Читать книгу Clara Barton, Professional Angel - Elizabeth Brown Pryor - Страница 15

six

In rooms that were the “cosiest and prettiest that one could ask,” Clara pondered and recovered, let the Bertrams wait on her, worried about Irving, weighed her options. Still “weak and bilious’’ in August but gaining strength, she was determined to go back to New York City, trade her accounting skills to the business world, and rely on friends, not family, for support.¹ Outside events, however, influenced her to follow a different course. Through circumstances that are not altogether clear, for her correspondence was minimal during these uncertain months, Barton was recalled to her post in the Patent Office. After the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, her politics did not seem so offensive.

It was the government's lame duck period between the election and the March 4 inauguration, when work was slack, and appointments were up for grabs. Some unnamed “personal friends” engineered Barton's appointment as a temporary copyist, charged with “recording specifications and making office copies.”² This did not equal the status of her earlier job with the Patent Office, and the salary too was lowered, for women could now earn only eight cents per hundred words copied, or a maximum of nine hundred dollars per year.³ But she was hardly in a position to complain, and she accepted the appointment with relief and even delight.

By December she had bid her final adieus to the Bertrams and, with a lighter heart than she had known in months, arrived back in Washington. The scenes and faces seemed so familiar. Samuel Shugert and Joseph Fales were still in the Patent Office; Charles Mason resided in the city, earning his living as a patent lawyer. Clara's old room in Almira Fales's boarding house was available. The two impressive fountains in the courtyards of the Patent Office building still made “cool the air in the sultry days of summer.” Picking her way through the muddy streets and up the long stairs to the office door, newfangled hoopskirts in hand, she felt as though her absence had been nothing but a pause in a long continuum.⁴

Washington itself was much the same. “As in 1800 and 1850, so in 1860,” Henry Adams wrote, “the same rude colony was camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek Temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads.”⁵ Yet the political air had a different quality in the days following the election of Abraham Lincoln. The southern states had long agitated over the policies of this man and his party, whose platform against the expansion of slavery seemed at odds with everything they valued. About the time Barton was patiently enduring the twelve-hour railroad journey from New York to Washington, the state of South Carolina declared the end of its own patience with the Union's policies toward slavery and tariffs, and the nation's capital became a whirligig of excitement. Those with Southern leanings predominated in the town; they guffawed at the pretenses of that awkward lawyer from Illinois and slapped each other on the back in congratulation of the South's audacity and spirit. Just what the action of South Carolina and the states that followed it would lead to was anyone's guess, and everybody did guess. A spirit of debate and the airing of long pent-up opinions filled the atmosphere, and the speculation about the country's future was the favorite topic in drawing rooms and alleys.⁶

Miss Barton, sitting at her desk in the ladies’ section of the Patent Office, held close to her conviction that a moderate course would prevail. No rabid abolitionist, she had opposed the mass meetings and fiery oratory that the North had offered a year earlier in support of John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. The South, she believed, had a right to feel fearful in the face of such misplaced zealotry. But she had scarcely expected them to dissolve the Union, and now, in January 1861, she did not think their hotheaded move would be permanent. “Would it be of the least interest if I should talk to you of political excitement and ‘secession’?” she asked cousin Elvira Stone. “I believe the latter to be wearing out in its infancy and if wisely left alone will die a natural death, long before maturity.”⁷ Like Robert E. Lee, who expected that “the wisdom and patriotism of the country will devise some way of saving it,”⁸ like countless others with hope or naivete in their hearts, Barton chose to view the Union as undividable. What rankled her was the bravado shown by Southern sympathizers, who saw triumph for the culture of the slave states and boasted of it in the streets of the nation's capital. “Nothing is or has been more common than to see little spruce clerks and even boys strutting about the streets and asserting that ‘we had no government—it merely amounted to a compact but had no strength,’” she wrote furiously a few months later. “I have listened to harangues of this nature in the few past months until my very brain whirled—and now from the bottom of my heart—I pray that the thing may be tested.”⁹

The political fever in Washington reached its highest degree with Abraham Lincoln's arrival in the city. Threats on his life and rumors of rioting had been so numerous that the lean westerner had quietly entered the town the day before he had planned to, disguised in an old slouch hat and baggy coat. Many thought he would not live to become president, but Barton reported to her friend Annie Childs that the “4th of March has come and gone, and we have a live Republican President, and, what is perhaps singular, during the whole day we saw no one who appeared to manifest the least dislike to his living.” She had attended the inauguration, thought the speech acceptable and the delivery good, but had turned down an invitation to the inaugural ball because of a bad cold. Sensing few of the ominous rumblings that foretold the coming conflict, she retained a haughty indifference to the earnest Southern leaders, viewing them as something akin to naughty children, who, if ignored, would come sheepishly back to the bosom of the family. Her letter to Childs ended, not on a note of foreboding about the national crisis, but in raptures over the spring weather and concern for the tawdry state of her wardrobe.¹⁰

Perhaps it was that she was less concerned with the Union's safety than with her own vulnerability in the Patent Office at that time. Recognizing that the political friends who had obtained her position would soon be out of power and that she had no guarantee of support from the new administration, she devised a plan to win some political influence. When last in Washington, as Clara told a friend, “I never formed any acquaintance with the Republican members of our Delegation as it would have been worse than nothing and now that it has come to be worth everything I have none of it.”¹¹ She spent some time observing those who represented Hubbell s and decided that Henry Wilson, one of the state's two senators, could best support her. She initially tried to spark an acquaintance by persuading Cousin Elvira, who knew Wilson, to write a letter of introduction interesting enough that he would go to the trouble of calling on her.¹² But six weeks later the inauguration had come and gone, her job was in jeopardy, and she had as yet found no guardian angel. On a chilly March afternoon she therefore put on her bonnet and set off for the Capitol. Rather than ask for personal favors, she planned to speak to the senator about the generally crowded and overworked conditions of the Patent Office, in which she knew he had an interest.

This time her scheme succeeded. Scarcely had Clara called Wilson out of the Senate chambers than “he set away his hat, arranged his coat sleeves, and settled himself into a conversable posture which seemed to say ‘let us talk, I am ready’, and we did talk.”¹³ Their understanding had been immediate; it was the beginning of a long and important friendship. They talked that afternoon, walked home together through the fashionable Capitol grounds, and then met again, only a few hours later. “Oh yes he is married,” Barton joked to Elvira.¹⁴

Barton made a savvy choice in picking Wilson to be her patron. Ambitious and effective in his work (one observer called him “the most skilful political organizer in the country”¹⁵), Wilson exuded a calculated geniality that made him almost a caricature of the successful politician. His big florid face shifted easily to delight or anger. He had had a poverty-stricken childhood in Hubbell s and a later apprenticeship as a cobbler; the memories of these early years were not pleasant, and he strove to overcome them with each decisive political maneuver. At the time he met Clara, Wilson was completing his first Senate term and had already become an impressive force in that body. His influence would grow rapidly with the coming of war, when, as chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, and with the complete confidence of Mr. Lincoln, he wielded enormous power. In March 1861 Barton had little concept of what Wilson's influence would mean for her in the next four years. She thought only that her clerkship might not be lost under the Lincoln administration, that her future in the Patent Office was more secure.

She was in fact pleased with her prospects under Lincoln. The new commissioner of patents, D. P. Holloway, seemed to have no objection to women in his office. On the contrary, rumors had it that he enjoyed their presence.¹⁶ Wilson, who had once told some prejudiced office seekers that he “supposed that it was the design of the Almighty that women should exist, or he never would have created them, although it is a scanty chance we give them,”¹⁷ was inclined to promote her interests simply because she was a woman. Instead of losing her precarious hold on a temporary clerkship, which was netting her only $35 to $61 per month, Barton had hopes that she would be given a permanent position and that her success would open the doors for other talented women. If this should happen, she told Elvira, “I had just as lief they made an experiment of me as not, you know it does not hurt me to pioneer.”¹⁸ Though the situation was far from settled, she sensed that she had beat the narrow prejudice of the government officials at last—indeed had beat them at their own game of spoils and patronage. With “all the influence of my State—personal at that” behind her, she wrote giddily that she “should like to see that little click reprove me in this matter—just let them try it will be fun—nuts, for me, I like it.”¹⁹

Her own future secured, Barton began concentrating on helping friends who were coping with similar problems with the government or the uncertainties of the times. There were many who were impressed with the tireless energy she had at this time for the problems and sorrows of friends, acquaintances, and relatives. One admirer recalled that he

rarely saw her without some pet scheme of benevolence on her hands which she pursued with an enthusiasm that was quite heroic and sometimes amusing. The roll of those she has helped, or tried to help, with her purse, her personal influence or her counsels, would be a long one; orphan children, deserted wives, destitute women, sick or unsuccessful relatives, men who had failed in business—all who were in want, or in trouble, and could claim the slightest acquaintance came to her for aid and were never repulsed. Strange it was to see this generous girl, whose own hands ministered to all her wants, always giving to those around her, instead of receiving, strengthening the hands and directing the steps of so many who would have seemed better calculated to help her.²⁰

She had not lost sight of her concerns for Mattie Poor and Irving Vassall, but their situations seemed in abeyance for the time being. More pressing now was a crisis for Elvira Stone, which brought to the fore all of Barton's anger at injustices to her sex. Since 1857 Stone had been postmistress of North Oxford, a political appointment that became vulnerable when the new administration took office. More than one gentleman in the town had his eye on Elvira's sinecure, which involved little work but brought in a significant revenue. When Elvira wrote of her worries, Barton acted quickly to inform Senators Wilson and Sumner that the pretext for which Stone might be removed had little to do with politics and everything to do with sex. Tempted to draw up a petition that began “Mankind being naturally prone to selfishness we hereby…,” Clara settled for reporting to Sumner and Wilson that she had been able to find no complaint against Stone's performance “except that she is guilty of being a woman.”²¹ With the aid of the two senators and some timely petitions from North Oxford's citizens, Stone's appointment was eventually secured. Triumphant against the “forces of blind prejudice and ignorance” that so annoyed her, Barton felt a modicum of satisfaction with her own abilities to overcome society's narrow standards. But the incident reinforced her awareness, too, of the disadvantage that even talented and willing women faced in male-dominated society; it glued one more rung in the ladder that would lead her to an active role as a feminist leader, bent on sweeping reform in government policies.²²

Success in these matters, an outlet for her work-hungry mind, and cheerful diversion at plays and levees made her confidence again unshakable. A handsome new companion in the Patent Office, R. O. Sidney, amused her with his stories of the South and an obvious admiration. Once there was an end to the dependence, the boredom, and the uncertainty of the previous six months, the despondency vanished. She felt ready to face anything. In all too short a time she would be surrounded by an emergency that would require all of her powers.²³

Fort Sumter was fired upon and captured by Southern rebels on a Friday. It was April 12, a memorable day when vague dreams, which pictured two peaceful nations existing side by side or the ultimate peaceful submission of the South, were shattered. The president was alarmed at the defenselessness of the capital and called for a force of seventy-five thousand volunteers to protect it from the rebels across the Potomac. Militiamen, and companies based on neighborhood groups and local associations, quickly heeded the call. Clara, as quick to rally as any volunteer, felt sure the Union would win. “She was confident, even enthusiastic,” marveled a friend. If Sumter truly meant war, she would embrace the fray with all of her resources. “For herself, she had saved a little in time of peace, and she intended to devote it and herself to the service of her country, and of humanity. If war must be she neither expected nor desired to come out of it with a dollar.”²⁴

Barton was pleased that men from Worcester County mirrored her own enthusiasm. Among the earliest troops to muster in and board a train, amid cheers and tears and fluttering handkerchiefs, was the Sixth Hubbell s Regiment. Many of them were fresh-faced farm boys who had never before left their native New England, and nearly forty had once been Barton's pupils. Only four days after the firing on Fort Sumter, the Sixth Hubbell s left Worcester. On April 19 they arrived in Baltimore.

Baltimore's citizens were overwhelmingly secessionist in spirit. It was they who had threatened the safety of the president-elect, and they saw both insult and opportunity in the parade of Union soldiers about to pass through their city. The trains from the North would not merely stop at the station or chug slowly by the brick row houses with distinctive marble stoops. The configuration of railroad tracks and stations was such that passengers were forced to alight, find transportation to another platform some half mile distant, and wait for the arrival of the cars, which were being drawn by mules along a precarious piece of track. The soldiers would have to leave the protection of the cars and march through the streets of the city in full view of the hostile Baltimoreans.²⁵

On April 19 exaggerated gossip proved true and worst fears were realized. The officers in charge of the Hubbell s men had ordered them to endure whatever the Baltimore mobs hurled at them—insults, profanities, or bricks—unless they were actually fired on. With raw troops and an angry crowd, however, there was little hope for restraint. Three men were killed and thirty wounded from the regiment that day—the war's first casualties. In Baltimore the rebellious mood was heightened, as defiance or determination grew stronger in every breast.²⁶

In Washington, news of the attack flashed across the telegraph wires, and crowds began to form in the street. Barton, hearing the noise, joined the throng and was “thrilled and bewildered” to hear of the atrocities in Baltimore.²⁷ Her sister (who had returned to Washington with Irving) was with her; together they were swept up in the current that flowed toward the depot of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Southern partisans predominated in the tumultuous crowd, jeering and shouting congratulatory slogans. By the time she and Sally reached the station, Clara was so “indignant, excited, alarmed” that she determined to render any aid possible to the weary and wounded men.²⁸

The city was unprepared for the arrival of so many soldiers, let alone wounded and frightened raw recruits. Hasty quarters had been arranged in, among other inappropriate places, the Senate chamber, There were no hospitals or even barracks, and Barton filled this immediate need by bringing the most severely wounded to Sally Vassall's house. From the patients there she learned that the men's luggage had been seized in Baltimore and that many had “nothing but their heavy woolen clothes—not a cotton shirt and many of them not even a pocket handkerchief.”²⁹ Hearing also that no rations had been issued them, Barton hastily set to work to alleviate the problems as best she could. The next morning, ignoring the fact that it was Sunday, she rose early to persuade neighboring grocers to sell her as many provisions as they would, hired a train of Negro servants, and proceeded to march down Pennsylvania Avenue, laden with parcels in wicker baskets. Besides food Barton packed every useful article she could dream of; she had emptied her pockets and drawers of combs, “sewing utensils, thread, needles, thimbles, scissors, pens, buttons, strings, salves, tallow, etc.” Old sheets were torn up for towels and handkerchiefs. With such a cargo she had no trouble passing the guards at the Capitol. Once inside, her former pupils crowded around her, anxious for news. She had only one copy of the Worcester Spy, so she sat in the chair reserved for the president of the Senate and read aloud to the men, joking later that it was “better attention than I have been accustomed to see there in the old time.” The troops were homesick and misunderstood the country's expectations, she noted, and pledged: “So far as our poor efforts can reach, they shall never lack a kindly hand or a sister's sympathy if they come.”³⁰

It was a crucial moment for Barton: this place and time united her selfconfidence and strength of purpose with a glaring need. She had once told a friend that it would be a “strange pass when the Barton's get fanatical,”³¹ but she became so, both in her devotion to the Union and her attachment to “her boys.” Inside the woman remained the little girl who shunned Mother Goose's melodies, asking instead for “more stories about the war” as she sat on her soldierfather's knee. She had always looked first to her father for pride and inspiration, and she saw now a chance to emulate his philanthropic nature, to fulfill his teaching that “next to Heaven our highest duty was to…serve our country and…support its laws.”³² Remembering the spirit of mission that she felt in these early weeks of the war, Barton would later acknowledge: “The patriot blood of my father's was warm in my veins.”³³

The troops from Hubbell s were soon followed by trains from New Jersey and Herkimer County, New York, all bearing old friends and former pupils. With the arrival of each new company, Barton's exhilaration rose, as did her determination to be a part of this great drama. She was amazed at the change in sleepy, rustic Washington, now a bustling place “grown up so strangely like a gourd all in a night.”³⁴ Over seventy-five thousand troops were camped in and around the city. Their white tents were everywhere, they marched and drilled and loafed in the streets, and at night the stars were blotted out by the haze and glare from their campfires. Many Washington women feared the strange men; one acquaintance of Barton's recalled that although she had had no unpleasant experiences, she spent the war years avoiding the throngs of soldiers. Clara felt no such intimidation. The presence of the troops brought a feeling of intimacy to her that had been missing in the city, and their numbers thrilled and cheered her. In an early war letter she informed her father, “I don’t know how long it has been since my ear has been free from the roll of a drum, it is the music I sleep by, and I love it.”³⁵

Clara and Sally visited the troops often. The DeWitt Guards, in which Bernard was now a fourth lieutenant, was a favorite company, as were the Fourth and Eighth New Jersey regiments, home for the familiar faces from Bordentown and Hightstown. The two women played whist with the officers in their tents, joked with correspondents from eastern newspapers, and shook hands all around. They also discovered the small miseries to which the soldiers were exposed. Disease and vermin were prevalent in the unsanitary camps. Clothing was shabby, meals inadequate, shelter sometimes completely lacking. Clara felt some envy but no sympathy for the “few privileged, elegantly dressed ladies who ride over and sit in their carriages to witness ‘splendid services’ and ‘inspect the Army of the Potomac’ and come away ‘delighted’.”³⁶ Increasingly, she brought delicacies from home for the men: homemade jellies, cloth-lined sewing kits called “housewives,” even whole pies and cakes. The soldiers wrote to their families with a myriad gripes in the early months of the war; at the top of the list were complaints over the inadequate food and the poor preparations the army had made for them. Energetic mothers and wives baked, preserved, and mended in answer to these grumblings, then sought a way to ensure delivery of their precious wares. Through a chance mention of Clara in a soldier's letter, someone's remembrance that she lived and worked in the Union's capital, or through Elvira Stone, who tirelessly began to solicit goods, individual women and relief societies started to connect Barton with philanthropic work with the troops. They began to send their boxes to Barton, certain that they could not go astray in her care.³⁷

By early June she was so inundated with supplies that she moved her quarters to a larger room in a business block. Though less homelike, it had enough space for both Barton and her stores. Behind a wooden partition she kept the boxes and barrels; her own belongings were crowded into the remaining space. “It was a kind of tent life,” noted Fanny Childs, “but she was happy in it.”³⁸ The importance she had assigned her work in the Patent Office now seemed misplaced. She had not meant to start the rush of boxes from Hubbell s, but when she realized the distribution of the provisions would serve a significant need, she committed herself to the work totally. She determined also to remain in the capital, despite the fact that, like most other citizens, she thought it would come under attack shortly. “I will remain here while anyone remains and do whatever comes to my hand,” she declared stoutly. “I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them.”³⁹

Barton was proud of the army in that late spring and summer of 1861, and as she sat calmly on the Treasury building steps watching campfires and Roman candles on Independence Day, she longed for their gleaming sabers to be called into service.⁴⁰ Even so she was unprepared for the outbreak of fighting only two weeks later. After Confederate troops, massed near Manassas, Virginia, held back the Union army's first advance with a decided rout on July 21, she watched the “sad, painful, and mortifying” scene of their return.⁴¹ Hundreds of wounded began to pour into Washington, filling makeshift hospitals in Armory Square, Judiciary Square, and even the exhibit hall of the Patent Office. Then a new phase of her work began. She unpacked the cartons so carefully piled near her bed and distributed combs and compresses, dainty cordials and embroidered neckerchiefs to the patients. The personal contact with the soldiers in the wards pleased her, and she enthusiastically wrote letters, smoothed brows, and fed disabled men, but it sobered her, too. The bright banners and flashing hooves that had been her chief inspiration faded. It was the grim reality of war, the overwhelming, numbing misery, that activated her now.⁴²

With something of a shock Barton realized how necessary her stores were. The hospitals were devoid of even the smallest niceties, and often the bare necessities as well. In its haste to establish an army, the government had sadly overlooked its medical needs, and now surgeons, nurses, and supplies were at a premium. She was further distressed by the neglect the wounded suffered. Some had gone days without food in the hot July sun; others had painful, festering wounds, which were left untreated until their arrival at a Washington hospital. One man, finally brought to Sally's home, had been left to rot until “all parts of the body which had rested hard upon whatever was under him had decayed…his toes were matted and grown together and…now dropping off at the joints. ”⁴³

Henceforth Barton would not simply receive supplies but would actively solicit them. An advertisement in the Worcester Spy called for the women to keep busy—”The cause is holy; do not neglect an opportunity to aid it.”⁴⁴ She wrote personally to her old friends in Hubbell s and New Jersey, asking them to send what they could. “It is said, upon proper authority, that ‘our army is supplied,’” she told the Worcester Ladies’ Relief Committee. “How this can be so I fail to see.” Begging them to continue to supply her, though no immediate danger was evident, she queried anxiously, “in the event of battle who can tell what their necessities might grow to in a single day? They would want then faster than you could make.”⁴⁵

In the next year Barton was overwhelmed with supplies. The women sent raspberry vinegar, pickled grapes, honey, soap, and lemons. What they did not send she bought from her own purse, spending up to fifteen dollars a day for bread alone. She became something of an expert on the vagaries of shipping, and she took time to instruct the women on the proper way of packing a box (small packages were preferable, and clothes were not to be packed with stewed fruits, which might easily spill and ruin the garments).⁴⁶ When the boxes overflowed her room, she rented space in a warehouse; six months later she had completely filled three.⁴⁷ Not content with accepting just what came to hand, Clara asked an officer what the troops needed most. To her surprise he answered “tobacco.” Far from flinching at this, she took the part of the men against the reproving frowns of her own sex. “It is needless to say that I trust soon to be a good judge of the product as it has become an article of commerce with me,” she told Vira Stone in some amusement.

You would smile at the sight of the half yard slabs of plug lying this moment on my table waiting for Dr. Sidney's Basket of Whiskey to arrive to accompany it to Kalorama. Dainty gifts, you will say, but all necessary my dear Coz—this I conceive to be no time to prate of moral influences. Our men's nerves require their accustomed narcotics and a glass of whiskey is a powerful friend in a sunstroke and these poor fellows fall senseless on their heavy drills.⁴⁸

Barton's love for “her boys” and fierce patriotism were further stimulated and reinforced by her former landlady, the plain-spoken Almira Fales. Fales was surely the first woman to engage in army relief work. She had not waited for a declaration of war to begin her ministrations but had commenced garnering supplies the moment South Carolina seceded. Others might mistrust the outcome of this action, but Fales had had no doubt it would lead to fratricidal war, and she simply ignored the laughter of acquaintances who gazed at her work and “thought it was a ‘freak.’” She continued to hoard delicacies and distribute them at her pleasure after the firing on Fort Sumter. Her snappy blue eyes and brash way of telling stories from a memorable fund of anecdotes made her a favorite in the hospital. Although her patriotism did not lack zeal—she once erected a tent in her front yard to minister to any suffering soldier who might happen by—she was extremely modest about the contributions she made. Before, during, and after the war she declined to discuss them, simply forging ahead in her blundering way, without fanfare or praise.⁴⁹

Fales was also one of the first to sense the terrors endured by the wounded on hospital transports and as they waited for help on the battlefield. The injured men needed a middleman between the bullet and the surgeon. As early as the battles of Corinth and Pittsburg Landing, she made her way directly to the line of battle, and she continued working in that capacity—tending wounds, encouraging, and nourishing—until the end of the war. She plied the Potomac River in hospital transports during the tedious Peninsular campaign and, when not actually with the army, met the wounded as they arrived at the wharves near Washington. After one of her own sons was killed at the Battle of Fredericksburg, she redoubled her efforts.⁵⁰

Fales's activities further galvanized Barton, who was beginning to acknowledge that the Washington hospitals were becoming pretty well supplied with luxuries and willing ladies to hand them out.⁵¹ Soon after the battle at Manassas, therefore, she began to take her supplies to meet the ships and train loads of disabled and sick men and, like Fales, found the effort more rewarding than mere hospital service. It reinforced her belief that many men perished for lack of simple attention. She once told a reporter that she was, at this time, “deeply impressed with the importance of early attention to the wounded, and was made to see how much more efficient her service would be if it could be promptly rendered on the field of battle.”⁵² As she recognized the need, Barton felt a growing urgency and pursued her course with uncamouflaged intensity. Oblivious to the opinions of the more dignified townspeople, she transported her wares in any conveyance, and at any time, that seemed handy. More than one person could recall her small figure perched atop a ludicrously large wagonload of goods, clutching the seat and sides as best she could, while crowds of well-dressed people walked sedately to church.⁵³

Throughout the fall of 1861 and the winter of 1862, Barton pursued this self-appointed task. It was above, and in addition to, her duties at the Patent Office, where she continued her chores on the “ladies side” at the same low salary. Clara later claimed that in her zeal for the Union she refused to accept any payment from the overtaxed United States Treasury, but government records show that she drew her salary throughout the war. She was, however, given additional responsibilities in December 1861. “I have been a great deal more than busy for the past three weeks,” she lamented to Fanny Childs, soon after the New Year, “owing to some new arrangements in the office, mostly, by which I lead the Record, and hurry up the others who lag.”⁵⁴

The tenor of the Patent Office was notoriously pro-South, which aggravated Barton no end. There and elsewhere she began a new crusade—routing out those disloyal to the Union. In the office she offered to take over the work of two blatantly Confederate clerks, at no extra salary, if they were dismissed. The proposal was politely refused and served only to make her unpopular.⁵⁵ Her familiarity with the parcel section of the post office caused her also to lead a campaign there, when she found that unclaimed parcels were being auctioned off to gentlemen who sent them on to the Confederate army. Barton had the pleasure of seeing that the rebels were arrested, though a hoped-for bonus in the form of an appointment to the army's sanitary committee never materialized. Still, she was content as long as her “precious freights” arrived directly.⁵⁶

The vagaries of the Patent Office and the treacherous dealings of local Southern sympathizers seemed of slight significance compared to a personal blow that befell Barton in February 1862. For months, cousins, nephews, and neighbors had kept her informed about her father's health. He had lost his robustness years before, and there had been a serious alarm in December 1860, but the old man's “oak and iron constitution” had forestalled the family's worst fears.⁵⁷ Clara had often thought of visiting her father, yet the image of North Oxford and the unhappiness she had felt there kept her from returning home, even when Sam, Stephen's boy, told her that the Captain “spoke in high terms of Julie and of the excellent care she had taken of him, but said after all there was no one like you.”⁵⁸ Now the end was truly near. Barton turned over her work to another Patent Office clerk and went home to do her “last and highest” duties.⁵⁹

Clara and her father talked much of the war in the last few weeks they had together. Captain Barton believed the Union would triumph but knew he would not live to see it; he therefore “committed himself and his country into the hands of a good and just God.”⁶⁰ Clara sat patiently at his bedside, listening to the old soldier and telling him of her own war work. She worried aloud about the sick and wounded soldiers, soliciting her father's advice about how and where to give the most expedient aid. She had hoped to go to the battlefield, she told him, but was struggling with her sense of propriety, for women in the camps were often considered—and treated as—prostitutes. He brushed aside her fears, maintaining that a respectable woman would meet with respect from even the roughest soldiers. He then gave Clara a command that she would always recall: “As a patriot he bade me serve my country with all I had, even my life if need be; as the daughter of an accepted Mason, he bade me seek and comfort the afflicted everywhere, and as a Christian he charged me to honor God and love mankind.”⁶¹ As a symbol of his faith in her decision he handed her his gold Masonic badge to wear for luck and protection.

Near mid-March Stephen Barton's condition worsened, his imminent death evident in the wasting away of his desire to live. He wrote his will and put his other business affairs in order but took no food or water for some days. Late in the evening on March 21, in Clara's words he “straightened himself in bed, closed his mouth firmly, gave one hand to Julia and the other to me, and left us.”⁶² The local papers heralded Captain Barton as a “brave and true man,” and the house and grounds were crowded for the funeral, held in David's home.⁶³ Clara watched as they lowered him into the grave, next to her mother—gone over a decade now—and recognized that she was alone in a way she had never been before. Her “last earthly guide” was gone, her mentor, the most inspired and inspiring of her kin.⁶⁴

The long hours of vigil at her father's deathbed had given Clara an opportunity to mull over her urge to join the army in the field and to determine the best method of preparing to do so. She had Henry Wilson's backing, but she needed someone with direct influence in the army who would supply her with passes and protection if she moved toward the lines. Most officials were not anxious to see Barton, or any woman, in the field, asserting that the women caused serious morale problems and at the first sight of a gun would “skeedaddle and create a panic.” Their wealth of supplies was viewed as a slap in the face of the quartermaster's department, and their presence in hospitals was an embarrassment to the obviously needy medical corps.⁶⁵ General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, an aging leader of the volunteer forces, given to nosebleeds and esoteric philosophic quotations, refused Barton permission on the grounds that she would be an “unreasonable, meddlesome body, requiring more waiting upon” than she would give to others.⁶⁶ Barton had already begun to badger friends in official Washington for permission to go to the front. While in Hubbell s she decided to petition John Andrew, the governor and commander-in-chief of the Hubbell s forces, for a recommendation. Accordingly, the day before her father's death she wrote him a stilted, calculating letter, full of self-justification, references to venerable Bartonian service to the country, and allusions to her rebel-hunting activities in Washington. Assuring him that she had “none but right motives,” she waited anxiously for a reply.⁶⁷ Governor Andrew answered her letter quickly with the promise of a “letter of introduction, with hearty approval of your visit [to the troops] and my testimony to the value of the service to our sick and wounded.” As she was soon to find, however, it would take far more than this to get her official permission to follow troops to the field.⁶⁸

Barton did not leave North Oxford immediately but remained to help clear away her father's effects and settle his estate, of which she was virtually the sole legatee. Captain Barton had believed in disposing of his property where it could be of the greatest benefit. David and Stephen Barton had been given land and milling equipment as young men; Sally received a generous settlement at her marriage, not to mention continual handouts during the financial ups and downs of her life with Vester Vassall. Only Clara had gone uncared for. Now she was the recipient of a modest acreage, a house, two horses, and some antiquated farming equipment. It was not a large legacy, but she was determined to administer it properly and as her father would have wished. One of her first acts was to make provision for the perpetual care of the family graves in the old North Oxford cemetery.⁶⁹

Frustration grew upon Clara, along with boredom and a feeling of uselessness. “You must feel lonely there and anxious to get away,” Irving sympathized, proceeding to give detailed war news, which only heightened her desire to get into the fray.⁷⁰ A few weeks later she wrote plainly of her envy to a young cousin, stationed in the muggy swamps of North Carolina. No account of his hardships could diminish her ardor for the soldier's life. “Why can’t I come and have a tent there and take care of your poor sick fellows?” she asked with some resentment. “I should go in five minutes if I could be told that I might.” She hinted that Dr. S. L. Bigelon, a brigade surgeon and distant relative, could request her services if he wanted to, but she feared that he disliked women.⁷¹ Finally, feeling she had done all she could for her family and herself in Hubbell s, she returned to the martial spirit and frantic activity of Washington.

Surrounded again by scenes of war that had seemed far removed in her home town, Barton felt a heightened urge to follow the cannon. Almira Fales had gone down the peninsula between the York and James rivers that spring; she was hardly talkative about her experiences, but her strength of purpose reinforced Clara's own. She was “full to aching” when she viewed the teeming hospitals, and touched beyond words by the frequent visits of hometown boys and former pupils who often left some personal items with her to be sent home if their names should appear on the black list.⁷² Yet she thought these urban hospitals abundantly supplied, and her aid seemed hollow and effortless. “I cannot rest satisfied,” she complained to Captain Denney, “it is little that one woman can do, still I crave the privilege of doing that.”⁷³ She was certain there were numerous ways she could be useful at the field, and though General Hitchcock might think otherwise, she was convinced that she was “stronger, better acclimated, had firmer health, better able to forego comforts than ladies in general. I had almost said men.” She raged mostly at the injustice of the accusation that she would hike up her crinoline and flee at the very first threat of danger. Time and again she assured herself that she would not “either run or complain if I were left under fire.”⁷⁴

Completely frustrated, she tried to forget the war, at least temporarily. But the heroic scenes and simple life of the soldiers continued to challenge, exhilarate, and haunt her as nothing had before. She was sensible of the discordant serenity of commonplace events when acted out against the backdrop of the terrible conflict. She read avidly the poets’ prolific works in every penny journal and ladies’ magazine, musing, “What did our poets do for subjects before the war?” She might as well have asked what she herself had done for conversation, for dreams, for paragraphs in her cherished correspondence. “I’m as bad as England,” she finally concluded after a last attempt to purge herself of the martial spirit, “the fight is in me, and I will find a pretext.”⁷⁵