Читать книгу Clara Barton, Professional Angel - Elizabeth Brown Pryor - Страница 14

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In her hasty departure from the rivalries in Bordentown, Clara Barton herself seems hardly to have known why she headed south. “I wanted the mild air for my throat,” she later claimed, stating that she believed Washington to be the furthest point south an unescorted woman could go with propriety. At other times she maintained that the decision was influenced by her interest in politics or the presence of the Library of Congress in the capital. Since the library offered her access to a greater variety of materials than she had ever before encountered, Barton hoped to spend her time in therapeutic study.¹

Certainly her decision had little to do with any lure of city lights, for Washington in the early 1850s was hardly a stimulating metropolis. The capital had been plopped down into the wilderness a half century earlier, and unfinished public buildings still stood like splendidly incongruous islands in a sea of seedy and temporary structures. These lent an air of hesitancy to the city, as did the transient population that flocked to it, anxious to receive the favors of the men who governed there, and then, with unabashed fickleness, left town when better prospects were seen elsewhere. The existence of slavery in the capital, the sleepy tempo, and a lack of adequate public water or sewage facilities often startled those visiting from Europe or the northern United States. Social and political life ebbed and flowed with the sessions of Congress. Those seeking entertainment could look chiefly to the galleries of the Senate or House of Representatives, a stroll on the Capitol grounds, or to private levees, to which everyone, from lowly government clerks to foreign diplomats, was invited. Both the government and the social arena were dominated by those from below the Mason-Dixon line; the city spoke with a decidedly southern drawl.²

Barton welcomed the slow pace and balmy spring air, for she was battered by the overwork and disappointment she had met in Bordentown. She and Fanny Childs took rooms near the Capitol in one of the city's innumerable boarding houses. While her friend looked for a new school in which to teach, Barton settled in to the “dim quiet of the alcoves” and arranged an ambitious course of reading for herself. Still eager to make up for her “lost 10 years” of teaching, she sped through books until, even as her throat grew better, her eyes suffered from the strain. “I enjoyed my quiet, almost friendless and unknown life,” Barton wrote.³ Her belief that she had done the right thing in escaping the situation in Bordentown was reinforced when the news reached her from New Jersey that the town had lost faith in the schools and had dismissed the principal and several teachers. “We have…all come to the conclusion that you took a prudent course with the Bordentown school and left it at just the right time,” wrote Stephen in May 1854. “I think it will be a long time before they can have a peaceable publick school and they had better have none than to have any other.”⁴

Barton's life was “almost friendless,” but not completely so. Among her first acquaintances in Washington was Alexander DeWitt, congressman from her home district. A tall, congenial man and a distant cousin, he made it his business to offer Clara hospitality and to act as an influential “sympathizer and benefactor.”⁵ Through DeWitt, Barton met another early friend and patron: Charles Mason, the commissioner of patents. Calm, self-effacing, and with an imposing intellectual curiosity, Mason proved to be a stimulating companion. Moreover, he shared many of Barton's views about public-spirited philanthropy and impressed her with his earnest efforts to conduct Patent Office business in an atmosphere of scrupulous fairness. For his part, Mason found Barton to be an excellent conversationalist and an astute political observer.⁶

Impressed with Barton's motivation and credentials, Mason asked her to become governess to his twelve-year-old daughter, Mary.⁷ Before the arrangements could be settled, however, DeWitt used his influence to persuade Mason that she would be much more suited to work as a clerk in the Patent Office. To her surprise she was requested to attend a formal interview, and the commissioner went so far as to send his private carriage to pick her up.⁸ At the interview Mason offered her a job as a clerk, copying patent applications, caveats, and regulations at the very respectable salary of fourteen hundred dollars a year. By July 1854, she had put her reading aside and had taken on the new role of office worker.⁹

Barton had a naturally inquisitive mind, and the Patent Office must have seemed an especially stimulating atmosphere. Her working life had been dominated before by children, among whom she had neither peers nor competition. Now she was challenged and amused by a whole office of fellow workers. Moreover, the work of the office encompassed an enticing range of pursuits—not only the regulation and granting of patents but many types of scientific research and acquistion. Although the office was under the auspices of the Department of the Interior, it carried out many of the functions of the later Department of Agriculture, Smithsonian Institution, and Weather Bureau. It sponsored scientific expeditions around the world and had amassed a large collection of specimens, many relating to the natural history of North America and the background and inventiveness of its people. Charles Mason believed these articles were too valuable and too interesting to sit in the cellar in which he had discovered them. After he cajoled Congress into appropriating money to construct a large addition to the already imposing Greek Revival building, the Patent Office took on some aspects of a museum. A march up the high steps and along its arched and marbelized corridors became a necessary stop for visitors to the capital. “It contains many of the rarest curiosities in the United States,” Clara wrote enthusiastically to a former pupil, including “Jackson's dress worn at the battle of New Orleans, and scores of relics too numerous to mention.” Like other branches of the government, the Patent Office had its spindles of red tape, petty spoils, and wasteful paper shuffle, but with its emphasis on innovation, it kept its reputation as one of the more dynamic places to work in Washington.¹⁰

The office employed lawyers, patent examiners, and clerks, whose number was strictly regulated by law. The commissioner had the option of hiring temporary clerks when the rush of business required it, however. Mason had chosen to use a very liberal interpretation of the patent laws, for he believed that promotion of technological progress was the most effective way of developing the country. The results of his policy showed themselves in simpler procedures and more open competition for the securing of patents—and a consequent flood of applications. The commissioner was therefore forced to be equally liberal in the number of temporary clerks he hired. It was as one of these impermanent workers that Barton was first employed.¹¹

Barton's position, though insecure, was nonetheless an unusual one for a woman. The government had very few women in its employ in 1854, and those who were hired were chiefly the widows or daughters of former employees, who kept the job in the deceased man's name. Few officials felt comfortable with the presence of women in the offices, but no firm policy had been established. Barton knew of only four other female clerks in Washington at the time of her appointment, though a year later there were at least that number working in the Patent Office alone. Her position was all the more unusual in that she was receiving a salary equal to that of the office's male clerks. Even in this favor-oriented metropolis, her job was precarious, and Mason took care to keep the situation unadvertised. During the six years she was in government service, not once was she included in the official roll sent annually to Congress.¹²

From nine o’clock in the morning until three in the afternoon, Barton labored with the other clerks. Her exquisitely formed and highly legible handwriting made her valuable to the office, as did her trustworthiness in confidential matters. In these first months of her employment she relished the novelty and responsibility of her position. “My situation is delightfully pleasant,” she wrote in October 1854. “There is nothing in the world connected with it to trouble me and not a single disagreeable thing to do, and no one to complain of me.”¹³ Her status and pay were far beyond any she had known as a schoolteacher. Following on the heels of her inequitable treatment by the Bordentown school board, the compensations of this job must have been especially gratifying.

She was easing, too, into Washington society, enjoying its personalities and eccentric social life. After walking in the golden autumn weather she wrote to her friends of the quiet confidence she felt.¹⁴ She took every opportunity to visit the Senate debates, where, from the gallery of the new red and gold Senate chamber, she came to know the faces and style of the era's great politicians: Sam Houston, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Charles Sumner were among those who particularly impressed her. She was surprised, like other young clerks, to find herself invited to numerous parties, and her early friendless condition rapidly changed. “I should be happy to see your nice collection of choise [sic] friends,” her brother told her, adding, “I think I can conceive the value you set on them for you and I value friends about alike.”¹⁵

Barton was boarding now with Joseph Fales, a fellow Patent Office worker, and his thin, jolly wife, Almira. Their companionship was light-hearted and added laughter to the satisfaction of hard work. Almira, whose exuberance especially impressed Clara, was a tall, plainly dressed woman with, as one friend noted, “few of the fashionable and stereotyped graces of manner.” She was a storyteller, a devotee of the jovial manner, gangly, abrupt, and disconcerting. Almira Fales believed strongly in the necessities of charity and pursued her private projects with a drive that matched Barton's own. Her enthusiasm and passionate devotion to her northern background would cause her to wholeheartedly embrace relief work during the Civil War—work that was to have a direct effect on Barton's own role in that conflict. But in 1854 Almira was for the most part simply an amusing personality in Barton's gallery of friends and acquaintances, providing a nice contrast to the more sophisticated and serious society of Alexander DeWitt and the Masons.¹⁶

Clara worked in this contented and ambitious spirit for nearly a year. Then, to her dismay, her “valuable ally,” Commissioner Mason, decided to resign his position and return to his home in Iowa. A difference of opinion with the secretary of the interior over internal administrative affairs was the immediate cause, but Mason was also anxious to oversee the affairs on his farm and remove his family from the heat of the Washington summer. His decision resulted in a good deal of confusion in the Patent Office and had some unfortunate consequences for Clara Barton.¹⁷

Mason left in mid-July 1855, and Samuel T. Shugert, his chief clerk, was appointed acting commissioner. Shugert was eager to please Secretary McClelland, and one of his first steps—despite his personal friendship with Clara Barton—was to consider removing the four female clerks from the office. Their presence had long annoyed McClelland, an old-line politician who considered that the women were taking jobs from deserving men who, even if not more competent, were at least voters. The sight of teapots and hoopskirts in the office irritated him; he could not see that they were only the female equivalent of the omnipresent cigars and spittoons. Barton's appointment as recording clerk was immediately dropped, and in August 1855 she was placed on the rolls as a copyist, to be paid according to the amount of work she completed each month.¹⁸ Ten cents per hundred words was the standard rate for both men and women. Even the most industrious copyist rarely made over nine hundred dollars a year. Worse yet, Shugert, though retaining their names as employees, gave the women no work to do; Barton drew no salary at all for the months of July, August, and September 1855.¹⁹ She and her colleagues were further discouraged when Shugert announced that by the end of August they must vacate the basement room in which they worked.²⁰ Back in Iowa, Mason heard the news and was greatly saddened. “I have some grave objections if I understand the matter rightly,” he remarked. “They were some of my best clerks and besides charity dictated their appointment and retention.”²¹

Barton began to mobilize her partisans almost as soon as she heard of Shugert's scheme. She wrote to her cousin, Judge Ira Barton, asking for his support, and she hoped that her father's membership in the Masonic order might also aid her. After reading her lengthy explanation of the situation, her brother Stephen expressed his sympathy and assured her that she had the support of her cousin, as well as Isaac Davis, a prominent politician.²² More importantly, Barton solicited the aid of Alexander DeWitt. He too wrote to McClelland and used all the influence at his command to have her retained. “Having understood the Department had decided to remove the ladies in the Patent Office on the first of October,” DeWitt wrote to McClelland, “I have taken the liberty to address a line on behalf of Miss Clara Barton, a native of my town and district, who has been employed in the past year in the Patent Office, and I trust to the entire satisfaction of the Commissioner.” ²³ But McClelland was seemingly unswayable. On September 27, 1855, he replied sharply, telling DeWitt that though he wished to help Barton, he would stop short of retaining “her, or any of the other females at work in the rooms of the Patent Office.” He allowed that they might do piecework in their own homes but balked at the “obvious impropriety in the mixing of the two sexes within the walls of a public office.” He was, he concluded, “determined to arrest the practice.”²⁴

It was not uncommon to send work out to be done in the home, and it is probably in this capacity that Barton worked in October 1855. She collected $73.56 that month, a rate well over that of most clerks. Why she was not dismissed on October 1, as McClelland had ordered, is not altogether clear, but perhaps, if his real complaint was the proximity of the women to other office workers, he did not object to her copying outside the building. Like the other women she would walk every morning along Seventh Street, past the bustling city market, and up the stairs of the Patent Office to pick up her work and hand in completed projects. She was not allowed to stay in the offices or linger with the other clerks.²⁵

What Barton thought of this drastic cut in pay and stature, whether she believed it preferable to dismissal or accepted it only on temporary terms while she looked for work elsewhere, has gone unrecorded, but it surely reinforced her growing objection to the unequal chances women had for earning a livelihood. She did not have long to debate the case, however, for in late October she received news that Charles Mason was returning from Iowa. The demand for his reinstatement had risen from the scientific grassroots of the nation. Inventors from all over the country sent petitions to him and to the government bemoaning the loss of his services. Bored after only a few months of the staid rural life he had previously coveted, Mason yielded. He arrived back in Washington on November 1, and with his return Barton's fortunes again rose.²⁶

In November 1855 Barton received pay of $135, nearly double that of the previous month and again consistent with her old salary of $1,400 per year. She was, however, kept on the rolls as a temporary copyist at the standard rate. Mason, anxious to retain Barton's good services but reluctant to make any move that might goad McClelland into dismissing the female clerks entirely, probably developed the system of classifying Barton as one type of employee and rewarding her as another. As Barton was to declare, it was all a little “subrosa.”²⁷ It may also have served Mason's purposes to keep Barton's real status a secret, for he again needed her help in straightening out intraoffice problems.

“I have been this day in my old place in the Patent Office,” noted Mason in his diary on November 3. “I do not know how well I shall be pleased with it after all. I shall have some very unpleasant duties to discharge in general of the clerks and examiners.…I fear I shall be obliged to discharge some of them.”²⁸ Intemperance was a problem among the employees, a sticky situation since several prominent political appointees were among the offenders. Worse, however, was a network of frauds he believed was threatening the impartiality of the office. Several clerks were evidently selling patent privileges illegally, an old temptation about which he had complained to Congress as early as 1853.²⁹ Moreover, there were apparently a number of in-house rivalries and jealousies cropping up, which were difficult to control and damaging to morale. “I have been so disgusted with the office seeking manoeuvering all around me,” a Patent Officer worker declared.³⁰ Calling on Barton's tight-lipped assistance, Mason set about untangling the personnel knots.

Clara viewed Mason's efforts as a righteous crusade and something of a witch hunt. It appealed to her strong moral outlook and allowed her to indulge herself in a short period of sanctimoniousness. “I found the frauds,” she told a female reporter proudly. “It made a great commotion among the clerks; they knew what it meant and they tried to make the place too hard for me.”³¹ The only woman regularly in the office now, she took the brunt of any animosity that the men felt against women workers. She wore victory with smugness, and this exacerbated the bitterness that she felt the men had secretly harbored because of her ability to equal or surpass them in their duties. That she made no attempt to hide her close social ties with Mason may also have increased the resentment against her. Lining the halls as she came in to work, the men made catcalls, spit tobacco juice at her, and blew smoke in her face.³² “It wasn’t a pleasant experience,” Barton conceded, “in fact, it was very trying, but I thought perhaps there was some question of principle involved and I lived it through.”³³ Indeed, she rose above them, though it did little to dissipate her reputation for haughtiness. In a tone of marked superiority she told a friend that “there is not a spot upon my system that is not perfectly invulnerable to any touch of theirs, all the world who know as I know the relation they have sustained toward me, and know what to expect from them. Any blow that they could slanderously aim at me in these days, would make about as much impression upon me a[s] a sling shot would upon the hide of a Shark—I have got above them.”³⁴ The job that had once been “delightfully pleasant” was now possible to endure only to win her point. By September 1857, the daily trip to the office had become a “weary pilgrimage.”³⁵

It is difficult today to imagine the degree to which Barton's aggressiveness and capability appeared unusual—and in many ways unacceptable—in the 1850s. Such traits as ambition, bureaucratic competence, and leadership were the opposite of those preferred in the Victorian woman. However “accomplished” she might be, a lady was expected to be demure, self-effacing, easily controlled, and interested primarily in children and the home. Within this sphere a woman was exalted and idolized by society, which saw her as the protector of moral values and family sanctity. Outside of it there was little or no place for her. A woman who was not married—who chose not to be married—was already suspect; a woman who enjoyed men's company and forged brazenly into their fields of occupation was due for reproach. When Barton encountered the rows of men who spat upon her each morning, she was, in a sense, facing the judgment of contemporary society, which could not quite believe that it was “nice” for a woman to earn her living or strive for occupational fulfillment. It was for these reasons more than personal habits or proclivities that women who were pioneers in government service often gained a tainted reputation, despite the fact that most of them came from respectable middle-class backgrounds and conducted themselves with self-conscious decorum. There was a rumor that the early clerks “painted” themselves and used indelicate language, but few specific examples could be given.

Similarly, Barton's own reputation for lax sexual conduct during this period was probably based more on the boldness of her employment than any real promiscuity. Reports that she arrived in Washington in the company of Samuel Ramsey, her friend from Clinton, and that her talk of free love and unwillingness to live apart from the professor caused her sister to shun her company are thus suspect, as are later stories of a similar nature about Barton and Senator Henry Wilson. Although Clara may well have been an advocate of free love, neither Sally Barton Vassall nor Ramsey lived in Washington at the time of her early Patent Office employment; the latter story, which featured the birth of two illegitimate children with Negroid features, seems equally unlikely. It is doubtful that men of the stature of Alexander DeWitt or Charles Mason would continue to keep company with a woman who this blatantly breached society's rules. Because she enjoyed and sought the company of men and was adept at their amusements and repartee, Barton was always open to criticism of her feminine conduct. (In later life she would diminish it by modest dress, a low, soft voice, and by actively avoiding confrontation.) Given in addition her persistent drive to work and her air of superiority, there was a rich field for those who wished to gossip or who felt threatened by her unwillingness to abide by a smug society's standards. For the rest of her life Barton would be prey to those who could not or would not understand her motives. There were those who would point to her even at the age of seventy-eight with accusations of lax morality or loose living.³⁶

Employee relations at the Patent Office were strained enough, but the work of the office had also reached a fever pitch. An examiner complained that he had to get to the office at 5:00 A.M. to make any headway in his workload. Barton was copying over a thousand pages a month of “dry lawyer writing” into a ledger too heavy for her to lift. “My arm is tired,” she told her sister-in-law, Julia Barton, “and my poor thumb is all calloused holding my pen.”³⁷ She began to feel that the efforts were not worth the rewards of the job. “We are tired as a dog and almost sick,” she complained in half jest to Bernard, “and it wouldn’t much matter if we were turned out to grass.” Whatever pressures emanated from the office were multiplied by Barton's own compulsion to drive herself, inability to relax, and tendency to set unattainable standards. After taking a few days off to visit Jamestown with a friend, she copied at a frightful pace to make up her work.³⁸ Despite intermittent bouts of malaria, she continued on the job, frequently working until late at night. She took a guilty view of her own foibles and rarely indulged herself either materially or mentally. Once when she misplaced a parasol, she would not buy another of good quality, forcing herself instead to carry a cheap one. In a strangely proud confession of this self-denial, she told Julia that “it was the best I have had all summer, and I walked to church under it today, so much to pay for carelessness.”³⁹

She was tired, her fingers were sore, yet she managed to maintain the intense correspondence with friends, former pupils, and relatives that was so important to her. Barton rarely spoke of her troubles in these letters; even brother Stephen had to plead with her not to bottle up her feelings.⁴⁰ Her sense of humor was particularly keen at this point in her life, and she joked about many of the rougher aspects of Washington life. Complaining in a light vein of the beastly summer weather, she wrote, “I have no idea where the thermometer stands, if indeed it stands at all, it does better than most people can.”⁴¹ And she told Julia, with regard to a current scandal that involved the shooting of a Pension Department worker by a jealous fellow employee, “We are at our same old tricks yet here in the capitol [sic], i.e. killing off everybody who doesn’t just happen to suit us or our peculiar humor at the moment.”⁴² Barton wrote of politics and her view of the South, which, like that of many New Englanders, tended to be one of both fascination and disdain. Southerners peppered their food—and their arguments—too much for her taste. She had a gift for letter writing, an ability to make the most mundane actions seem fresh and interesting. The enthusiasm she had in the small pleasures of her life was infectious, and the demands her correspondents made for letters almost smothered her in an embarrassment of popularity.

Barton was pleased, too, in these days, with the strength of her finances, which allowed her to buy presents for her father and Bernard, save extensively, and even purchase some valuable prairie land in Iowa, perhaps at the instigation of Charles Mason.⁴³ “We are in fact in a state of prosperity,” she told a friend, obviously tickled.⁴⁴ Free from monetary worries, she could enjoy the company of a fellow boarder, Mr. Harbour, a bricklayer from Iowa whose sense of humor matched her own: “We have laughed since he has been here until we are sore.”⁴⁵ Even merrier was the first of a number of extended visits of sister Sally and her younger son Irving Vassall to Washington. Clara escorted them to the city's important sites, talking enthusiastically of the local politics and gossip. With the unjaded eye of a sixteen-year-old, Irving surveyed the self-conscious Washington scene and found it wanting. Far from adulating the heroic statesmen of the age, he found their peccadillos a source of amusement. James Buchanan, the newly elected president, had hair “combed so as to stick up exactly straight something in the fashion of an Indian. He tips his head to one side and squints with one eye horribly.” Old General Cass, long a respected member of the Senate, was ridiculed because he did little except frequently move for an adjournment. “He has a funny way of smacking his lips every few moments,” Irving told his grandfather, “so loud that it can be heard distinctly all over the Senate chamber.”⁴⁶

Irving's Aunt Clara laughed at his irreverence but overall viewed the Washington circus a bit more seriously. She took advantage of every opportunity to watch the proceedings of the Senate and House, whose debates now centered upon the fiery question of slavery. One evening in 1856 she sat spellbound in the Senate gallery while Hubbell s senator Charles Sumner delivered an impassioned speech against expanding slavery into the territories. So vehement were his arguments in this speech, entitled “The Crimes Against Kansas,” that the next day he was struck down and beaten by Congressman Pierce Butler from South Carolina. Dour Charles Sumner with his staid speech and imperious ways was not a man to inspire adulation, but the assault on him caused a flurry of emotion both North and South. This scene, more than anything else she had witnessed in Washington, sobered Barton to the terrible divisions within the country. “I have often said that that night war began!” she told a friend years later. “It began not at Sumter, but at Sumner.”⁴⁷

She was beginning to realize, too, that her own political star was descending. The men who had sponsored her were, one by one, leaving Washington. Much to her regret, Colonel Alexander DeWitt was not reelected in Clara's home district, and he returned to Hubbell s in March 1857. “I would attempt to tell you something of how sorry I am that the Colonel is going home to return to us no more,” Barton confided to Julia, “but if I wrote all night I should not have half expressed it.”⁴⁸ Barton herself was out of step with the new Buchanan administration, which advocated unconditional political allegiance as a prerequisite to government jobs. Buchanan, like all presidents, sought to reward his own followers, but he also hoped to avoid the strife and delay caused by factions within the government. Though she could not vote, Barton's liberal views had made her sympathetic to the supporters of Buchanan's rival, the antislavery candidate John C. Fremont, and she realized her position was in jeopardy. When she joked about it at a political levee, a fellow office worker tried to smooth over the incident, saying that she was not responsible for anything she “might say on the present occasion, as the coffee was exceedingly strong.”⁴⁹ Charles Mason was also worried. On June 27, 1857, he noted in his diary that the secretary of the interior had that day “asked me what I thought of the policy of removals in the patent office for political differences of opinion. Being thus asked I stated to him briefly my notions, that it would not be wise…to remove good officers…merely because they differed from us in political views.”⁵⁰ Barton was agitated, yet she tried to make light of it to her family and friends: “there is great talk about cutting off official heads,” she told a nephew, “but no specimens of decapitation yet.”⁵¹

That summer the Patent Office was in a frenzy of activity. June 1857 was the busiest month in its history, and Barton put in long hours to keep up with the workload.⁵² In six days she did two weeks’ work, all in an oppressive heat wave that overwhelmed the city that month. As the summer wore on she tried to keep up with the work, though a severe case of malaria sapped her strength. She took “Bitter bitters” to rid herself of the disease, but her skin turned yellow and her spirits flagged.⁵³, ⁵⁴ Any hopes she had for keeping her job were finally dashed when Commissioner Mason resigned on August 4, 1857. Without DeWitt or Mason, her two staunch advocates, she had little chance of retaining her already controversial appointment.⁵⁵ “I begin to feel that my Washington life is drawing to a close,” she wrote home early in September. She had prized the work and welcomed the experience, but her uncomfortable position vis-à-vis the other clerks and the infighting between the secretary and commissioner allowed her to leave in a state of mind more philosophic and relieved than regretful. It “had not been all sunshine,” she concluded, but “a steady battle, hard-fought, and I trust well won.”⁵⁶ A month later, after being told that her place was wanted, she packed her bags and headed north.⁵⁷

Barton was free and had a substantial savings account, but she had formulated few ideas about her future, immediate or otherwise. Washington seemed a less attractive place to remain, even temporarily, now that her friends were gone, and a hostile administration virtually foreclosed any possibility of employment. But, as always, she was loath to return home permanently. Giving herself time to think and a much needed rest, Barton boarded a train for Auburn, New York. There she visited the Bertram family, with whom she had stayed years before while a student at the Clinton Liberal Institute.⁵⁸

Barton was a good house guest, cheerful, helpful, and unobtrusive, and the Bertrams pampered her and urged her to stay for an extended visit. They tried to interest her in settling in the area, possibly to start an academy for young ladies. Barton, however, was in no mood to set up a school or to overstay her welcome. Perhaps remembering her uncomfortable subservience at the Nortons’, she determined not to settle in New York. After a stay of nearly two months, she made a long-promised Christmas visit to her family.

She found that North Oxford was still little changed from her childhood and youth. The same families wielded the same influence. A few new mills had sprung up, but population, enterprise, and interest generally remained stagnant. Her father was growing deaf and saw with difficulty, but he still insisted on setting out his beloved garden and walking miles over the rocky hills to chat with his old comrades. Clara was living in the little house in which she was born, a guest of David and Julie, and that situation, too, was reminiscent of old times. The same climbing rose grew over the door, the same underlying tensions puzzled and disturbed her. Julie's acerbic tongue made her at once witty and disquieting to be around. David she found as charming and erratic as ever, personifying the family trait of overworking himself to the point of nervous exhaustion. Their active, bustling household reflected the varied life of an extended family, but to Clara it seemed to encompass everyone except her, and she felt again that she was the fifth wheel, the sore thumb, the one who did not quite fit.

Only Stephen was missing, his absence keenly felt by Clara. Early in 1856 he had moved to North Carolina to establish a new milling complex. His reputation had never completely recovered from the association with the Learned bank robbery in New York, and this, coupled with a conviction that labor and land were cheaper in the South, and chronic medical problems that made him uncomfortable during the cold New England winters, convinced him to make a move. He sold his share of the S & D Barton Mills to David, recruited twenty excellent workers, uprooted his wife, son Sam, and Bernard Vassall, and settled on the Chowan River in Hertford County. The first year was a lonely and anxious struggle to establish himself as a farmer and businessman. Still, he kept a tight cork on his liberal attitudes, availed himself of the local black labor supply, and determined to succeed. Two years later his business was thriving, but his wise counsel was sorely missed by his youngest sister.⁵⁹

Clara's visit to North Oxford was meant to be only a short one, but it lengthened to a stay of over two years. During this time she was suspended in a semipermanent limbo. She refused all offers to teach that would commit her to staying in the vicinity. Yet she had no dreams that would precipitate a move. Long a pragmatic dweller in the present, Barton was not given to making elaborate plans. Decisions about the future—a hazy and alien place to her—came with difficulty. She seems to have decided that if she would have to teach she would undertake a position in an academy or as a governess. With a partial eye to this, and with her ever-present zeal for further education egging her on, she embarked on a series of French classes, painting lessons, and other art courses. Languages and art were considered necessary attainments for a well-taught lady and indispensable to the private teacher. In 1858, Clara moved to Worcester, boarded with the family of Judge Barton, and commenced taking classes at a local academy.⁶⁰

Barton did well in her French courses and earned a little pocket money here and there, chiefly as a companion to an elderly woman friend.⁶¹ In addition, she lived off her savings, thus making herself financially independent. Nevertheless, she did not flourish in this, her own most-hated role of subservience and uselessness, and she felt obliged to explain herself and her actions or to conform to the family's standards when in their presence. For all of 1858, she continued her studies, half hoping that something more enticing would come along. Undecided about the future and unhappy with the present, she seemed incapable of acting decisively to relieve her depression.

Determined to make at least a small change, Barton switched from languages to drawing courses in September 1858. Throughout that fall she sketched from nature or models, then graduated to painting and work with ceramics. The few pieces of her artistic work remaining show a detailed and technically competent style, but one that lacks originality or freedom of movement. Though she found her efforts mildly interesting, she did not regard them as work and could not embrace them seriously. Rather, they encouraged her fears that she was not developing but only idly filling time.⁶²

What Barton sorely needed was a sense of purpose. She found a focus in two young relatives, both of whom looked to her for help at this time. She was distracted by their troubles and, more importantly, could bolster her own feelings of self-worth by working out their problems. But ultimately she undertook too much responsibility for these children, and they proved a costly emotional and financial drain. Their success or failure became entangled with her own sense of achievement; their progress dictated her own elation or sorrow.

It was concern for her nephew, Irving Vassall, that most seriously affected Barton's mood. She was closer as a peer to Irving and his brother Bernard than perhaps any other members of the family. To these two she confided her own darkest self-doubts, and with them she was at her most playful. For years she had exchanged poems with Bubby, as she nicknamed Irving, and enjoyed his witty and inquiring mind. In his late teens, he had “grown to be a young man, full of promise, noble and intellectual beyond all reasonable expectations.”⁶³ Now she watched with alarm as his health declined and his vitality sputtered and died. He was, at sixteen, consumptive, and he was beginning to experience the full effects of this debilitating disease. By the time his Aunt Clara moved to North Oxford, his spirits and constitution were precariously low. He and his mother had moved to Washington: they hoped the mild climate would improve his health. In fact it had deteriorated seriously during their first months there. To make matters worse, Vester Vassall, his father, had proven to be an inadequate provider. The Barton family was constantly called on to help, for Irving's own family could afford neither expensive medical care nor a permanent move to a less rigorous climate. Worried that the boy would be allowed to waste away, Barton began to confer with Bernard about the best possible course for his recovery.

Neither Bernard nor his father was working at that time, and thus they could contribute little. But Clara and Bernard together devised a plan to collect funds to send Irving to Minnesota. The “prairie cure,” which relied on the clear dry air of the Midwest to allay the disease, was popular at the time, and Barton hoped the change in climate would help her nephew. Sure that if she explained the case each of Irving's many friends would contribute a little toward the journey, Clara hoped to collect over one thousand dollars. She was, however, disappointed. Stephen Barton gave a good deal of money, and several Oxford families contributed five or ten dollars to the fund, but the net collection was something under two hundred dollars.⁶⁴

The family believed the proposed cure was unlikely to aid Irving's health and would be a waste of money on a boy who, though charming and talented, they considered thoroughly spoiled. This attitude annoyed and hurt Clara, and coupled with legitimate worries over Irving's condition and her own sense of futility, it created an intense period of anxiety for her. To her diary she complained that her nerves were “ticklish” and her sleep fitful. In early February 1859, she became so distraught that she could accomplish nothing and spent her time wandering aimlessly.⁶⁵ A month later, after receiving a letter from Irving that spoke of a greatly worsened condition, her old insomnia returned, and with it the painful physical symptoms that accompanied her periods of mental stress. “I became satisfied then,” she told Elvira Stone, “of what I had mistrusted before, i.e., where the difficulty in my back originates.”⁶⁶ Her low spirits increased throughout the year until she began again to think life not worth living and meditated forlornly on “the strange duplicity of mankind.”⁶⁷

It was not only Irving Vassall's case that depressed her but other family obligations as well. Her Aunt Hannah died in February 1859, leaving her “sad and desolate” and saddled with most of the responsibility for the funeral arrangements. Moreover, she worried about her father's increasingly feeble state. When David fell ill that spring, she felt obliged to care for him as of old. She returned to North Oxford to “nurse up” her brother, who was slow to mend, and her own affairs were left in disarray for nearly two months.⁶⁸ At the same time she took up the cause of Mattie Poor, another young relative. Mattie, then studying music in Boston with high hopes of becoming a concert pianist, had more ambition than talent. Naive and profligate, she ran through the $125 Barton sent her in March 1859 in less than three weeks. Horrified, but unwilling to see the girl's education go unfinished, Barton burdened herself with this additional responsibility.⁶⁹

She tried to raise her spirits by attending the lectures of fashionable speakers such as poet Oliver Wendell Holmes and travel author Bayard Taylor. She pieced together a quilt, kept up her voluminous correspondence, and took pleasure in a few outings with old friends.⁷⁰ As the summer wore on, however, her thoughts were increasingly black, her mood ensnared in some terrible, dark cavern of depression. Irving's situation was worsening gradually, and it seemed apparent that her sister and other family members would do little or nothing to aid him. Worse yet, Irving himself had apparently begun to lose courage and seemed reluctant to try the prairie cure or anything else that might help his condition. Finally, convinced that she must shoulder this burden alone if she could not find others to help, Barton sent Irving a bank draft for three hundred dollars. Then, after a thorough check of her finances, she penned him a forceful letter. “You are going to Minnesota as soon as you are able to start, and your mother is going with you,” she wrote, adding that the expense was little to her in comparison with the prospect of his recovery. More money would be forthcoming, she promised, concluding: “So My Boy dont puzzle over it, but get ready, get off and get well, as fast as you can.”⁷¹

She felt better with the decision made, despite the worrisome drain on her finances. (The last check to Irving, she confided to a friend, had “exceeded my limit.”⁷²) But, her guilt erased and optimism restored, she could now wax philosophic about her prospects. “I have taken the ‘rough and tumble’ of life and outlived aspirations enough to know something of it,” she told Bernard. “I have helped do just such things as I desire done for Irving and it was a pleasure then, and surely is now to remember it.”⁷³ Feeling more useful and self-satisfied than she had in a year, Barton decided to escalate her role in the matter. Sometime in August she announced that she would accompany Sally and Irving on their trip west and stay to see them settled.

It was a long and difficult journey. Irving's illness was more pronounced than she had been led to hope. His thin, shaky frame was wracked by hemorrhages, during which he lay coughing up blood for hours. Barton met the Vassalls in Washington, where they took the dirty and rattling cars for Chicago. They sat stiff and tired for the three day trip, arriving in Chicago's raw wooden railway terminal on September 18. Irving was sick and worn; he had to lie prone and quiet for a week before they continued on. Though it was her first trip west of New York, Barton was too preoccupied with Irving to experience much beyond a grim determination to settle him in a healthful atmosphere; she recorded no impression of Chicago's rough streets or the wide stretches of waving prairie grass, so different from the rocks and rills of Hubbell s. Before her opinion could be formed, they traveled on from Chicago to Duluth, where they stopped for several days.⁷⁴

Barton stayed with her sister and Irving until late November. They tried a number of towns in their search for a place to settle permanently but could not find one that suited them exactly. Irving, in despair over his ebbing strength, became pettish and was rarely satisfied with food, lodging, or location. Sally Vassall was also tired and exasperated, and it fell to Clara to keep them in good cheer. A woman who met them at this time remembered her as “a small person with a very bright face and at times very serious. Often she was gay, too.” Clara talked with Irving of slavery and politics, took him on excursions to see the Mississippi River, and tried to make herself useful to the families who generously put them up.⁷⁵ One family was surprised to find her building a cupboard from rough boards when she saw that they had need for one. Another man remembered the gracious and cheerful way in which Clara “refused to deprive the ‘little sisters’ of their bed, and slept on the floor,” and how she loaned her “dancing slippers” to a disappointed girl whose own had been forgotten. Later in life the girl would brag that “she stood in Clara Barton's shoes a whole evening.”⁷⁶

Finally, short of money and recognizing her own need to find a job, Barton returned home. Once there, however, her depression only worsened. To her discomfort she found her finances even less secure than she had supposed. Her old nervous condition was back and within a few weeks was so bad that she could scarcely leave her bed. She was also distressed to hear that both Bernard and his father were still essentially unemployed and unable to contribute to Irving's support. Worse yet, she either sensed or imagined a lack of hospitality on the part of David and Julie. Convinced that they wished her to leave, she felt more beholden than ever. In despair, she told Bernard that she had sent Irving thirty dollars more, but that he “must meet the next demand. I have very little money, no credit, no business, no prospect of any, and sick in bed, and unlike either of you, no home.”⁷⁷

Two weeks later Irving sent a request for additional funds, which Barton felt unable to raise. He also wrote that he disliked Minnesota, found it unbearably cold, and wanted to return to Washington for the winter. To underscore his point he allowed that his health had worsened in the Midwest. Alarmed that the boy might leave Minnesota before the cure had a chance to work and completely exasperated at his demanding and ungrateful attitude, Barton's patience gave way. “Can it be that he is so trifling and selfish?” she asked Bernard. “Would he subject us to all he has…and then after we are all beggared, rob us of all the little chance of gratification we could possibly have, viz to see him try to improve a little under our exertions.” If so, she concluded, “if there's not more than this to him, he is not worth trying to save.”⁷⁸

Her reserves of cheer and strength were giving out now, eaten away by worries real and imagined. Mattie Poor, who had also overrun her funds, refused to leave her studies, though she was now more than qualified to teach music. She demanded Clara's continued aid but rejected any advice along with the check; “she is only a counterpart of Bub on my hands,” Clara sadly noted.⁷⁹ At the same time, Clara was worried about her father's health. When he was again sick in February, she became so distraught that she exhausted herself, as she had so many times before, nursing him.⁸⁰ When she at length looked up from his sickbed she found the winter nearly over. Another season had passed without profit or serenity.

At home, Barton received no support, comfort, or even understanding for her misery. Friends and kinfolk thought her foolish for pampering Irving and Mattie and believed she had brought her troubles on herself. They could not understand why Clara did not take a teaching job, settle down, and rid herself of her nervous affliction. Julie Barton seemed concerned that her sister-in-law would become a permanent charge, for Clara had not been able to pay for her board for several months. Furthermore, Clara was—or felt she was—socially shunned. She had no idea what was expected of her, did not know how to fit in, felt every move was the wrong one.⁸¹ “I work all day to keep things as straight as possible and cry half the night…,” she wrote, adding sarcastically, “now you will naturally see that things look ‘bright to me.’”⁸²

Well aware that she needed to get away, find work, and recapture her self-esteem, Barton wrote, “I must not rust much longer…[but] push out and do something somewhere, or anything, anywhere.”⁸³ Just what she would do was another question. She would consider the subservient and poorly paid life of teaching only as a last resort. “I gave outgrown that, or that me,” she recognized. “I have no desire to do it now.”⁸⁴ Having ruled out the most easily obtainable position, she wearied of mulling over the other limited possibilities. Clerking, starting a school, and escaping to South America were all considered. Frustration mounted as she used her influence to gain lucrative positions for Bernard, Elvira Stone, and other friends, and saw herself still empty-handed. After two jobs—a clerkship and an administrative job with a school—failed to materialize, Clara's emotional state became so desperate that she was immobilized by panic. She had, she acknowledged, “added more than ten years right into my life in the last two months.”⁸⁵

Her frustrations were heightened by the difficulty she was experiencing because of her sex. The very clerkships that Barton's influence gained for Bernard were not open to her. It was a fact of which she was acutely conscious and which increasingly rankled her. The outright discrimination she had suffered in Bordentown and the prejudice of the official policy during her years in Washington had done a good deal to politicize her feminism. Like many other early women's leaders, personal experience gave bite to the shadowy liberal notions with which she had been raised. Knowledge of her own capabilities and the way in which these were bound by society began to give her reason to believe a radical change in the social structure must be accomplished. She was angry that she could not win the same political favors her untried nephew could, simply because she “couldn’t wear broadcloth.” Barton acknowledged that her political friends had always encouraged her to call on them for aid. There was a difference, however, between such hearty reassurances and the actual initiation of some help. Still shy when asking favors, Clara did not see how she could approach her friends and was thus reluctant to ask them “until some change should open the way.”⁸⁶

Perhaps, she surmised, a permanent government appointment was too much to expect. Then, in a burst of fury, she recognized her own tendency to limit her expectations to the level of the men around her. She vented her anger to Bernard, in one of the most succinct statements she was to make about the oppression she felt surrounded her and others of her sex:

When you have pictured my past life and habits and training for the past number of years, you will…forgive such an aspiration in me. Were you in my place you would feel it too, and wish and pine and fret in your cage as I do, and if the very gentlemen who have the power could only know for one twenty-four hours all that oppresses and gnaws at my peace, they could offer me something to do in accordance with my old habits and capabilities before I am a day older, but they will never know and I shall always be oppressed no doubt. I am naturally businesslike and habit has made me just as much so as a man (and were I a man I would never do a four penny business).…I should be ‘perfectly happy’ today if someone would tell me that my desk and salary were waiting for me—that once more I had something to do that was something.⁸⁷

But the prejudice continued to haunt her. On yet another job search in official quarters she found to her dismay that “the registrar says he has no room for ladies…and fears to have papers taken out of the office to be copied.”⁸⁸

Word from Irving was as discouraging as her search for a job. He was dissatisfied, in need of money, and weaker than ever. Clara, her patience strained to the limit, could not see how he and Sally could run through so much money. Clara was not a natural altruist, and much of her pleasure in helping was bound up in the gratitude, love, and dependence that were shifted back to her. She resented those who did not give her this recognition, and the news from the Vassalls was thus doubly exasperating. Irving complained so much of Minnesota and its negative effect on his condition that his aunt dryly allowed that “the child's disease must have removed from his lungs to his head.”⁸⁹ Feeling that for all her good intentions she was to blame for Irving's plight, Barton's nerves gave way. Once again suicidal thoughts crept upon her. “I wished we were all at rest…,” she remarked upon receiving yet another sad epistle from the West. “I am not quite myself and don’t know when I shall be again…. I am weak and nervous ever since, and I am good for nothing at all.”⁹⁰

Barton now had virtually no money to send Irving and Sally. Her long-term finances had taken a turn for the better in February when Captain Barton sold her twenty acres of valuable timberland at a bargain-rate price. He took a note for the property, though she felt obliged to pay him for it later in the year.⁹¹ But this transaction did nothing to help her immediate need for cash. To make ends meet she returned to Boston in late April for another brief tour as a companion to an older woman. This was little better than doing nothing; its only advantage was to remove her from the critical eyes of Julie and David.⁹² She endured it for a month, then, deciding that she must take control of her life and earn some money, she suddenly packed her bags and left for New York.

Barton was sick and nervous when she left North Oxford, “in a better condition,” she admitted to a friend, “to go to bed than New York City.”⁹³ She had hoped to look for a job in the business community, but she arrived barely able to make it to the offices of her old friend, phrenologist L. N. Fowler. He took her in hand, charted her personality traits (giving her high marks for friendship, low for self-esteem), and sent her to a hotel run by a son of the Bertrams, bidding her rest and get well before trying to find work.⁹⁴

After a week the hotel proprietor decided to send her home to his parents. Determined to go “where I could be sick and feel that I was not committing an unpardonable sin thereby,” she retreated to the Bertrams, where she was received with open arms.⁹⁵ The contrast between her treatment there and that afforded her by her own family could not have been sharper. “I was almost cheated in belief that I had come home and had a home to come to,” she told Bernard sadly.⁹⁶ For two months they harbored her, pampering her, encouraging her to stay with them indefinitely. They again tried to talk her into starting an academy or teaching in their area “It is really a temptation, Ber,” she told her nephew, “if it were anything but teaching I would.”⁹⁷ She was more relaxed with the Bertrams, yet she knew it was only one more temporary stopping place. And with no immediate prospect of work, home, or any sense of permanence, she could not quite shake her morbid thoughts. In late July she was still feeling that there was “nothing…so welcome as perfect rest.” She was happy when she slept and, she noted, had felt “for long years…that when the command should come, Lay down thy burden and rest, it must be the sweetest hour of my whole existence…sometimes my stubborn heart rebels and I murmur to myself, how long Oh Lord how long.”⁹⁸