Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Elizabeth Brown Pryor
to settle him in a healthful atmosphere; she recorded no impression of Chicago's rough streets or the wide stretches of waving prairie grass, so different from the rocks and rills of Hubbell s. Before her opinion could be formed, they traveled on from Chicago to Duluth, where they stopped for several days.74
Barton stayed with her sister and Irving until late November. They tried a number of towns in their search for a place to settle permanently but could not find one that suited them exactly. Irving, in despair over his ebbing strength, became pettish and was rarely satisfied with food, lodging, or location. Sally Vassall was also tired and exasperated, and it fell to Clara to keep them in good cheer. A woman who met them at this time remembered her as “a small person with a very bright face and at times very serious. Often she was gay, too.” Clara talked with Irving of slavery and politics, took him on excursions to see the Mississippi River, and tried to make herself useful to the families who generously put them up.75 One family was surprised to find her building a cupboard from rough boards when she saw that they had need for one. Another man remembered the gracious and cheerful way in which Clara “refused to deprive the ‘little sisters’ of their bed, and slept on the floor,” and how she loaned her “dancing slippers” to a disappointed girl whose own had been forgotten. Later in life the girl would brag that “she stood in Clara Barton's shoes a whole evening.”76
Finally, short of money and recognizing her own need to find a job, Barton returned home. Once there, however, her depression only worsened. To her discomfort she found her finances even less secure than she had supposed. Her old nervous condition was back and within a few weeks was so bad that she could scarcely leave her bed. She was also distressed to hear that both Bernard and his father were still essentially unemployed and unable to contribute to Irving's support. Worse yet, she either sensed or imagined a lack of hospitality on the part of David and Julie. Convinced that they wished her to leave, she felt more beholden than ever. In despair, she told Bernard that she had sent Irving thirty dollars more, but that he “must meet the next demand. I have very little money, no credit, no business, no prospect of any, and sick in bed, and unlike either of you, no home.”77
Two weeks later Irving sent a request for additional funds, which Barton felt unable to raise. He also wrote that he disliked Minnesota, found it unbearably cold, and wanted to return to Washington for the winter. To underscore his point he allowed that his health had worsened in the Midwest. Alarmed that the boy might leave Minnesota before the cure had a chance to work and completely exasperated at his demanding and ungrateful attitude, Barton's patience gave way. “Can it be that he is so trifling and selfish?” she asked Bernard. “Would he subject us to all he has…and then after we are all beggared, rob us of all the little chance of gratification we could possibly have, viz to see him try to improve a little under our exertions.” If so, she concluded, “if there's not more than this to him, he is not worth trying to save.”78
Her reserves of cheer and strength were giving out now, eaten away by worries real and imagined. Mattie Poor, who had also overrun her funds, refused to leave her studies, though she was now more than qualified to teach music. She demanded Clara's continued aid but rejected any advice along with the check; “she is only a counterpart of Bub on my hands,” Clara sadly noted.79 At the same time, Clara was worried about her father's health. When he was again sick in February, she became so distraught that she exhausted herself, as she had so many times before, nursing him.80 When she at length looked up from his sickbed she found the winter nearly over. Another season had passed without profit or serenity.
At home, Barton received no support, comfort, or even understanding for her misery. Friends and kinfolk thought her foolish for pampering Irving and Mattie and believed she had brought her troubles on herself. They could not understand why Clara did not take a teaching job, settle down, and rid herself of her nervous affliction. Julie Barton seemed concerned that her sister-in-law would become a permanent charge, for Clara had not been able to pay for her board for several months. Furthermore, Clara was—or felt she was—socially shunned. She had no idea what was expected of her, did not know how to fit in, felt every move was the wrong one.81 “I work all day to keep things as straight as possible and cry half the night…,” she wrote, adding sarcastically, “now you will naturally see that things look ‘bright to me.’”82
Well aware that she needed to get away, find work, and recapture her self-esteem, Barton wrote, “I must not rust much longer…[but] push out and do something somewhere, or anything, anywhere.”83 Just what she would do was another question. She would consider the subservient and poorly paid life of teaching only as a last resort. “I gave outgrown that, or that me,” she recognized. “I have no desire to do it now.”84 Having ruled out the most easily obtainable position, she wearied of mulling over the other limited possibilities. Clerking, starting a school, and escaping to South America were all considered. Frustration mounted as she used her influence to gain lucrative positions for Bernard, Elvira Stone, and other friends, and saw herself still empty-handed. After two jobs—a clerkship and an administrative job with a school—failed to materialize, Clara's emotional state became so desperate that she was immobilized by panic. She had, she acknowledged, “added more than ten years right into my life in the last two months.”85
Her frustrations were heightened by the difficulty she was experiencing because of her sex. The very clerkships that Barton's influence gained for Bernard were not open to her. It was a fact of which she was acutely conscious and which increasingly rankled her. The outright discrimination she had suffered in Bordentown and the prejudice of the official policy during her years in Washington had done a good deal to politicize her feminism. Like many other early women's leaders, personal experience gave bite to the shadowy liberal notions with which she had been raised. Knowledge of her own capabilities and the way in which these were bound by society began to give her reason to believe a radical change in the social structure must be accomplished. She was angry that she could not win the same political favors her untried nephew could, simply because she “couldn’t wear broadcloth.” Barton acknowledged that her political friends had always encouraged her to call on them for aid. There was a difference, however, between such hearty reassurances and the actual initiation of some help. Still shy when asking favors, Clara did not see how she could approach her friends and was thus reluctant to ask them “until some change should open the way.”86
Perhaps, she surmised, a permanent government appointment was too much to expect. Then, in a burst of fury, she recognized her own tendency to limit her expectations to the level of the men around her. She vented her anger to Bernard, in one of the most succinct statements she was to make about the oppression she felt surrounded her and others of her sex:
When you have pictured my past life and habits and training for the past number of years, you will…forgive such an aspiration in me. Were you in my place you would feel it too, and wish and pine and fret in your cage as I do, and if the very gentlemen who have the power could only know for one twenty-four hours all that oppresses and gnaws at my peace, they could offer me something to do in accordance with my old habits and capabilities before I am a day older, but they will never know and I shall always be oppressed no doubt. I am naturally businesslike and habit has made me just as much so as a man (and were I a man I would never do a four penny business).…I should be ‘perfectly happy’ today if someone would tell me that my desk and salary were waiting for me—that once more I had something to do that was something.87
But the prejudice continued to haunt her. On yet another job search in official quarters she found to her dismay that “the registrar says he has no room for ladies…and fears to have papers taken out of the office to be copied.”88
Word from Irving was as discouraging as her search for a job. He was dissatisfied, in need of money, and weaker than ever. Clara, her patience strained to the limit, could not see how he and Sally could run through so much money. Clara was not a natural altruist, and much of her pleasure in helping was bound up in the gratitude, love, and dependence that were shifted back to her. She resented those who did not give her this recognition, and the news from the Vassalls was thus doubly exasperating. Irving complained so much of Minnesota and