint of juvenile literature. She was difficult, controlling, and sometimes vindictive; she feuded bitterly with the women who eventually replaced her at the Red Cross; she was a poor administrator who succeeded through sheer personal force rather than organisational skill. But the force was real. She went to places no woman of her era was expected to go, she did work that no one else was doing, and she built an institution that has saved millions of lives. The best recent biographies — Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s Clara Barton: Professional Angel (1987) and Stephen B. Oates’s A Woman of Valor (1994) — give a fuller portrait of a complicated, driven, indispensable American.
Collecting Barton
The Red Cross in Peace and War (American Historical Press, 1899) is the primary collecting target. A Story of the Red Cross (Appleton, 1904) and The Story of My Childhood (Baker & Taylor, 1907) are also collected. Barton’s letters and autograph material are actively traded. Association copies related to the Red Cross or Civil War service command premiums. Items related to the Johnstown Flood and Galveston hurricane relief are of particular interest.