Part 4

Alone in the world, dependent upon her own efforts for a living and looking for a “job,” the following is what in letters Miss Barton says of herself in 1854 and 1860 respectively:

In a letter to her friend Miss Lydia F. Haskell, Washington, D. C., January 20, 1854, Clara Barton said:

“Well, I am a clerk in the United States Patent Office, writing my fingers stiff every day of my life.... The truth is, I have written nights until one or two o’clock for the last two weeks. I shall not be so very busy long. I am just now fitting the mechanical report for the press; that off my hands and I shall be quite at ease, I suppose.”

In a letter to Frank Clinton, Bordentown, New Jersey, dated January 2, 1860, Clara Barton said:

“I can teach English, French, drawing and painting.... I am a rapid writer or copyist, and have the reputation of being a very good accountant ... and if, in your travels through the South, you see an opening for me, tell me.”

As the pioneer woman in Government service Clara Barton was the object of commiseration. And only because she was a woman, she suffered through jeers and hoots and cat-calls, and tobacco smoke in her face, and slanderous whisperings in the hallways and boisterous talks about “crinoline”—all sorts of offensiveness, on the part of Government employees. Clara Barton in the public school, in the patent office, in the Civil War, in the Franco-Prussian War, in the Cuban War, in national disasters, in the presidency of the Red Cross, now filled by the President of the United States, is a series of object lessons of the greatest significance in the progress of womankind in the public service. Clara Barton the _intruder_ among men in the patent office in 1855, and Jeannette Rankin, the _honorable_ among men in Congress in 1918, are the exponents respectively of two conditions of American sentiment as to the public function of women in the United States.

Possibly because of her sad experience as a woman in the public service, she became one of those who, with Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and other suffragettes, blazed the way to equal rights for women—equal rights now approved by the President, the United States Congress and the American people. At a meeting of the American Suffrage Association held in Washington, D. C., in language most caustic and argumentative, in part in a public address Clara Barton said:

A woman shan’t say there shall be no war—and she shan’t take any part in it when there is one; and because she doesn’t take part in the war, she must not vote; and because she can’t vote she has no voice in her Government. And because she has no voice in her Government she is not a citizen; and because she isn’t a citizen she has no rights, and because she has no rights she must submit to wrong; and because she submits to wrong she isn’t anybody. Becoming optimistic, she said, the number of thoughtful and right minded men who will approve equal suffrage are much smaller than we think and, when equal suffrage[5] is an accomplished fact, all will wonder as I have done, what the objection ever was.

Footnote 5:

The Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution proclaimed August 26, 1920.

XII

Clara Barton’s simple life was long, and so full of stirring incidents that all the books will not record the whole of it.

Worcester (Mass.) _Telegram_.

Be not like dumb-driven cattle.

LONGFELLOW—_The Psalm of Life_.

The Ox has therefore stretched his yoke in vain.

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM.

And the plain ox, That harmless, honest guileless animal, In what has he offended? he whose toil, Patient and ever ready, clothes the land With all the pomp of harvest. THOMPSON—_The Seasons_.

A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age. MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

BRILLAT SAVARIN.

The sign of true, not casual, progress, ... is the progress of vegetarianism ... more and more people have given up animal food. TOLSTOI.

I had not then learned the mystery of nerves. CLARA BARTON.

CREDULOUS OX—INNOCENT CHILD—CLARA BARTON, A VEGETARIAN

Among the Puritans the horse was a luxury; the beast of burden was the ox. In the first half of the nineteenth century the ox made possible in Massachusetts even the existence of man. In the snows of winter, at seed time and at harvest, the toiling ox was loyal—faithful to the best interests of the family. The ox himself was unsuspecting, and untutored in the art of deceiving others. He couldn’t think his kindly attentive Master, Man, unappreciative, disloyal—wholly obsessed with greed. He didn’t know that money was above life,—he hadn’t read war-history. He didn’t know that through the love of money, by man, come life’s woes. The ox knew only that _he_ was the friend to man; and he thought man must be _his_ friend. Poor credulous ox! And yet in the child the friendship of the ox is not misplaced. Innocent child! to man and beast Heaven’s best gift, a loyal friend.

Captain Stephen Barton kept a dairy. When a small girl Clara used to drive the cows and oxen to, and from, the pasture. Clara also assisted morning and evening in milking the cows. One evening she observed three men, one holding in his hand an axe, driving a big, red, fat ox into the barn. She saw the man with the axe strike the ox in the head, then saw the ox drop to the floor. At the same moment she fell unconscious to the ground. She was carried to the house, placed on a bed, and a camphor bottle freely used. When she regained consciousness, in reply as to why she fell, she said: “Someone struck me.” “Oh, no, no one struck you,” they said. “Then what makes my head sore,” she asked. At that time her desire for meat left her; and in later years she used to say, “all through life to the present, I have eaten meat only when I must for the sake of appearances. The bountiful ground always yields enough for all of my needs and wants.”

REPRESENTATIVE TEMPERANCE ADVOCATES

XIII

The Mother, patriot though she were, uttered her sentiments through choking voice and tender trembling words, and the young man caring nothing, fearing nothing, rushed gallantly on to doom and to death. CLARA BARTON.

The soldier’s fear is the fear of being thought to fear. BOVEE.

Self trust is the essence of heroism. EMERSON.

I have no fear of the battle field; I want to go to the suffering men. CLARA BARTON.

I was always afraid of everything except when someone was to be rescued from danger or pain. CLARA BARTON.

Like the true Anglo-Saxon, loyal and loving, tender and true, the Mother held back her tears with one hand while with the other she wrung her fond farewell and passed her son on to the State.

CLARA BARTON.

FELL DEAD ON THE GROUND BESIDE HER

The first time Clara Barton visited in New Haven, she wore a gray dress that had bullet holes in it—received in caring for the wounded at Fredericksburg. In describing the battle scene Clara Barton said: “Over into that City of Death; its roofs riddled by shells, its very Church a crowded hospital, every street a battle line, every hill a rampart, every rock a fortress, and every stone wall a blazing line of forts!”

At Fredericksburg They rated blood as water, And all the slope shone red, Past Valor’s call By bristling wall; Defeat linked arms with slaughter Astride the blue-robed dead.

As Miss Barton was being assisted off the bridge by an officer, an exploding shell hissed between them, passing below their arms as they were upraised, carrying away both the skirts of his coat and her dress. A moment later, on his horse, the gallant officer was struck by a solid shot from the enemy; the horse bounded in the air and the officer fell to the ground dead, not thirty feet in the rear.

In her usual modest manner, in relating _war incidents_, she described the experience to a lady friend and said: “I never mended that dress. I wonder whether or not a soldier ever mends a bullet hole in his clothes.”

XIV

Military glory—that attractive rainbow that rises in showers of blood, that serpent’s eye that charms to destroy.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

The friends of humanity will deprecate war, whenever it may appear. GEORGE WASHINGTON.

There is no need of bloodshed and war. ABRAHAM LINCOLN.

* * * * *

Wars are largely the result of unbridled passions.

CLARA BARTON.

War is only splendid murder. JAMES THOMSON.

War is the mad game that the world so loves to play. SWIFT.

* * * * *

Every battleship is a menace to the peace of the world. With each new battleship every nation carries a chip on its shoulder.

CLARA BARTON.

The Red Cross took its rise in, and derived its existence from, war. Without war it had no existence. CLARA BARTON.

Deplore it as we may, war is the _great act_ of all history.

CLARA BARTON.

War has been the rule, if not largely the occupation, of the peoples of the earth from their earliest history. CLARA BARTON.

Scarcely a quarter of the earth is yet civilized, and that quarter not beyond the probabilities of war. CLARA BARTON.

General Sherman was right when, addressing an assemblage of cadets, he told them “war was hell!” Take it as you will, it is this;—whoever has looked active war full in the face has caught some glimpse of regions as infernal as he may ever fear to see.

CLARA BARTON.

Only time, prolonged effort, national economics, universal progress and the pressure of public opinion could ever hope to grapple with the existence of war, the monster evil of the ages.

CLARA BARTON.

I have studied the massing of forces and scanned from point to point the old battle-grounds of Marengo and Jena and Waterloo and the Magenta and Solferino and it has seemed to me that these armies had a fairer field and a better chance than ours, in the Civil War. CLARA BARTON.

War may be a _great harmonizer_, but it is not a _humanizer_.

CLARA BARTON.

That which is won by the sword must be held by the sword, whether it is worth the cost or not. CLARA BARTON.

If there be any power on earth which can right the wrongs for which a nation goes to war, I pray it may be made manifest.

CLARA BARTON.

If there be any good wars, I will attend them.

SIR PHILIP SIDNEY.

That noble and numerous class of patriots who are brave with other men’s lives and lavish of other men’s money. GLADSTONE.

There never was a good war, nor a bad peace.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

Don’t talk about war; we have done with war. The Peace of the world is the question now. CLARA BARTON.

WICKEDNESS OF WAR—SETTLES NO DISPUTES

Clara Barton was a patriot, but “not a war woman.” She had no sympathy with the religion such as was Odin’s, of the ninth century, which religion assured for him who had killed in battle the greatest number the highest seat reserved in the Paradise of the Valhalla; nor with the sentiment of the King of Denmark of that day, “What is more beautiful than to see the heroes pushing on through battle, though fainting with their wounds;” nor with the sentiment of that same king’s boast, “War was my delight from my youth, and from my childhood I was pleased with a bloody spear.”

Princes were privileged to kill, The numbers sanctified the crime.

Wolves in “packs” seek prey; so do men—in sheep’s clothing. Wolves truthful, in howls, send forth their propaganda—hunger; men untruthful, in words, send forth their propaganda—hate. If the “survival of the fittest” be nature’s law only brutes conform to nature—by using no weapons. Men kill their own “kith and kin”; brutes combine to protect their own species. The more one sees of men on war’s slaughter-fields killing their friends or strangers, for prospective profit, the more he must admire the ethics of the brute. In brute history there have been no wars. Facing human record, the record of 3,400 years, there have been 3,166 years of war, and only 234 years of peace; facing the picture of which history makes no mention and which in the wake of armies she had seen, Clara Barton says: “Faces bathed in tears and hands in blood, lees in the wind and dregs in the cup of military glory, war has cost a million times more than the world is worth, poured out the best blood and crushed the fairest forms the good God has ever created.”

Through war and its consequences, one third of “civilized man” since the world began has come to an untimely end, by violence, as did Abel at the hands of Cain.

Earth’s remotest regions Lie half unpeopled by the feuds of Rome.

“Mankind is the greatest mystery of all mysteries,” says Clara Barton, and insists that she can never understand the history of human conduct in this world, and wonders whether or not she will in the next. In the light of war’s history and, trying to solve the “mystery of all mysteries,” she asks: “Heavenly Father! what is the matter with this beautiful earth that thou hast made? And what is man that thou art mindful of him?”

Further philosophizing on the “Wickedness of War,” in a masterful public address, she says: “There is not a geographical boundary line on the face of the earth that was not put there by the sword, and is not practically held there by this same dread power. War actually settles no disputes, it brings no real peace; it but closes an open strife;—the peace is simply buried embers. The war side of the war could never have called me to the field—_through and through_, thought and act, body and soul, _I hate it_. We can only wait and trust for the day to come when the wickedness of war shall be a thing unknown in this beautiful world.”

Again philosophizing she says: “As I reflect upon the mighty and endless changes which must grow out of war’s issues, the subject rises up before me like some far-away mountain summit, towering peak upon peak, rock upon rock, that human foot has not trod and enveloped in a hazy mist the eye has never penetrated.”

XV

In the same year, and about the same time in the year, that Clara Barton first started for the battlefield her warm personal friend, Julia Ward Howe, wrote “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”

THE AUTHOR.

You remember the time was Sunday, September 14th, 1862.

CLARA BARTON.

Society forbade women at the front. CLARA BARTON.

Tradition absolutely forbade a good woman to go unprotected among rough soldiers. CLARA BARTON.

And what does woman know about war, and because she doesn’t know anything about it she mustn’t say, or do, anything about it.

CLARA BARTON.

It has long been said, as to amount to an adage, that women don’t know anything about war. I wish men didn’t either. They have always known a great deal too much about it for the good of their kind. CLARA BARTON.

I struggled long and hard with my sense of propriety—with the appalling fact that “I was only a woman” whispering in one ear; and thundering in the other the groans of suffering men dying like dogs—unfed and unclothed, for the life of every institution which had protected and educated me. CLARA BARTON.

When war broke over us, with an empty treasury and its distressed Secretary, Salmon P. Chase, personally trying in New York to borrow money to pay our first seventy-five thousand soldiers, I offered to do the work of any two disloyal clerks whom the office would discharge and allow the double salary to fall back into the treasury. When no legal way could be found to have my salary revert to the national treasury, I resigned and went to the field.

CLARA BARTON.

I could not carry a musket nor lead the men to battle; I could only serve my country by caring for, comforting, and sustaining the soldiers. CLARA BARTON.

I broke the shackles and went to the field. CLARA BARTON.

Washington, D. C., June 20, 1864.

Dr. J. M. Barnes, Acting Surgeon General, U. S. A.,

Sir: The undersigned, Senators and Representatives of Massachusetts, desire you to extend to Miss Clara Barton of Worcester, Massachusetts, every _facility_ in your power to visit the army at any time or place that she may desire, for the purpose of administering to the comfort of our sick and wounded soldiers. Also that such supplies and assistants, as she may require, may be furnished with transportation.

We are, very respectfully,

H. L. DAWES, ALEX. H. RICE, D. W. GOOCH, JOHN D. BALDWIN, THOS. D. ELIOT, GEO. S. BOUTWELL, CHARLES SUMNER, HENRY WILSON, JNO. B. ALLEN, OAKES AMES, W. F. WASHBURNE.

HER WARDROBE IN A HANDKERCHIEF—THE BATTLE SCENE

On September 14, 1862, Clara Barton started from the City of Washington to the firing line, then at Harper’s Ferry. She took with her no Saratoga, no grip, no “go-to-meeting clothes.” The articles in her wardrobe on that eventful trip will never be known but it is known to a “dead certainty” that whatever “worldly goods” she did take with her were all tied up in a pocket handkerchief.

Her only escort was a “mule skinner.” He, wearing the blue, held the one _jerk line_ to the team of six mules, animals known in the west as “Desert Canaries.” The vehicle in which Clara Barton took that eventful ride was an army freight wagon covered with canvas, such wagon sometimes called the “prairie schooner.” “In the Days of Old, the Days of Gold,” as “Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way,” the “prairie schooner” was almost the exclusive vehicle of conveyance over the deserts for freight and passengers. It was in the “prairie schooner” that the Mormons went to Utah in 1848, and the Argonauts to California, in “’49 and ’50.” It was from a “prairie schooner” that, rising from a sick bunk and looking out over that beautiful valley of Salt Lake, Brigham Young exclaimed: “This is the Place!”

After an eighty-mile ride bumping over stones and dykes and ditches, up and down the hills of Maryland, Clara Barton arrived at the battlefield. There, side by side, cold in death with upturned faces, were the brave boys of the Northern blue and the Southern gray. In closing a description of this battle scene Clara Barton says: “There in the darkness God’s angel of Wrath and Death had swept and, foe facing foe, the souls of men went out. The giant rocks, hanging above our heads, seemed to frown upon the scene, and the sighing trees which hung lovingly upon their rugged edge dropped low and wept their pitying dews upon the livid brows and ghastly wounds beneath.”

XVI

Clara Barton carried on her work in the face of the enemy, to the sound of a cannon, and close to the firing line.

Boston (Mass.) _Transcript_.

So long as the Republic lives the name of Clara Barton will be honored. _Roswell Record._

Clara Barton—Glorious Daughter of the Republic!

_The Buffalo News._

Clara Barton performed work for wounded soldiers often at the risk of her life. PHEBE A. HANAFORD, AUTHOR.

Clara Barton—right into the jaws of death she went, ministering to the wounded, soothing the dying.

CHAPLAIN COUDON (_of G. A. R._) _National House of Representatives_.

Follow the cannon. CLARA BARTON.

The soldier has been supposed to die painlessly, gloriously, with an immediate passport to realms of bliss eternal. CLARA BARTON.

The soldier who has fallen in battle “with his face to the foe” has been regarded as a subject of envy, rather than pity.

CLARA BARTON.

If wounded and surviving, the honor of a soldier’s scars has been cheaply purchased, it has been supposed, though he strolled a limping beggar. CLARA BARTON.

Only a small portion of the thought of the generations of the past has been devoted to the subject of devising, or affording, any means of relief for the wretched condition resulting from the methods of national and international strife. CLARA BARTON.

The pitiable neglect of men in war appears to have constituted one of the large class of misfortunes for which no one is to blame, or even accountable, assuming that wars must be. CLARA BARTON.

Go card and spin, And leave the business of war to men. DRYDEN.

I am a U. S. soldier and therefore not supposed, you know, to be susceptible to fear. CLARA BARTON.

THE BRAVERY OF WOMEN—CLARA BARTON’S BRAVEST ACT

When asked where occurred her bravest act, Clara Barton replied: “At Fredericksburg.” She made headquarters at the Lacy House, just north of the Rappahannock River. While there, the surgeon in charge of the wounded on the south bank of the river sent a special messenger to Miss Barton to come across with her assistants and supplies at once. As a _soldier_ and as an American patriot, she obeyed orders and followed the flag over the bridge and on to the battle field. In later years describing the women who went to the war Clara Barton sings:

The women who went to the field, you say, The women who went to the field;—what did they go for—? Did these women quail at the sight of a gun? Will some soldier tell us of one he saw run?

In referring to the _incident_, in her experience at Fredericksburg, she said: “As I walked across this bridge with the marching troops, the bullets and shells were hissing and exploding in the river on either side of me, the long autumn march down the mountain passes—Falmouth and old Fredericksburg with its pontoon bridge,—sharp-shooters—deserted camps—its rocky brow of frowning forts—the one day bombardment, and the charge!” There, unperturbed, among the men was Clara Barton, there in the broad glacis, the one vast Aceldama, where—

In the lost battle, Borne down by the flying, Were mingled war’s rattle With the groans of the dying.

REPRESENTATIVE SUFFRAGE LEADERS