Читать книгу Clara Barton, Professional Angel - Elizabeth Brown Pryor - Страница 16

seven

Colonel Daniel H. Rucker scanned the crowded waiting room of his office somewhat impatiently. It was a hot July day and the quartermasters office was, as usual, filled with petitioning citizens and irate soldiers, who had come to leave baskets for favorite sons or brothers, collect their back pay, or angrily demand remuneration for property confiscated or damaged by the Union army. The sea of faces had paraded by Rucker for so many days now that he had stopped seeing them individually, and although he was a kindly man, with a genial face and comfortable stomach, he could no longer view these cases as particular tragedies. Checks went out, answers and small comfort were dispensed, but the actions had become automatic, the responses given by rote.¹

He was surprised therefore to find his eye caught by a small, plainly dressed woman sitting in the corner. She was not beautiful; at best her face was full of interest and the character of middle age. Yet there was an arresting quality to this woman, something that commanded attention and respect.² Rucker called her over to his desk; to his surprise she burst into tears when he asked what she wanted. “I want to go to the front,” she choked out. Attempting to keep his patience, Rucker explained that the front was no place for a lady, there was to be a battle soon, and it would be next to impossible to find any relatives she might have in the army. But with a studied meekness she told him she wanted only to distribute some stores she had collected for the soldiers. She needed a pass and some wagons. Then she played her final card, telling him this was no basket of made-by-loving-hands delicacies she was describing, but three warehouses full of hospital stores and food—everything, in fact, that the soldiers needed.³

In an instant Barton’s world changed. With a haste that seemed absurd in light of the months of tedious waiting, Rucker wrote out an order for six wagons, teamsters and men to load them, and requests to the surgeon general, secretary of war, military governor of Washington, D.C., and other crucial officers to allow Miss Clara Barton to pass through the lines “with such stores as she may wish to take for the comfort of the sick and wounded.”⁴ Where logical and patient petitioning had failed, influential friends and loyal relatives had been unsuccessful, and demonstration of sincerity and need had been ineffectual, tears had worked. If Barton’s incipient feminist views were at odds with this, she never admitted it. It was a trick she would use with success on many occasions, and she always recounted the episodes dramatically, without a hint of apology.

The Army of the Potomac was camped near Fredericksburg, Virginia, and this is where she intended to deliver her supplies. But she did not leave at once, preferring first to visit her family in Hubbell s, supply a few more Washington hospitals, and get her stores in order. She began to feel an interest around this time in the plight of runaway and freed slaves—”contraband” as they were called—who were crowding the Union lines, and she shared some of her supplies with them. Feeling that she would need some protection on the ninety-mile journey through rebel country, Barton also spent time arranging for additional passes for two gentlemen and a lady companion.⁵

On August 2 they set off, reaching the Union camps the next day. Barton and her comrades distributed their stores and were cordially received by both officers and men. She breakfasted at the Lacy House—a gracious eighteenth-century structure where elegant entertainments had been held for Fitzhughs, Washingtons, and Lees—with the officers of the Twenty-first New York Regiment, not knowing that in four months the house would be the site of some of the most grisly scenes she would see in the war. The next day, she found her beloved Twenty-first Hubbell s, greeted privates and officers, took special pains to cultivate the friendship of Dr. Clarence Cutter, the old regimental surgeon, and enjoyed the cheers and adulation of her boys. The cheers could not, however, hide the deprivation in the army, which more than fulfilled her expectations. She returned to Washington on August 5 to gather more supplies to send along to her co-workers who had stayed on in the camps.⁶

Scarcely had she arrived back than news of a clash between the two armies near Culpeper, Virginia sent dots of panic along the telegraph lines. The battle, variously referred to as Cedar Mountain, Cedar Run, and Culpeper, took place on August 9. General Lee’s Southern army and the Union army under John Pope had met in a vast cornfield on a sweltering day. Despite a valiant and somewhat desperate charge by Union forces under General Nathaniel Banks, the North was soundly beaten, and their casualties numbered almost two thousand. On a Monday morning Barton learned these details; imagining the groans and suffering, she determined to go to the front.

It was here, as she later recalled, that she “broke the shackles and went to the field.”⁷ She did not ask for new passes, for they would most likely be denied. Instead she used the old ones meant only for safe transportation to an unengaged army in camp. On this sultry August day' she gave up her last concerns over the propriety of her army work, letting the immediate need forestall her fears of insults or abuse. The “groans of suffering men dying like dogs, for the life of every institution” she valued drowned the doubts in the back of her mind, the chief one being “the appalling fact that I was only a woman.”⁸

Once decided, Clara was impatient to go and promised herself she would leave the first moment access could be obtained.⁹ She went to the Hubbell s state supply agent to get additional supplies and arranged to have them sent by rail to the scene of the battle. She then rounded up Cornelius Welles and a Mrs. Carner, who had helped her in Fredericksburg. Carner, a middle-aged woman with plump, capable hands and a ready smile, was able to work tirelessly in the soldiers’ hospitals but was skittish near the battlefield. Welles complemented her skills. He had been sent by a missionary society from his home church in Hartford, Connecticut, to work in freedman’s schools in Washington, but as the war commenced he began to work chiefly with the wounded. He had a tendency to talk to pain-wracked soldiers of the “Physician of the Soul,” a habit which annoyed Barton. But they worked well together because he subordinated himself, instinctively following Clara’s commands in the heat and confusion of battle. She later described him in terms that revealed her ideal of a fellow worker: he was “a meek, patient, faithful” follower.¹⁰

On August 13, Barton and the other workers clambered aboard the creaking cars to Culpeper, arriving about five o’clock. Though the battle had been over for four days, Barton immediately saw the suffering she had imagined for eighteen months, suffering that made her shudder and despair. “I cannot describe it,” she jotted in her diary.¹¹ Almost at once she began transferring her stores from the freight car to wagons. Dr. James Dunn, a Pennsylvania surgeon who would become one of Barton’s special admirers, told his wife of her midnight visits to his hospital. The poorly equipped surgeons were out of dressings of every kind and gratefully received her bandages, salves, and stimulants. “I thought that night,” Dunn wrote, “if heaven ever sent out a homely angel, she must be one her assistance was so timely.”¹² It was the commencement of “such a course of labor,” Barton later told a group of women, “as I hope you may be spared from ever participating in, unless you have sinews of steel and nerves of iron.”¹³

Barton found that the doctors and wounded needed all she had brought and more. The next day, at the Main Street hospital and at countless private houses that had been converted to shelter for the wounded, she saw that the anguished men covered the bare floors, lying in their own blood and filth, some without arms and legs, others with jaws or hands blown away. Many of the wounded had lain on the field in the blistering sun until a flag of truce allowed them to be cleared off. Sunstroke, dehydration, and shock increased their suffering. When thanking the women who had sent boxes of cooling cordials and soft linen shirts, she could write: “You will believe they were welcome when I tell you that we put shirts on men who had been stripped on the field and lain with naked breast in the scorching sun two days.”¹⁴

Barton labored with “the strength of desperation” for two days and nights, without food or sleep, hardly knowing how to face the enormity of the suffering and able only to relieve small pockets of it. She, Welles, and Carner cooked food, made bandages, held hands, and helped the surgeons whenever they could. They drafted every available bystander for the work of cleaning the “hospitals” and the men, both of which were filthy.¹⁵ When her supplies had given out “with a rapidity truly appalling,” Barton was relieved to see the stringy form of Almira Fales jump with tight-lipped determination from the side of a freight car of reinforcements. She also saw that no matter what desperate scenes her mind had formerly conjured up, she had not anticipated this overwhelming carnage. Barton had believed herself bold and realistic. To her dismay she found that her ministrations were not completely effective because the horrors of the battlefield had been beyond the reach of her imagination. Her naiveté had left her unprepared.¹⁶

At Culpeper she was away from the battle, removed from the powder and noise she would come to know only too well, but she was initiated into the chaos and want that so characterized the Union’s medical activities. No trained ambulance corps brought in the wounded. Supplies reached the surgeon days after the conflict, or not at all. At one station there was nothing but rooms of wounded and one broad table that served as stretcher, operating theater, and occasional bed. Simple necessities such as fresh water or clean bandages were luxuries in some hospitals, and she saw that most of the shelters were furnished “without a single convenience of life, without one cheering thought or view.”¹⁷

Barton visited every makeshift ward she could, staying until her last shirt had been handed out. Before leaving Culpeper she visited a hospital of wounded Confederate prisoners, who had been badly neglected in the furious rush to supply the Union casualties. Believing her to be a local resident, they begged her to bring them sheets and clothing—anything that would lighten their suffering. When she told them she was from Hubbell s, their faces fell, but an observer recalled that tears came into some eyes as she brought in every article she could for their comfort. Impartiality became a watchword of her war work. Pain and anguish, she believed, were scarcely held in monopoly by the Union men, and she could not bear to see unmitigated distress. Moreover, she had always liked helping the lowliest underdogs, for they heaped on her the greatest praise and gratitude. The feelings of the boys in blue came close to adulation, but, after all, she was a staunch Unionist, and these were her friends, her defenders. To the Confederate soldier who was surprised by her aid, who believed he would find neglect and brutality within the Union lines, her spot of comfort was an unexpected gift, for which he was generous in praise and gratitude. If there were tears in the rebels’ eyes, if they hailed her as an exception to the hated “damn Yankee,” Barton relished it and solicited their worship.¹⁸

Barton later told lecture audiences—in theatrical tones, which both heightened the image of her work and distorted it—that she had worked for five days and nights at Cedar Mountain. Her diary shows, however, that after two days she left Culpeper, went home, and slept for twenty-four hours.¹⁹ This would not be the only time she exaggerated. Believing in the power of strongly stated publicity, she also wrote a series of letters that, though theoretically penned to friends during the press of work, were in reality written afterward with the knowledge that their calculated drama would lend them to publication. Clara had long combined a swift, sure, and witty style of writing with a heightened sense of the tragedy and tension in human life. The conflict that surrounded her now accentuated these skills. The extent of her own naivete led her to realize the total ignorance of the North about the real conditions of the war. In bold phrases, well planned to horrify and inspire, she described the patience of the men, their wants, and their noble cause. After Culpeper, she wrote the first of these letters, describing the “golden ringlets of the fair-cheeked boy, the weeping, waiting, mother’s idol,” and “the blood-matted and tangled locks of the sterner, braver man, who has faced death on many a field…. The bright stream that trickles…to the floor—is it wine? Ah, who shall count the value of the wine of life?”²⁰ In a frenzy of patriotic fervor she rallied her reader to uphold the Union cause for which these men were so valiantly fighting. “At no moment of my life has our country seemed worth so much or her institutions so sacred as now,” she stated, “in the fearful trial of fire and blood, she shows us that she can produce, and nurture, and educate, and sacrifice such sons.”²¹

Barton hardly knew how to return to normal life after this experience. She could not react to commonplace sights and sounds but spent her time mending socks for the soldiers and pleading with her contacts in New Jersey and Hubbell s to send her more supplies. In one battle she had emptied her three warehouses, and now to meet the army’s “terrible necessities” she had only her empty hands.²² She was no longer working at the Patent Office, though her name remained on the registers, presumably keeping her place open for the day that hostilities would cease. “Miss C. H. Barton” also collected her pay throughout the war, but half of the salary went for the use of a substitute, who did her work and collected the pay under Barton’s name.²³ Such a practice was common in D. P. Holloway’s Patent Office. The commissioner’s unqualified support for the North led him to make exceptions and allowances for anyone helping the army—not always to the satisfaction of the other department clerks who were required to take up the slack. One, who became so annoyed that he petitioned Congress with his complaints, noted that by thus paying salaries to absent clerks the commissioner was “taxing the office twice for one service.”²⁴ But for Barton, the fact that her place was held was a measure of security in what was an otherwise disturbing and chaotic, if exciting, period of her life.

On August 30 Barton made one of her routine trips to the hospital on Armory Square. She was taking some small toilet articles to one of her boys of the Twenty-first Hubbell s when she chanced to hear the news of a battle that had taken place on the old Bull Run battlefield near Manassas, Virginia. Crowds of people were flocking to the Sixth Street wharf for news of the encounter, and Clara went along, anxious to verify the rumors.²⁵ What she heard was more disastrous news for the Union. General John Pope’s troops had retreated from their defeat at Cedar Mountain along the Rappahannock River, hoping to meet General George McClellan and the Army of the Potomac. But Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had cut them off and forced a battle on the site of the first Battle of Bull Run. The troops were exhausted and leaders hesitant or entirely absent. Union casualties were, as usual, heavy; Clara heard reports that over eight thousand were wounded, though this later proved an exaggeration. Union medical care was, as ever, inadequate.

Barton rushed home suffused with excitement and energy. From Colonel Rucker and the burgeoning Sanitary Commission (a relief agency started by northerners concerned about the Union army’s lack of supplies) she requisitioned stores. Before daybreak the next morning, she donned her battlefield uniform—a plain, dark print skirt and blouse, which for pragmatic reasons eschewed the fashionable hoopskirts and furbelows of the era—and alerted Cornelius Welles, Almira Fales, and two friends from New Jersey, Lydia Haskell and Ada Morrell. Pausing only long enough to pen a hasty letter to her brother David, she prepared to depart.²⁶ “I leave immediately for the Battlefield,” she wrote, “don’t know when I can return. If anything happens [to] me you David must come and take all my effects home with you and Julie will know how to dispose of them.” She dashed off a similar note to Vira and was on her way.²⁷

Rucker had supplied her with men to load a boxcar that night, and the next morning in a drenching rain she joined the train as it “steamed and rattled out of Washington.”²⁸ She managed to squeeze herself into a spot atop the boxes and barrels and spent the trip wondering whether she would be thrown out of the open side door. It took two hours to make the eight-mile trip to Fairfax Station, where the federal wounded were being taken. This was excellent time compared with the experiences of many trains that day. The medical officials had thrown up their hands in the face of the slaughter at Second Bull Run and reluctantly advertised in newspapers for “surgeons and nurses (male) to attend to the wounded.” The thought of adventure and easy pay attracted a whole range of unsuitable men, who held up the trains or celebrated their delays by breaking open the casks of wine and brandy meant to revive the wounded. One train took eleven hours to travel from Alexandria to Fairfax Station, and when it arrived the bands of workers more resembled brigands than conveyors of mercy.²⁹

At ten o’clock the train rolled to a stop and Barton stepped gingerly from her precarious perch. She had believed herself a little inured to the agonized visages of the wounded, but the scene at Fairfax Station shocked and frightened her. The station was surrounded by thinly wooded hills, their grass burnt yellow and dry from the scorching Virginia sun. Stretched out on these hills were thousands of wounded men, covering the landscape in every direction.³⁰ “The eye wearied, the heart grew faint in seeing them,” wrote a chaplain who was there that Sunday morning.³¹ A threadbare procession of stretchers came in from the field to the temporary operating theaters. Frantic surgeons worked there, horrible with “their knives and uprolled sleeves and blood-smeared aprons, and by their sides ghastly heaps of cut off legs and arms.” Surrounded by the shrieks and waitings of the wounded, Clára, for a moment, panicked.³² They were the earliest relief workers to arrive, and with a start she realized that they were but “a little band of almost empty handed workers, literally by ourselves in the wild woods of Virginia with 3000 suffering men crowded upon the few acres within our reach.”³³ But it was not like her to give up or complain, and she quickly plucked up her courage.

This was not a hospital with tents or beds but a way station for those wounded who were to be taken on to Washington. The most fortunate lay on rough straw that had been hastily laid on the hillside. Many had been transported over twenty-five miles of rough roads in ill-designed and crowded ambulances; most had not had food or water for two days. These were the simple needs Barton hoped to meet. Her place, she later acknowledged, was “anywhere between the bullet and the hospital.” Her work was to keep as many men alive as she could before they could reach expert assistance.³⁴

With a box of motley tinware and some cornmeal, she began to cook. When the meal gave out she made a concoction of crushed army biscuits, wine, water, and brown sugar to feed the languishing men. “Not very inviting you will think, but I assure you always acceptable.” She lacked receptacles in which to hand it round, relying on empty jelly jars and wine bottles for the purpose.³⁵ In moments away from the kettle, she ministered to whatever need she found among the men. For many she bound wounds, to others she gave last rites or a clean shirt, or simply closed their glazed eyes. Many needed encouragement and a friendly voice as much as they needed water. One young boy, who haunted Barton for the remainder of her life, mistook her for his sister, and she sat with him through a fever-raged night, then pleaded with surgeons to include him on the hospital train, though his case was hopeless. If in her own estimation her resources were inadequate, her assistance again seemed a godsend to those about her. Dr. Dunn who had seen her as a “homely angel” at Culpeper, remembered the despair of the surgeons at Fairfax Station, where he said, “we had nothing but our instruments, not even a bottle of wine.” To his amazement and joy he saw that “when the cars whistled up to the station, the first person on the platform was Miss Barton to again supply us with bandages, brandy, wine, prepared soup, jellies, meals, and every article that could be thought of.”³⁶

The inadequate medical services of the Union army made Barton's work at this battlefield station among the most difficult—and important—that she would perform. No system of hospital care or emergency relief had yet been established, though Dr. Jonathan Letterman, an earnest and creative surgeon, had been brought on a month earlier to tackle the problem. Care for those who were shot or ill was left to the individual regiments, and this generally collapsed in the pandemonium that followed a battle. Among the worst problems was the lack of trained ambulance workers, not to mention the disastrous design of the ambulances themselves, which were ungainly, two-wheeled ox carts that swayed and tipped on the rough roads so that a man had not even the consolation of a level bed. If he survived the trip he could look forward to medical care that included ignorance of bacterial infection. “We operated in old blood-stained and often pus-stained coats…with undisinfected hands,” wrote a Union surgeon. “We used undisinfected instruments…and marine sponges which had been used in prior pus cases and only washed in tap water.” Quinine and morphia were practically the only drugs available for whatever ailed the men, and the mortality rate among the wounded during this early part of the war was truly dismaying. Nearly 90 percent of those suffering abdominal wounds died despite hospital ministrations, as did 62 percent of those with other wounds. The statistics were even higher at the field of Second Bull Run. On the long retreat down the Rappahannock the valuable medical supplies, considered cumbersome and expendable, were left by the roadside as the men wearied. In all only two wagons of medical supplies reached hospital personnel at this battle.³⁷

Though Barton would rail against the “heartless officers” whom she thought responsible for these statistics, it was impossible for her to view her wounded boys in aggregate numbers, for she was caught up with the private suffering of each individual soldier. Her accounts of this most personal of wars, which touched Americans as no other conflict, appear not as a continuum but a collection of stories and scenes, strung together like beads on string by a memory so jumbled with weariness, blood, and a thousand small crises, that it could not possibly sort them into consecutive facts. She was too busy to note each day’s events in the small pocket diaries she always carried with her, but they are filled with the names of dying men and last messages, each one too precious at that instant to be overshadowed by the larger reality of war. With more grief than surprise she recognized some powder-stained faces. It was not “a light thing…to pick up a shattered arm to bind and sling it and find the other suddenly thrown across your neck in recognition. Oh what a place,” she lamented, “to meet an old-time friend.”³⁸

Thus she worked on through that night and the next day, overwhelmed by the numbers yet never losing sight of new ambulance trains leaving more men to take the place of those already transferred to Washington. At night the horrors were increased, for the wounded men lay so close to each other that the workers could not step for fear of injuring them. The candles they carried made fire an ever-present risk on the windy, hay-covered hillside, and Clara lived “in terror lest some ones candle fall into the hay and consume them all.”³⁹ Their supplies gave out with woeful rapidity. “I never realized until that day how little a human being could be grateful for—and that day’s experience also taught me the utter worthlessness of that which could not be made to contribute directly to our necessities,” Barton acknowledged. “Of what real value was that which could not save life? the bit of bread which would rest on the surface of a gold [coin] was worth more than the coin itself.”⁴⁰ She feared, and rightly so, that whatever measure of aid she gave, it was not enough.

All day Monday' she labored as she had on Sunday, unable to think of anything beyond the crisis of immediate need. She was working by rote now, squeezing out her own last drops of strength, for she had had no sleep for two days and had eaten nothing. As food became scarce she and the other workers took the meat from their own sandwiches and gave it to the stricken men. Clara and the others were demoralized, overwhelmed by the ceaseless parade of ambulances, the seeming indifference among army officials, and the confirmed reports of disastrous defeat at the hands of the Southerners. “It is no light thing to travel days and nights among acres of wounded and dying men, to feel that your last mouthful is gone and still they famish at your feet.”⁴¹

Barton and the other relief workers could hear the shots of rebel skirmishers in the nearby hills, reminding them of Confederate dominance of the area and warning them that they must hurry.⁴² Ebbing strength and fear of the guerrillas caused two women of the party to scurry home to Washington, leaving only Reverend Welles to labor beside Clara.⁴³ And beyond every impersonal sorrow was the dreadful start of recognition Clara felt when she saw the faces of friends and former pupils among the sufferers. “Seven times! in one train of ambulances, I passed this ordeal,” she mourned, “you will not wonder that my heart is sore.”⁴⁴

Late that afternoon a thunderstorm blew up, and so did the sounds of another battle. Pope’s ragged and angry men were retreating along country roads to the west when they encountered Stonewall Jackson’s forces. Jackson’s men challenged the Unionists to make a stand near the tiny hamlet of Chantilly. It was a brief battle, fought furiously in the rain, and two popular Union generals, Isaac Stevéns and Philip Kearny, were lost here. Though it was a small victory for the South, it heightened the already serious demoralization of the United States troops.

This “cavalry charge in a cornfield,” as a curious bystander described it, inevitably meant yet more ambulances, more stunned and bleeding men, more need and fewer supplies to relieve it.⁴⁵ Barton had caught a catnap by huddling in a waterlogged tent among baskets and boxes, unable to completely lie down. After sleeping for two hours, she sprang again to action after removing the matted grass and leaves from her hair and wringing the muddy water from her skirts. She spent the next day climbing from the wheel hub to the brake of every ambulance, determined to see that no man faced the long trip to the hospital without some water or a small portion of food.⁴⁶

Rebel scouts appeared more frequently now among the rain-glistening trees. An officer rode up to Clara and asked her if she could ride a horse bareback. “Then you can risk another hour,” he shouted to her affirmative reply. Should the Confederates close in, Barton knew, she would have to ride an unfamiliar horse cross-country through enemy lines to reach Washington. Fortunately this emergency did not arise. At breakneck speed Barton and Welles loaded the last man on the train about five o’clock Tuesday afternoon, then jumped aboard themselves, escaping just as a band of rebel cavalrymen galloped up to the station. Barton peered out from the boxcar as the engine puffed away and saw them setting fire to the little station, which had sheltered the helpless. “Two hours later,” she told Vira, “and Fairfax Station is no more.”⁴⁷

In the days that followed, the carnage she had witnessed seemed almost too much for Clara to comprehend. The well-known scenes of Washington life, the fashion-conscious patina and nonchalance—even gaiety—appeared brutal and yet steeped in a familiarity that made the desperate days with the wounded only a horrible fantasy. She slept and wrote letters, including some for public consumption, and though she described events, she could not bring herself to retell the grisly details. “My heart is too sore today to recount to you the scenes of suffering I have witnessed,” she told her friends. “Some future day, when their wounds and mine are less fresh, I will find strength to tell you.”⁴⁸

If Barton felt any small pleasure or pride in her recent experience it was in the knowledge that she had labored to her capacity and that her courage and energy had been tried and not found wanting. Four months earlier she had thought she “would not…run if left under fire.” She had faced sniper fire and the threat of capture at Fairfax Station, and an eyewitness later asserted that her willingness to stay until the last man was aboard the train was “one of the most courageous acts of the war.”⁴⁹ She had proved her value to the army, to the surgeons, and most importantly, to herself. Now she would tackle her work with a new energy, conditioned by an understanding of the tremendous need for her services and the confidence that she had the strength, as well as the desire, to meet it.

Barton had come to believe in “the folly or wickedness of remaining quietly at home” while the army was in the field, and she regretted to the end of her life that social mores had kept her from the field for over a year. “I said that I struggled with my sense of propriety,” she told friends nearly twenty years afterward, “and I say it with humiliation and shame. I am ashamed that I thought of such a thing.”⁵⁰ She rushed off again almost immediately, therefore, following the army to Hammond Hospital in Point Lookout, Maryland. Her young cousin Leander Poor was amazed to find her “just as usual,” fired with enthusiasm, even after the experience she had undergone during the previous fortnight. “It has been more than a common soldier could endure,” he noted proudly, “yet I find her with head, heart and hands full of business: calm, methodical, and cheerful.”⁵¹

Thin fingers of light were creeping over the eastern sky a few mornings later when an army messenger slipped a paper into her hand. “Harper’s [sic] Ferry—not a moment to be lost” it ran. She read it, then burned it in front of the courier, who told her when her wagons and supplies would be ready. The army that had been so reluctant to accept her services now offered her supplies and the best mules and teamsters, as well as privileged information about anticipated battles.⁵² Robert E. Lee’s self-assured men had headed toward Maryland in the belief that an invasion of the North would both inflict psychological damage on the already shaken Union and provide new fields to plunder. The Union army followed lamely, unable to prevent wily Stonewall Jackson from capturing the strategic mountain town of Harpers Ferry and taking thirteen thousand prisoners on September 12, and two days later handing them defeat at South Mountain some miles distant.

Only the faithful “Cornie” accompanied Barton, for she no longer felt the need of a female companion to protect her against the barbs of society’s judgment. Although she would later laud the role of women in the Civil War and claim their bravery and competence for a victory over the doubts and superstitions of men, in actuality she scorned the women who surrounded her. She could feel nothing but contempt for the well-meaning ladies who

When the charge is rammed home and the fire belches hot…

never will wait for the answering shot.⁵³

Even Almira Fales had hurried off at the first sign of danger, and though she only “went for stores,” Barton could not forgive her: “I know I should never leave a wounded man there if I knew it, though I were taken prisoner forty times.”⁵⁴ Women helpers caused Clara more hindrance than help when they were shaken or tired; moreover, they vied with her for recognition and the honor of equaling the men in nobility and courage. She came to agree with Colonel Rucker and the other officers who had tried to keep her from the front for these very reasons. Never again was she accompanied at the battlefield by a woman.⁵⁵

Barton would test her strength again at the fields of South Mountain. At first her wagons passed the straggling blue-clad soldiers, and she revived them as best she could by passing out chunks of bread from a supply she replenished at each town. Then debris and grotesque forms began to appear along the road. The fighting was barely over when she finally arrived at the battlefield. Almost more dreadful than she could contemplate, the sight merited the only description she would write of a field of war. It was “all blood and carnage,” she wrote with revulsion, “our wagon wheels within six feet of yet unburied dead. A mingled mass of stiffened, blackened men, horses, muskets, bayonets, knapsacks, haversacks, blankets, coats, canteens, broken wheels, and cannon balls which had done this deadly work—the very earth plowed with shot.…It was a fearful way to learn of a battle, a hard page to read.”⁵⁶ She and Welles, “shocked and sick at heart,” climbed over the hills and ledges to find the last wounded man and see that he got medical attention, then trod through the field to answer screams and whimpers. The last she saw of “that field of death” was the lingering haze of smoke and a “hideous pile of mangled and dismembered bodies.”⁵⁷

She joined the army then. Her four wagons became part of the ten-mile train, which crawled through Maryland’s western valleys. The golden, peaceful country was beautiful, but Barton knew, as did the dispirited ranks surrounding her, that the incidents at Harpers Ferry and South Mountain amounted to little more than a dress rehearsal for an imminent and terrible clash. Barton was more frustrated than demoralized at this point, however. Her carts and stores, which she believed should be ready the instant there was need, stood at the back of the creeping train, hours, even days, away from the troops destined for battle. The officers and drivers ahead of her refused to let her pass. They would “no more change position than one of the planets,” she remarked.⁵⁸ Feeling a “terrible sense of oppression” as the armies approached the little community of Sharpsburg, Maryland, she devised a plan to travel all night through the caravan of wagons, which had pulled off the road for a few hours of fitful sleep. By daybreak, as the fetid air of men and beasts began to fill the muggy, somnolent valley, Clara was where she wanted to be: just behind the cannon.⁵⁹

With the first roar of the artillery, Barton, feeling sorrowful for the men but as exhilarated as any general in anticipating the battle, urged her teams to a gallop, taking them eight miles across the fields to what appeared to be a dressing station on the right. Wading through a field of ripe corn so high that it hid everything from view, she came upon the farm of Joseph Poffenberger, a German immigrant who had fled with his family at the first sign of the armies. To Barton the whole wretched scene in the house already overloaded with the wounded was too familiar. Even the surgeons were those with whom she had previously worked. The first face she saw on reaching the house was that of Dr. James Dunn.⁶⁰

His round face brightened at the sight of Barton, and his lips formed the praise that made her efforts worthwhile: “The Lord has remembered us; you are here again.”⁶¹ Their necessities were terrible, he told her. The house was so close to the field that shells burst among the workers, lighting up the sky in a brilliant display. The worst cases were brought here, those that could neither stay on the field nor endure the long passage to the distant field hospital. Those with entire thighs gone, with faces blown away or abdomens penetrated, were tenderly transported by comrades who believed there was still hope in the surgeon’s small knife and rolls of cotton bandaging. Until Barton's arrival, however, there was little comfort for the agonized. Doctors Dunn and Chaddock had rolled up their sleeves to begin work with nothing but their instruments and a little chloroform they had hastily crammed into their pockets. Not only were the wagon trains as slow as molasses, but a railroad shipment of stores had failed to reach them. Men were bleeding to death from shell wounds, with only green corn leaves to cover, but not stop, the flow. Four tables with patients ready for surgery stood on the porch of the bullet-ridden house. With relief the surgeons accepted Barton’s armfuls of bandages and stimulants and began their awful labor. Barton sized up the situation, drafted twelve loitering soldiers (who, to her delight, were from the Twenty-first Hubbell s) to help locate the wounded, and together with Reverend Welles began to answer the screams which echoed on all sides.⁶²

On this, the “bloodiest day in American history,” nearly forty thousand lives were lost. There were few survivors at the Poffenberger farm, where one of the relief workers estimated fifteen hundred men were crammed into barns, corn cribs, and mangers. Welles told his flock in New York that their work centered largely on “a grateful privilege to bathe their faces and close their eyes for the sake of loved ones at home.”⁶³ Oliver Wendell Holmes, who went to the field at Antietam Creek to find his wounded son, wrote that it was “a pitiable sight, truly pitiable; yet so vast, so far beyond the possibility of relief, that many single sorrows of small dimensions have wrought upon my feelings more than this great caravan of maimed pilgrims.”⁶⁴ This was how Barton too remembered the battle of Antietam—not as a sea of faces but as the bright image of one or two which appeared through the smoke that blinded and choked and sickened them. She extracted her first bullet at this battle from the face of a youngster who begged her to relieve his pain and let more seriously wounded men be attended to by the surgeons. With her pocketknife she severed for the first time “the nerves and fibers of human flesh,” while a veteran, wounded in the thigh, held the boy’s head. “I do not think a surgeon would have pronounced it a scientific operation,” she said with a quiet pride, “but that it was successful I dared to hope from the gratitude of the patient.” She held another face, offering the man a drink of cool well water, only to hear a soft whir and see his body quiver and lie still: “a bullet sped its full and easy way between us, tearing a hole in my sleeve and found its way into his body.” Still another face that peered anxiously through that sooty haze looked to Clara too soft to be a soldier; the boy was suspiciously hesitant to have his wounded breast dressed. After gentle probing, Barton ascer-tained that the soldier’s name was Mary Galloway. Barton could sympathize with this girl’s spirited defiance of custom and her determination to join her menfolk at the front. She shepherded and shielded the girl, and subsequently located her lover in a Washington hospital. In later years Barton liked to recall that the two had named their eldest daughter for her.⁶⁵

She cut an eccentric figure, standing over a kettle of gruel, with the hem of her skirt pinned up about her waist, her hair astray, her face covered with gunpowder.⁶⁶ But no surgeon would have thought to laugh at the sight. She had the habit of command and comfort, and the soldier aides turned naturally to her for instructions, which she always gave in a calm and sometimes infuriatingly unhurried manner. When, exhausted from the unrelieved misery, the medical men denounced the indifferent government that left them to cope in the dark without a single candle, she gently told them of the candles and lanterns she had brought. She would not flinch as she held a leg that was to be hacked off without chloroform, did not cry at the ghastly death of some former pupil. “Now what do you think of Miss Barton?” Surgeon Dunn asked his wife, after describing to her some of these feats. “In my feeble estimation, General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield.⁶⁷

At the Poffenberger farm Barton saw the worst of the day's fighting and the worst excesses of medical disorder, despite the fact that medical services overall improved markedly at the battle of Antietam. Dr. Letterman had rounded up a team of competent and well-rehearsed ambulance workers, who could proudly claim at day's end that no man was left on the field more than twenty-four hours. Letterman had also begun to slyly supplant the ineffective regimental hospital system, proposing instead field hospitals on the division level with supplies distributed only to the surgeons in charge. It was a radical change for the slow-moving medical department, and one that did not evolve completely until the campaigns of 1864. The conservative career doctors of the army medical bureaucracy frowned on these humane innovations, believing they would cost the army money or slow its ability to move. They had reluctantly supported the newfangled ambulances, only to see the army order large numbers of the ridiculous two-wheeled carts, which caused more misery than relief. But Letterman had the support of Dr. William Alexander Hammond, the aggressive and self-confident surgeon general whose “immense energy and capability” made his promotion of new ideas a valuable asset. Together Letterman and Hammond fought to eliminate “the total want of organization, the drunkenness and incompetency” they had seen at Second Bull Run.⁶⁸

The Sanitary Commission was also a crucial source of relief supplies during this battle. The organization had been started early in the war when disease and demoralization from filthy camps and inadequate food threatened to undermine the hastily assembled Union army. The prominent New Yorkers who headed the organization rightly predicted that disease and malnutrition would decimate the men more quickly than bullets, and they formed their own army of civilians to inspect camps and distribute everything from onions (to prevent scurvy) to cotton drawers. They fought favoritism to particular regiments with equitable distribution of supplies, administered from a network of regional and local auxiliaries. Not surprisingly, the medical department refused at first to acknowledge them. The Sanitary Commission went blithely on, however, cleverly harnessing the energetic spirits of volunteers from Maine to Kansas. Women from Chicago and Philadelphia organized huge “Sanitary Fairs” to raise money to outfit hospital ships and purchase supplies, and women at home knitted, preserved, and stitched, packing every kind of ware under the label of “sanitary stores.” The goods they collected resembled those solicited by Barton, and they established warehouses similar to hers for collection and distribution. Eventually effective publicity and obvious impact on several battlefields won the commission both recognition with the army medical staff and nationwide fame.⁶⁹

Alongside the Sanitary Commission labored the Christian Commission and a bevy of female nurses under the superintendence of Miss Dorothea Dix. The Christian Commission, whose purported goal was to “give relief and sympathy and then the gospel,” was a branch of the YMCA.⁷⁰ It did seek to convert the soldier and warn him against the campfire sins of gambling and drinking, but especially in the latter part of the war, it also provided many of the same comforts as other civilian groups. Dix’s nurses, on the other hand, were a breed apart. Experienced medical men might be unused to women in the sanctity of their wards, but the work of Florence Nightingale in the Crimea had pointed up the terrible need for the kind of routine care and cleaning for which surgeons had little time or inclination. Able-bodied men were needed in the army, and the use of women, however controversial, seemed a pragmatic solution for the understaffed hospitals. Dorothea Lynn Dix, who had gained national prominence for her exposure of the scandalous treatment afforded inmates of prisons and insane asylums, was appointed to head the Department of Female Nurses. She was a small, birdlike woman, flighty and energetic, with a prim, pointed face. At sixty she was determined that no scandal should taint her nurses. She required that the volunteers be over thirty, plain of dress, and strong enough to singlehandedly turn a man in bed. Pretty girls with hoopskirts and wasp waists, or bold personalities who craved adventure, were turned away. For the most part these nurses staffed Washington hospitals and, later, the divisional field hospitals established by Letterman. But Dix lacked executive ability, and this, coupled with her rigidity and nervous temperament, confirmed many a medical man’s worst fears about female nurses. At war’s end Dix left the organization with personal regrets: “This is not the work I would have my life judged by.”⁷¹

In addition to Dix’s workers there were countless unaffiliated women who labored as Barton did, with individual initiative and hand-to-mouth resources. Heavyset Mary “Mother” Bickerdyke worked with the western armies, alternately bullying and soothing the men until she gained the respect of surgeons and generals. Upon receiving complaints about her high-handed tactics, General William T. Sherman stated to an aide that he could not correct her for “she ranks me.”⁷² Frances D. Gage fought in South Carolina for the rights of black soldiers, bucking prejudice in every rank as she struggled for impartiality of treatment. Mary A. Livermore directed the Western Sanitary Commission. Katherine Wormely took hospital ships as her special jurisdiction. In a tribute to these women, written in the 1880s, Barton acknowledged their contribution, and lauded the “hinderance and pain, and effort and cost” of their individual sacrifices.⁷³