Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Elizabeth Brown Pryor
Barton saw little chance of their friendship ripening into a permanent attachment. Fanny Childs again held the view that Williams was not a very interesting man and that Barton failed to see in him “the possibility of a husband such as she would have chosen.”31 Before Clara was thirty, Williams had left North Oxford to bury his sore heart in the gold fields of California.
It was indeed a time when most girls of her age and social status were considering marriage, both as romantic fulfillment and as their highest calling in life. There is every indication that Clara Barton also assumed that marriage would come to her in due course. She liked the company of men; as a girl she had preferred the companionship of her brothers, father, and male cousins. She was no political feminist—she admitted that in her youth she never heard of the work of Susan B. Anthony or Elizabeth Cady Stanton—but her entire background had encouraged her to view herself as the compatriot and match of any man. The men in her family had treated her—indeed trained her—as an equal, and her personality grew as strong and dominant as theirs.32 By comparison her beaus seem to be always in her shadow. A friend wrote that “more men were interested in her than she was ever interested in,” then added that Clara was so pronounced in her opinions that most men, used to more submissive women, “stood somewhat in awe of her.”33 They admired her extravagantly, and Clara enjoyed their adulation, but she could not take any of them seriously as a life partner. Moreover, she came to disdain many men who she thought treated women in a patronizing way. The case of Sam Healy, a young man who for a time paid attentions to Elvira Stone, is indicative of Clara Barton's strong sense of the respect she felt was due women. Healy escorted her cousin for a time, but his intention was more to gain social acceptance than to have the pleasure of Elvira's company. Barton was outraged when she heard that Healy had stopped seeing Elvira after securing his social toehold and had spoken poorly of her in company.
“Ah Sam Healy,” Barton wrote, “that was the day ye died in my estimation and there was no Resurrection for Ye.”34 Incidents such as these convinced her that it would be a rare man who could live up to her standards of intelligence and at the same time respect her for her own abilities and aspirations. Fanny Childs Vassall, who knew Clara intimately during her twenties, acknowledged this. “I do not think she ever had a love affair that stirred the depths of her being,” she wrote. “Clara Barton was herself so much stronger a character than any of the men who made love to her that I do not think she was ever seriously tempted to marry any of them.”35
Yet a mystery hangs around the emotions involved in many of Barton's romantic relationships. In later life she often alluded to serious affairs, including one that was terminated not by her desire but by the gentleman's death in the Mexican War. She never mentioned the man's name, but she gave at least one person the impression that the two had been engaged.36 Clara's diaries also show that she was capable of a strong emotional response to men.37 Her disinclination to marry, at least during these early years, stemmed more from the unavailability of a suitable mate than from a strong prejudice against the subordinate role of women in marriage or a dislike of men.
Clara's social life during the years of teaching was not dominated by amorous adventures. Captain Barton, recognizing the emotional, burden that teaching often placed on her, bought her a spirited saddle horse.38 She often rode alone, leaving her cares behind as she flew through the wooded country lanes, but she also occasionally shared her rides with the more adventurous of her acquaintances.39 She played whist, apparently with some indifference, and tried her hand at making artificial flowers and painting.40 Between school terms, when she had an unusual amount of spare time, she wrote copious letters—a habit of correspondence she was to keep all her life—and went chestnuting with her favorite nephew.41 Literary pursuits, too, occupied her time, and she wrote verses (generally more doggerel than poetry) for her friends and copied works by others in a scrapbook pasted together from her old school copybooks.42 Her days were filled with social calls, as a diary entry for February 24, 1849, shows: “Received a call from Mrs. Cummings, visited David in the afternoon. Went to Webster [a neighboring town] in the evening. E P. called and left in the evening.”43
Clara could hardly be accused of being asocial now, yet she still preferred to spend her time in some productive occupation. Restless and impatient, she searched for ways to be useful. She often found an outlet in keeping the books for her brothers’ mills, and when the mills burned in 1839, she helped to straighten the financial records so that a new complex could be built. She was anxious, too, to be of help at home. During the final illness of her grandmother, Dorothy Barton, who died in 1838, she aided her mother as best she could, and when her sister Dolly finally succumbed in 1842 to the sad collapse of her mental powers, Clara was by her side.44 In addition, she participated actively in the work of the Universalist church. When a new church was to be erected, around 1844, she pitched in to help raise money for the building. As always, it gratified her to work toward a goal. She noted with pride that “no body of church people ever worked harder than we. We held fairs, public and home, begged, and gave all but the clothes we wore, we cleaned windows, scrubbed [up] paint after workmen, bought and nailed down carpets.” Barton also helped to furnish the parsonage and was pleased when she was chosen to stay in the house to welcome the new minister and his young bride.45
Yet her church work, dedicated as it was, was not an indication of deep religious feelings. Though aware of her father's devotion to Universalist principles, Clara did not share his strong religious convictions. From childhood on she remembered the town church as an austere place of “tall box pews and high narrow seats” in which there was ever an “incongruous winter atmosphere” that pinched her fingers and toes, and where faith was not easy but was “hammered out.”46 Despite the efforts of friends such as Lucien Burleigh, who advised her to search her soul and give more attention to religious beliefs, Barton remained aloof from the doctrines of the church. She had trouble meshing the Universalist notion of ultimate joy with the poverty and unhappiness she saw around her, and if anything she became increasingly pessimistic during this period. After confiding to a friend about this trend in her personal feelings in 1843, he replied with a note of sadness: “You announce to me a change in your religious view from a hope in the final infinite happiness of all mankind you have become a believer in the endless misery of a part, that is truly a change.”47 Barton never completely relinquished her faith but remained, as she pronounced it, a “well-disposed pagan.”48 Still she enjoyed the tie to the church's organization, which provided a welcome outlet for her enormous energy and capability.
Barton's most ambitious project during the 1840s, however, was worked in tandem with her brother Stephen. For several years Clara had been aware of the need to redistrict the schools in the town of Oxford. Owing to the success of the various mills, the town had grown rapidly, and the centers of population had shifted so that the locations of the old schools were no longer suitable. Oxford had no large central schools. Instead it relied on several small, dilapidated buildings that were empty half of the year and served only a few pupils. Clara had seen similar problems in other areas. In the early 1840s, during the time she had taught in Millbury, she had persuaded the local school board to endorse a report that deplored the poor attendance, lack of uniform textbooks, inadequate facilities, and superficial community attention to school problems.49 In 1844 she began in earnest to try to remedy similar problems in Oxford, and she found in Stephen, who was then a member of the town school board, a willing and able compatriot.
After several sessions, during which they consumed “more or less midnight oil,” Clara and Stephen set out to convince the town of the need for a new system of school organization. They met with strong opposition. Many Oxford citizens believed that such an effort would cost the town dearly and that sufficient funds were already spent on education. Others saw a problem in requiring their children to walk across town to school; they liked the system of neighborhood schools, which kept the boys and girls close to home where they could be called quickly if they were needed to help with farm or shop. Moreover, the Barton's’ original plan had grown to encompass a scheme for educating the millworkers and their children. As a mill owner, Stephen was well aware that low wages and long hours conspired to keep these people from obtaining an education, and that, furthermore, no district school existed in the area in which the millworkers lived. Although