Part 27
Ye have met to remember, may ye ever thus meet, So long as two comrades can rise to their feet; May their withered hands join, and clear to the last May they live o’er again the great deeds of the past Till summoned in victory, honor and love, To stand in the ranks that are waiting above, And on their cleared vision God’s glory shall burst, Re-united in Heaven, the old Twenty-first.
The meek brown-eyed little maiden who, in 1836, left the scenes of her childhood at the age of fifteen had returned crowned with laurel, in 1912, then seventy-six years a veteran in the service of humanity. Impressive in its simplicity is that home coming which occurred at Oxford. In Memorial Hall had assembled gray-haired men and women who had known her from her youth. In that hall were the children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the playmates of her childhood. The hall had been decorated by loving hands; flowers of rare beauty gently had been placed near the temporary altar. By her request her beloved pastor was there to invoke Him who was highest in service to humanity; to speak words of cheer and to bespeak immortality. Songs were sung, prayers were said, eulogies of her real character pronounced, and the long line of personal friends accompanied her to the Silent Home of her ancestors. Still clad as from youth in her fair robes of charity, there she lives and sleeps and sleeps and lives.
The Cradle and the Tomb Alas! so nigh.
No bugle sound reached the ear, no crack of the soldier’s rifle rent the air, no war hero’s honors were hers; hers were the honors of a gentle maiden that came to save life, not to destroy it. Into the open earth that received her, and on the grassy slope of the hill, lovingly were dropped flowers of sentiment; among these the red rose, the flower she loved best; the lily, symbol of immortality. There Valor proudly sleeps,—there almost in sight of the birthplace; where her eyes greeted, first, the Christmas Morn; where she was rocked in her rude wooden cradle; where her baby fingers had pressed against the window pane and her eyes looked out upon innocent nature; where she had romped with other children in the wildwood, gathered wild flowers in the field, ridden untamed horses, skated upon the smooth surface of frozen waters, learned life’s early lessons at home and in the school-room; where she had said “goodbye” to childhood, to enter public service. There, after more than four score years and ten, death was still almost amidst her baby playthings. Only a few steps from her cradle to the grave and yet, on that short journey, she had taken millions of steps for humanity. At the end of her journey is her memorial tribute to those she loved; waving appreciative is the flag she served; looming significant is the Memorial Red Cross, a memorial that gives expression to “a world of memories, a world of deeds, a world of tears and a world of glories;” and, as was said of another great American at his passing, Clara Barton now belongs to the ages.
THE FINALE
After the ceremonies at the cemetery, concluding with the hymn “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” the following conversation took place, at a christening:
The Mother: My little girl was born in Clara Barton’s birthplace; in the very room.
Reverend Barton: Bring her to me and I will christen her at once, “Clara Barton.”
CIII
Honorable Charles Sumner Young’s address was an eulogy surpassing anything ever heard in Oxford on the woman whom the town delights to honor—Clara Barton. Worcester (Mass.) _Telegram_, May 31, 1917.
There is properly no history—only biography.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON.
CLARA BARTON
(Delivered by Charles Sumner Young, at Oxford, Massachusetts, Memorial Day, 1917)
The inspiration of this historic day originated in the mind of woman. To the credit of womanhood there is a woman at the beginning of every great undertaking, sentimental and humanitarian. Today we pay the floral tribute to the late soldier-patriot. Equally befitting is it, amidst flowers of memory and at her birthplace, to pay tribute to the soldier’s comrade, the greatest woman-patriot of the Civil War.
In ancient days woman was the cultivator of the soil, the guardian of the fire, the creator of the home, the oracle of the Temple, and not infrequently the leader of men. Countless women in closing their career could similarly say as, according to Greek legend, said Semiramis: “Nature gave me the form of a woman, my actions have raised me to the level of the most valiant of men.” Artemisia was a heroine, wise in the councils of war, and had Xerxes not scoffed her advice he would not have gone down to eternal disgrace at Salamis. Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, who of her two sons said “These are my jewels,” lives honored as the highest type of Roman motherhood.
To a woman Rome was indebted for her republic; to a woman, the legal right of plebeians to become office-holders in the Roman Commonwealth; to a woman, the inspiration of Dante in transmitting to the world the Divine Comedy; to a woman, who pawned her jewels that she might finance Columbus, must be accorded the discovery of America; to a woman, the saving of the colonists of Jamestown and the colony’s future existence; to a woman America owes the Treaty of Guadaloupe Hidalgo; to a woman, the Sisters of Charity in the United States with its thousands of angels of mercy; to a woman, the foundation of Christian Science to which is anchored the hope of millions; to a woman, known as the “Grandmother of the Revolution,” the revolt against tyranny by autocracy in Russia; to a woman, the American Red Cross with its millions of humanists.
So vital to the human race is labor that in the centuries of the classic past gods and goddesses supervised the various fields of human effort. Such was the dignity of labor that even a toiling ox was regarded sacred, and whoever killed this companion of toiling man was punishable with death.
There is dignity in labor Truer than e’er pomp arrayed.
In the presence of more than a hundred suitors, Penelope was daily engaged in weaving while waiting the return of her Ulysses. The celebrated Lucretia was not too proud to spin in the presence of her attendants. In the days of Homer princesses did themselves the honor to dip the water from the springs, and with their own hands to wash the linen of the household. Augustus, the world sovereign, wore with pride the clothes made by his wife and sister. The sisters of Alexander the Great made the clothes worn by their distinguished brother. To the request of her son to make Mt. Vernon her home during her declining years Mary, the mother of Washington, replied: “My wants are few in this world, and I feel perfectly competent to take care of myself.” Queen Victoria became world-beloved because she rendered personal service to her children, and to the children in families less fortunate than her own.
Hypatia, the philosopher and teacher at Alexandria, refused the advances of all would-be lovers that she might give instruction to her pupils. Elizabeth accepted maidenhood rather than motherhood that she might exclusively serve her subjects; Maria Theresa reproached herself for the time she spent in sleep, as so much robbed of her people; Clara Barton, with but a few hours of sleep daily, served not her people but strangers. Wherever locating, Clara Barton was the directing spirit of a swarm of workers where were permitted no drones, and among whom she was the queen. She adopted as her rule of conduct, “hard work and low fare,” sacrificed health without complaint, risked life without hope of reward.
Nations are the rising and falling tides of humanity; women, the fixed beacon lights along the wave-borne highway of human progress. Fabiola, the Roman Matron of the fourth century, who established the first hospital and herself cared for human wrecks, set a precedent existent through all succeeding centuries. All honor to Queen Isabella, the first to appoint military surgeons and to originate what was known as the “Queen’s Hospital” for the sick and wounded. As a nurse in her home, in the plagues of her country and the wars of the fourteenth century, Catherine Benincasa rose to the exalted position of Saint Catherine, patron saint of Italy. As a nurse among the poor, sewing, cooking, keeping the house clean indoors, and working with her brothers in the harvest field—before she saw the vision of St. Michael—prepared Joan of Arc to become the deliverer of France from Britain in the fifteenth century, and in consequence the Maid of Orleans became a patron saint of that period.
Maria Theresa provided hospitals for the wounded soldiery in the country over which she ruled, until then a soldiery wholly neglected in their sufferings on the battlefield. Ever green in memory should be kept the name of Grace Darling, and that graphic picture of her as she hastens down from the lighthouse on Farne Island, and through the mists of that terrible night in 1838 goes to the rescue of the shipwrecked sailors. Born in Florence, Italy, reared in England, a little girl caring for the injured birds and animals in her improvised hospital at Lea Hurst, the student nurse in Germany, the superintendent of nurses in the Crimean War, Florence Nightingale became adored throughout Christendom, diffusing rays of glory on the closing years of the nineteenth century.
Of England’s heroine, Longfellow sings:
A Lady with a Lamp shall stand In the great history of the land; A noble type of good, Heroic Womanhood.
CLARA BARTON! The Babe of Oxford, a Christmas gift to humanity. In a little corner room of a little farmhouse, her tiny eyes greeted, first, the eyes of highly esteemed but not far-famed parents. From this Huguenot Colony, with no prestige of birth and no power of wealth, the meek, brown-eyed maiden went forth unheralded to carry her message of love and service. No Star of Destiny had cast its rays aslant the cradle, and no omen betokened her future as
Out of the quiet ways Into the world’s broad track
she ventured.
Timid as a fawn, “the sweet voiced retiring little woman” emerged from Youth’s environs. She had dreams romantic, but her romance was wrecked. She had visions of a mission, but for her no mission materialized. Things came to her “as if by a world controlling power.” In whatever her field of service, she stumbled over opportunities to be brave and good;—there seems to have been for her a decree of the Fates against “how circumscribed is woman’s destiny.”
Having a wide vision, she laid the foundation for the superstructure. She was a student of the best English writers; of the classics that gave prestige to Aspasia, the mentor of Socrates and Pericles. She studied sanitary methods at Jackson Sanitorium, and treatment of diseases with Doctor Carpenter at London and with her co-worker, Doctor Hubbell. In statesmanship she learned at the feet of Webster, Calhoun, Sumner and Lincoln. In military tactics and military strategy, she studied Napoleon at Ajaccio, his birth-place, and at Paris made by him “Paris Beautiful,” whence the leader of men promulgated the Napoleon Code of Laws;—“Paris Beautiful” and the Code, two services which of themselves entitle Napoleon to lasting fame.
Of great versatility, she had varied accomplishments. She conversed in French, and was a close student of Holy Writ. In crayon and painting, she produced work highly commended by artists. In letter writing, as evinced by letters which “excelled all others in literary merit that come to the White House,” and by tens of thousands of other letters, she must ever rank in a class with Cornelia, the Roman matron; and Abigail Adams, the illustrious American. In poetry, as tokened in “Marmora,” “A Christmas Carol,” “The Women Who Went to the Field,” and in many other published and unpublished poems, she at times received real inspiration from some gentle muse. In pedagogy, as through Pestalozzi in Switzerland so through Clara Barton in New Jersey, “pauper schools” were transmuted into public schools.
In oratory, through her six war lectures and many other public addresses, she established her reputation as a public speaker. Speaking from the same platform, receiving a like fee and being as great a “drawing card” as John B. Gough, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips and Henry Ward Beecher, she must rank for all time as one of the greatest orators of a half century ago. Mr. W. J. Kehoe, having reported thousands of speeches and for twenty-five years official reporter of Congress, says: “Clara Barton evinced qualities of diction and oratory hardly excelled by any other American.”
Separate and distinct from that of man is the inner machinery of woman’s mind; distinctive also are the outward manifestations. Whether as the ruler of a nation or the ruler of a cottage, a woman’s mind rules in its own inimitable way. In the realm of heart, woman is the queen and in that realm there can rule no king. Of our many great American heroes and statesmen, only one has been honored in having had accorded to him the heart of woman—all Americans worship at his shrine. Of a woman’s mind, the inner workings and outward manifestations, no man has made portrayal, none save perchance the Bard of Avon through his fifty heroines. Having “the brain of a statesman, the command of a general and the heart and hand of a woman” no man, as indicated by Lincoln, could have become world-adored through services such as were rendered by Clara Barton.
Equipped a leader among women, she became no Zenobia with thirst for fame; no Cleopatra, with Cæsars and Anthonys at her beck and call; no Catherine the Great, with political and military support; no Joan of Arc, with a frenzied and despairing soldiery at her heels; no Elizabeth nor Victoria, with an Empire to acclaim her reign; Clara Barton became the self-termed “lonesomest-lone-woman-in-the-world”;—a woman “majestic in simplicity,” who went about merely doing good and, in enduring influence for good, surpassed them all.
She came not from a line of ancestors reliant mainly on social prestige. Her inheritance from environments was a spirit intensely practical—the puritan spirit.
REPRESENTATIVE MASSACHUSETTS STATESMEN
She achieved through nature’s endowments—a head to think, a heart to feel and hands to work. From her hard-working Barton forbears she inherited the sentiment in the Roman adage—“There is no easy way to the stars from the earth”;—all things are conquered by labor. For her to labor was to worship; to her the dignity of labor was greater than queenly dignity; labor, “wide as earth,” became her passport from the farm, the field of war, fire, flood, drouth, famine and pestilence, into every country of earth; her “labor of love,”—the open sesame to the White House, to the palaces of kings and emperors.
The illustrious author of “The True Grandeur of Nations,” a personal friend of Clara Barton, says: “No true and permanent fame can be founded, except in labors which promote the happiness of mankind.” Clara Barton learned lessons in manual training before manual training became a science; she learned to use her hands in the kitchen, in the garden, in the factory, in the sick room. She not only knew how to sew and spin and weave and cook and care for the sick, but she organized women for such work throughout two continents. Labor organized by her among the poor, the sick and wounded in Germany, France, Russia, Sea Islands, Turkey, Armenia, Cuba and other countries, attesting her appreciation Luise, the Grand Duchess of Baden, writes: “Clara Barton possesses the ever powerful mind and ready love for suffering mankind;—faithful gratitude follows her for ever.”
In person she was not a Queen of Sheba arrayed for kings to admire; not a Cleopatra bejeweled in richest splendour to beguile military heroes; not an Elizabeth with a new dress for every day in the year to impress millions of subjects—she was a “working-woman.” Her raiment was homespun or commonplace, by her ‘made over,’ raiment which would put to shame for economy the average rural housewife, and yet she could but be envied for her artistic taste by the heiress to millions. Simple in dress she lived close to Nature, a Nature-child of perennial growth;—“a passion for service,” she developed through the years an identity all her own. Her identity thus developed, she became a landmark in her own country for humanity, as in Switzerland became Dunant who first caught the spirit of the Red Cross work on the bloody fields of Solferino.
Most unusual were Clara Barton’s physical and mental powers. If her powers were portrayed by the imaginative mind of a Homer, Clara Barton would be a composite being possessed of attributes as to the head, of a Jupiter; as to the heart, of a Venus; as to the shoulders, of an Atlas; as to the hands, of a Vulcan. But she was human, intensely human, a “frail woman,”—in her own words, a “Poor little me.” Her weakness was her strength; her courage, a woman’s heart.
She dwelt not on a Mount Olympus, not in a palace;—when on the “firing-line,” “rolled in her blankets” she camped under the wagon, or on the ground within a canvas tent. In the days of _rest_ through her closing years, she “camped” in a warehouse of thirty-eight rooms, with seventy-six closets; in her “house of rough hemlock boards,” a house stored with food and clothing and she ready “to set in motion the wheels of relief at a moment’s warning over the whole land.” She lived on the banks of the quiet Potomac, in the midst of Nature’s foliage, in the presence of the oak, the elm, the cedar, the poplar,—within “God’s first temples,”
UNITED STATES SENATORS WHO SAW THE WORK OF CLARA BARTON
where birds sang to her beautiful songs, and where flourished sweetest scented flowers.
Within that house on the Potomac, Clara Barton received from President McKinley the command: “Go to the starving Cubans with your relief ship, and distribute as only you know how.” In haste to carry out that command, when nearing the point of service, she begged that she might have the right of way. “Not so,” said the Admiral of the Navy; “I am here to keep the supplies out of Cuba; I go first.” Clara Barton replied: “I know my place is not to precede you. When you make an opening, I will go in. You will go and do the horrible deed; I will follow you, and out of the human wreckage restore what I can.” Having herself achieved a place in unusual fields of public service, in this war timely the advice of Clara Barton: “Woman, there is a place for thee, my hitherto timid, shrinking child; go forth and fill it, that in thee mankind may be doubly blessed.”
Following the precedent of him who was “first in war, first in peace,” in war and in peace at her own expense and without salary, Clara Barton served her country. Hers was the patriotism of a Washington, “What is money without a country.” In the early days of the Civil War, as to the probable capture of the City of Washington by the Confederates, she exclaimed: “If it must be, let it come, and when there is no longer a soldier’s arm to raise the Stars and Stripes above the Capitol, may God give strength to mine.” In defiance of sentiment as to the propriety for a “lone-woman” to go with the soldiers on the battlefield, she conformed to her father’s patriot-sentiment, “Go, if it is your duty to go.”
Through the thousands of years of Pagan and Christian history there had existed the sentiment “Humanity in war must stand aside.” Among men, war-trained and war-sacrificed, rare the word of pity that reached the Most High for the wounded soldier. On the battlefield there had been seen no angel of mercy until was seen the angel nurse, with the candles of her charity lighting up the gloom of suffering and death.
At the second Bull Run, in August, 1862, with a tallow candle in her hand through the darkness, in tears the ministering angel moved gently among the suffering thousands, putting socks and slippers on the wounded, feeding the hungry, giving water to the thirsty. Her own life then in peril, while on that field of carnage there came from her lips the heroic words: “I should never leave a wounded man, if I were taken prisoner forty times.” Was hers patriotism to country? Greater than patriotism. Was hers woman’s love—woman’s love for her friend? It was love divine, a woman’s love for all mankind.
On, on to Chantilly, mid darkness and gloom, Fire, thunder and lightning, guns boom upon boom.
At Chantilly the rain came down in torrents, the darkness impenetrable save when lit up by the lightning or the fitful flash of the guns. There up the hill to her tent she goes, falling again and again from exhaustion,—only to find a few moments’ rest on her bed of earth soaked with water. From her tent at midnight, the dead grass and leaves clinging to her, her hair and clothes dripping wet, she comes back to heartrending scenes. Forgetful of self, she carries army crackers mixed with wine, brandy and water for her compatriots, such work continuing for more than one hundred consecutive hours, save two hours of dreamful sleep.