Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Elizabeth Brown Pryor
in the present, Barton was not given to making elaborate plans. Decisions about the future—a hazy and alien place to her—came with difficulty. She seems to have decided that if she would have to teach she would undertake a position in an academy or as a governess. With a partial eye to this, and with her ever-present zeal for further education egging her on, she embarked on a series of French classes, painting lessons, and other art courses. Languages and art were considered necessary attainments for a well-taught lady and indispensable to the private teacher. In 1858, Clara moved to Worcester, boarded with the family of Judge Barton, and commenced taking classes at a local academy.60
Barton did well in her French courses and earned a little pocket money here and there, chiefly as a companion to an elderly woman friend.61 In addition, she lived off her savings, thus making herself financially independent. Nevertheless, she did not flourish in this, her own most-hated role of subservience and uselessness, and she felt obliged to explain herself and her actions or to conform to the family's standards when in their presence. For all of 1858, she continued her studies, half hoping that something more enticing would come along. Undecided about the future and unhappy with the present, she seemed incapable of acting decisively to relieve her depression.
Determined to make at least a small change, Barton switched from languages to drawing courses in September 1858. Throughout that fall she sketched from nature or models, then graduated to painting and work with ceramics. The few pieces of her artistic work remaining show a detailed and technically competent style, but one that lacks originality or freedom of movement. Though she found her efforts mildly interesting, she did not regard them as work and could not embrace them seriously. Rather, they encouraged her fears that she was not developing but only idly filling time.62
What Barton sorely needed was a sense of purpose. She found a focus in two young relatives, both of whom looked to her for help at this time. She was distracted by their troubles and, more importantly, could bolster her own feelings of self-worth by working out their problems. But ultimately she undertook too much responsibility for these children, and they proved a costly emotional and financial drain. Their success or failure became entangled with her own sense of achievement; their progress dictated her own elation or sorrow.
It was concern for her nephew, Irving Vassall, that most seriously affected Barton's mood. She was closer as a peer to Irving and his brother Bernard than perhaps any other members of the family. To these two she confided her own darkest self-doubts, and with them she was at her most playful. For years she had exchanged poems with Bubby, as she nicknamed Irving, and enjoyed his witty and inquiring mind. In his late teens, he had “grown to be a young man, full of promise, noble and intellectual beyond all reasonable expectations.”63 Now she watched with alarm as his health declined and his vitality sputtered and died. He was, at sixteen, consumptive, and he was beginning to experience the full effects of this debilitating disease. By the time his Aunt Clara moved to North Oxford, his spirits and constitution were precariously low. He and his mother had moved to Washington: they hoped the mild climate would improve his health. In fact it had deteriorated seriously during their first months there. To make matters worse, Vester Vassall, his father, had proven to be an inadequate provider. The Barton family was constantly called on to help, for Irving's own family could afford neither expensive medical care nor a permanent move to a less rigorous climate. Worried that the boy would be allowed to waste away, Barton began to confer with Bernard about the best possible course for his recovery.
Neither Bernard nor his father was working at that time, and thus they could contribute little. But Clara and Bernard together devised a plan to collect funds to send Irving to Minnesota. The “prairie cure,” which relied on the clear dry air of the Midwest to allay the disease, was popular at the time, and Barton hoped the change in climate would help her nephew. Sure that if she explained the case each of Irving's many friends would contribute a little toward the journey, Clara hoped to collect over one thousand dollars. She was, however, disappointed. Stephen Barton gave a good deal of money, and several Oxford families contributed five or ten dollars to the fund, but the net collection was something under two hundred dollars.64
The family believed the proposed cure was unlikely to aid Irving's health and would be a waste of money on a boy who, though charming and talented, they considered thoroughly spoiled. This attitude annoyed and hurt Clara, and coupled with legitimate worries over Irving's condition and her own sense of futility, it created an intense period of anxiety for her. To her diary she complained that her nerves were “ticklish” and her sleep fitful. In early February 1859, she became so distraught that she could accomplish nothing and spent her time wandering aimlessly.65 A month later, after receiving a letter from Irving that spoke of a greatly worsened condition, her old insomnia returned, and with it the painful physical symptoms that accompanied her periods of mental stress. “I became satisfied then,” she told Elvira Stone, “of what I had mistrusted before, i.e., where the difficulty in my back originates.”66 Her low spirits increased throughout the year until she began again to think life not worth living and meditated forlornly on “the strange duplicity of mankind.”67
It was not only Irving Vassall's case that depressed her but other family obligations as well. Her Aunt Hannah died in February 1859, leaving her “sad and desolate” and saddled with most of the responsibility for the funeral arrangements. Moreover, she worried about her father's increasingly feeble state. When David fell ill that spring, she felt obliged to care for him as of old. She returned to North Oxford to “nurse up” her brother, who was slow to mend, and her own affairs were left in disarray for nearly two months.68 At the same time she took up the cause of Mattie Poor, another young relative. Mattie, then studying music in Boston with high hopes of becoming a concert pianist, had more ambition than talent. Naive and profligate, she ran through the $125 Barton sent her in March 1859 in less than three weeks. Horrified, but unwilling to see the girl's education go unfinished, Barton burdened herself with this additional responsibility.69
She tried to raise her spirits by attending the lectures of fashionable speakers such as poet Oliver Wendell Holmes and travel author Bayard Taylor. She pieced together a quilt, kept up her voluminous correspondence, and took pleasure in a few outings with old friends.70 As the summer wore on, however, her thoughts were increasingly black, her mood ensnared in some terrible, dark cavern of depression. Irving's situation was worsening gradually, and it seemed apparent that her sister and other family members would do little or nothing to aid him. Worse yet, Irving himself had apparently begun to lose courage and seemed reluctant to try the prairie cure or anything else that might help his condition. Finally, convinced that she must shoulder this burden alone if she could not find others to help, Barton sent Irving a bank draft for three hundred dollars. Then, after a thorough check of her finances, she penned him a forceful letter. “You are going to Minnesota as soon as you are able to start, and your mother is going with you,” she wrote, adding that the expense was little to her in comparison with the prospect of his recovery. More money would be forthcoming, she promised, concluding: “So My Boy dont puzzle over it, but get ready, get off and get well, as fast as you can.”71
She felt better with the decision made, despite the worrisome drain on her finances. (The last check to Irving, she confided to a friend, had “exceeded my limit.”72) But, her guilt erased and optimism restored, she could now wax philosophic about her prospects. “I have taken the ‘rough and tumble’ of life and outlived aspirations enough to know something of it,” she told Bernard. “I have helped do just such things as I desire done for Irving and it was a pleasure then, and surely is now to remember it.”73 Feeling more useful and self-satisfied than she had in a year, Barton decided to escalate her role in the matter. Sometime in August she announced that she would accompany Sally and Irving on their trip west and stay to see them settled.
It was a long and difficult journey. Irving's illness was more pronounced than she had been led to hope. His thin, shaky frame was wracked by hemorrhages, during which he lay coughing up blood for hours. Barton met the Vassalls in Washington, where they took the dirty and rattling cars for Chicago. They sat stiff and tired for the three day trip, arriving in Chicago's raw wooden railway terminal on September 18. Irving was sick and worn; he had to lie prone and quiet for a week before they continued on. Though it was