She was the baby of the family, the youngest of five children, with brothers and sisters at least ten years older. And she was painfully shy. Clarissa Harlowe Barton, born on Christmas Day 1821 in North Oxford, Massachusetts, was so timid that her worried mother went looking for advice on how to help her.
No one could have guessed that this quiet girl would one day walk onto battlefields under fire, find thousands of missing soldiers, and found the American Red Cross. Her life is a reminder that our storms do not get the last word.
A shy girl finds her calling
The first sign of what Clara would become came early. When she was 11, her brother David was badly hurt in a fall from a barn rafter. According to the National Park Service, she spent two years caring for him.
Still, she was shy. History.com reports that her mother consulted a phrenologist, L.N. Fowler, who suggested teaching as a way. It worked. Clara began teaching as a teenager. In 1852 she started a free public school in Bordentown, New Jersey, which grew from six students to several hundred. When the town board then hired a man to run it at twice her salary, she left rather than accept the unfairness.
She moved to Washington, D.C., and in 1854 took a job at the U.S. Patent Office, one of very few women working for the federal government at the time. She earned equal pay with the men, until a new boss demoted her to copyist. She kept going.
Into the storm of war
When the Civil War began in 1861, Massachusetts soldiers were attacked in a riot in Baltimore on April 19. Some of them had been Clara’s own former students. She gathered food and supplies and cared for them at a makeshift hospital set up in the U.S. Senate chamber.
She was a self-taught nurse. By 1862 she had secured passes to reach the front lines. After the Battle of Cedar Mountain, a field surgeon compared her to an angel, and the name stuck: “the Angel of the Battlefield.”
At Antietam, the National Park Service records, she arrived with a wagonload of bandages and supplies near the edge of the infamous Cornfield. A bullet passed through her sleeve and killed the man she was helping. She kept working.
The war took a toll on her body. In 1863, on Morris Island near Charleston, she fell ill and was evacuated. Yet in 1864 she was back, in charge of hospitals for the Army of the James.
Searching for the missing
When the war ended, thousands of families did not know whether their loved ones were alive or dead. With President Lincoln’s permission, Barton opened what became known as the Office of Missing Soldiers. Over four years, her office answered more than 63,000 letters and identified more than 22,000 missing men, according to PBS NewsHour.
She also helped identify and mark the graves of nearly 13,000 Union soldiers who died at the Andersonville prison camp in Georgia.
Breakdown, rest, and a bigger vision
By 1869, years of overwork had broken her health, and her doctor ordered rest. In Europe she learned about the International Red Cross, and when the Franco-Prussian War broke out, she helped distribute relief.
Back home, she ran into opposition. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes turned down her request to support the Geneva Convention, worried it would entangle America with Europe. She did not quit. On May 21, 1881, she held the first meeting of the American Red Cross in her Washington apartment. The first local chapter formed that August in Dansville, New York. In 1882, the U.S. Senate finally ratified the Geneva treaty.
Barton also pushed for something new: Red Cross help not only in war, but in natural disasters like floods, fires and famines. She led relief after the 1889 Johnstown Flood and, at 77, served in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.
Critics objected to her tight control, and in 1904 she was pushed to resign. She died at her home in Glen Echo, Maryland, on April 12, 1912, at age 90.
What Clara Barton teaches our families
The American Red Cross shares a line from her that sums up her life: “You must never think of anything except the need, and how to meet it.” How families can live that out:
- Shy is not stuck. Help quiet kids find one way to serve.
- Look for the forgotten. Who in your community is waiting for a call or a visit?
- Rest is not failure. Her breakdown led to her greatest work.
- Keep knocking. A president said no. She asked again.
“Also I heard the voice of the Lord, saying, Whom shall I send, and who will go for us? Then said I, Here am I; send me.”
Isaiah 6:8 (KJV)
Clara Barton was not fearless. She kept saying yes to the need in front of her. Through every storm, we rise together.
Who is a quiet person in your life who has shown great courage? Share in the comments below.
Sources: National Park Service, “Clara Barton”; American Red Cross, “Clara Barton: Highlights of an Extraordinary Life”; History.com, “Clara Barton facts” by Cate Lineberry; PBS NewsHour, “Clara Barton’s crusade to bring the Red Cross to America” (May 22, 2014); Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Clara Barton”; VCU Social Welfare History Project, “Barton, Clara”; KJV Isaiah 6:8.
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