Phineas Taylor Barnum  Olympia Brown

Clarissa Harlowe Barton (1821-1912)

Clarissa Harlowe Barton Clarissa Harlowe Barton

The Civil War “Angel of the Battlefield,” was also the founder of the American Red Cross. Clarissa Harlowe Barton was born on December 25, 1821 in North Oxford, Massachusetts to an active Universalist family. The youngest of five children, Clara’s father Stephen and her mother Sarah (Stone) both rejected their Baptist heritage. He was present at Hosea Ballou’s ordination, and later became an officer in the Universalist church in North Oxford. A shy child, Clara was a regular attender at the Universalist church, but her memories were mostly of how cold it was in the wintertime. Although she did not join, Barton remained devoted to the institutional church, and helped raise money for a new building in Oxford in 1844. Later in life she referred to herself as a “well-disposed pagan,” but she also wrote that she considered herself a Universalist throughout her life, and apparently joined the Universalist Church of our Father when she lived in Washington.

Encouraged to be a teacher, Clara began to teach in North Oxford when she was only 15, but left to enroll in the Clinton Liberal Institute in New York. After her graduation, she moved to New Jersey, where some Universalist friends resided. Here she opened the first public school in Bordentown. The school was a great success and led to the establishment of a permanent public school there. When the job of principal that she wanted was offered to a man, Clara felt rebuffed and resigned.

Feeling worn from her labors, Clara moved to Washington, D.C. and became a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office. When the Civil War broke out, Barton’s compassion was activated by the sight of trains of wounded soldiers, specifically the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment. During the war years she organized field hospitals and tended to the sick, wounded and dying, and her front line aid, especially at Antietam, earned her the Angel of the Battlefield nickname. After the war she traveled to Andersonville Prison in Georgia to help identify the dead. After a brief period on the lecture circuit, Barton went to Europe to try to recover her health. The Franco-Prussian War broke out, and Barton went to assist on more battlefields. Here she first saw the work of the Red Cross, and became determined to found an American branch. She worked hard to see it come to pass, and when Chester Arthur signed the Treaty of Geneva, Barton was appointed the first president of the Association of the American Red Cross. She remained in that position for twenty-three years, during which the Red Cross became directly involved in peacetime disaster relief, such as the Johnstown flood.

In 1900, she wrote to Vincent Tomlinson, the Universalist minister in Worcester, “Surely the love that surpasses fear should be the strongest stimulus to all good endeavor.” This love made Barton a true international humanitarian who always defied the “tyranny of precedent” especially to relieve someone’s suffering. She died in Glen Echo, Maryland on April 12, 1912. In 1920 the Women’s National Missionary Association began to discuss purchasing her birthplace as both a Universalist shrine, and a service project for the Clara Barton Guilds, which had been established at many Universalist churches. The next year the property was purchased, eventually becoming the Clara Barton Camp for Diabetic Girls, the first such facility in the country.