Clara Barton

Barton was so shy as a girl in North Oxford, Massachusetts that her family sent her to boarding school hoping other children would draw her out. It made her worse. What worked was nursing: at 11 she spent two years tending her brother David after a fall from a barn roof, and the responsibility suited her more than any schoolroom had. She earned a teaching certificate at 17, taught a decade, then opened a free public school in Bordentown, New Jersey that grew to 600 pupils in a year. When the town replaced her with a male principal after its success, she broke down and quit teaching for good. In 1855 she took a Patent Office clerkship in Washington, one of the first women paid equally with men.

Barton began nursing wounded soldiers reaching Washington in April 1861, and by 1862 had talked her way onto the front lines at Antietam and Fredericksburg without official army sanction. From 1865 to 1868 she ran the Office of Missing Soldiers, tracing more than 22,000 men. A trip to Europe introduced her to the International Red Cross, and in 1881 she founded its American branch, leading it through the Johnstown Flood, the Armenian crisis and the Galveston hurricane. BriefHistory has that record in full. What follows is the part that made her, and the part that ended it.

She improvised through the worst of it: corn husks for bandages when supplies ran out at Antietam, and in 1864, while she was directing hospitals for the Army of the James, a bullet passed through her dress sleeve without touching her and killed the soldier she was tending. She carried that kind of exposure for years without a break and without a salary she could rely on. It caught up with her at the Red Cross itself. By 1904, at 83, a newer generation of male administrators had decided her personal and organizational finances were too tangled to defend, and forced her resignation from the charity she had built from nothing. She did not retire quietly — she founded the National First Aid Society the same year and kept working.

She died of pneumonia at her Glen Echo, Maryland home in 1912 and is buried at North Cemetery in Oxford, Massachusetts. The Red Cross she was pushed out of grew into the institution that still carries her name into hurricanes and floods, run now on the professional, credentialed lines the men who removed her had wanted. Her Glen Echo house became the first National Historic Site dedicated to a woman's work, in 1975. Scholars still argue over how much of her own account of her achievements — the tallies of soldiers found, of burials arranged — can be taken exactly at face value, a tension common to reformers who had to be their own publicists to survive.

Clara Barton's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Bordentown free public school building
  New Jersey's first free public school — grew to 600 pupils in a year 1852
• Office of Missing Soldiers company
  Traced more than 22,000 men after the Civil War 1865
• American Red Cross company
  Founded May 21, 1881, at her Washington apartment 1881
• The Red Cross book
  Her own history of the organization's founding 1898
• The Story of My Childhood book
  Published at 86 1908
• National First Aid Society company
  Founded the same year she was pushed out of the Red Cross 1904

• 1832 aged ~11 Nurses her brother David for two years after a fall She was 11. The experience shaped every job she took afterward.
• 1839 aged ~18 Earns a teaching certificate at 17
• 1855 aged ~34 Takes a clerkship at the U.S. Patent Office One of the first women in a federal post paid equally with men.
• August 1862 aged 40 Gains permission to work the Civil War front lines She served at Antietam and Fredericksburg, among other battles.
• 1865 aged ~44 Opens the Office of Missing Soldiers Ran it until 1868, tracing over 22,000 men.
• May 21, 1881 aged 59 Founds the American Red Cross
• 1900 aged ~79 Leads Red Cross relief after the Galveston hurricane
• 1904 aged ~83 Forced to resign the Red Cross presidency at 83
• April 12, 1912 aged 90 Dies of pneumonia at Glen Echo, Maryland

• Susan B. Anthony 1820–1906
  Suffragist and civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. fellow suffrage advocate
• Abraham Lincoln 1809–1865
  16th President who preserved the Union during the Civil War and issued the Emancipation Proclamation. nursed the wounded of his war
• Dorothea Dix 1802–1887
  Social reformer who championed humane treatment of the mentally ill and established asylums nationwide. contemporary in Civil War nursing administration
• Walt Whitman 1819–1892
  Poet whose Leaves of Grass celebrated democracy, nature, and the human body in free verse. fellow Civil War hospital volunteer