Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Elizabeth Brown Pryor
his head.”89 Feeling that for all her good intentions she was to blame for Irving's plight, Barton's nerves gave way. Once again suicidal thoughts crept upon her. “I wished we were all at rest…,” she remarked upon receiving yet another sad epistle from the West. “I am not quite myself and don’t know when I shall be again…. I am weak and nervous ever since, and I am good for nothing at all.”90
Barton now had virtually no money to send Irving and Sally. Her long-term finances had taken a turn for the better in February when Captain Barton sold her twenty acres of valuable timberland at a bargain-rate price. He took a note for the property, though she felt obliged to pay him for it later in the year.91 But this transaction did nothing to help her immediate need for cash. To make ends meet she returned to Boston in late April for another brief tour as a companion to an older woman. This was little better than doing nothing; its only advantage was to remove her from the critical eyes of Julie and David.92 She endured it for a month, then, deciding that she must take control of her life and earn some money, she suddenly packed her bags and left for New York.
Barton was sick and nervous when she left North Oxford, “in a better condition,” she admitted to a friend, “to go to bed than New York City.”93 She had hoped to look for a job in the business community, but she arrived barely able to make it to the offices of her old friend, phrenologist L. N. Fowler. He took her in hand, charted her personality traits (giving her high marks for friendship, low for self-esteem), and sent her to a hotel run by a son of the Bertrams, bidding her rest and get well before trying to find work.94
After a week the hotel proprietor decided to send her home to his parents. Determined to go “where I could be sick and feel that I was not committing an unpardonable sin thereby,” she retreated to the Bertrams, where she was received with open arms.95 The contrast between her treatment there and that afforded her by her own family could not have been sharper. “I was almost cheated in belief that I had come home and had a home to come to,” she told Bernard sadly.96 For two months they harbored her, pampering her, encouraging her to stay with them indefinitely. They again tried to talk her into starting an academy or teaching in their area “It is really a temptation, Ber,” she told her nephew, “if it were anything but teaching I would.”97 She was more relaxed with the Bertrams, yet she knew it was only one more temporary stopping place. And with no immediate prospect of work, home, or any sense of permanence, she could not quite shake her morbid thoughts. In late July she was still feeling that there was “nothing…so welcome as perfect rest.” She was happy when she slept and, she noted, had felt “for long years…that when the command should come, Lay down thy burden and rest, it must be the sweetest hour of my whole existence…sometimes my stubborn heart rebels and I murmur to myself, how long Oh Lord how long.”98
six
In rooms that were the “cosiest and prettiest that one could ask,” Clara pondered and recovered, let the Bertrams wait on her, worried about Irving, weighed her options. Still “weak and bilious’’ in August but gaining strength, she was determined to go back to New York City, trade her accounting skills to the business world, and rely on friends, not family, for support.1 Outside events, however, influenced her to follow a different course. Through circumstances that are not altogether clear, for her correspondence was minimal during these uncertain months, Barton was recalled to her post in the Patent Office. After the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, her politics did not seem so offensive.
It was the government's lame duck period between the election and the March 4 inauguration, when work was slack, and appointments were up for grabs. Some unnamed “personal friends” engineered Barton's appointment as a temporary copyist, charged with “recording specifications and making office copies.”2 This did not equal the status of her earlier job with the Patent Office, and the salary too was lowered, for women could now earn only eight cents per hundred words copied, or a maximum of nine hundred dollars per year.3 But she was hardly in a position to complain, and she accepted the appointment with relief and even delight.
By December she had bid her final adieus to the Bertrams and, with a lighter heart than she had known in months, arrived back in Washington. The scenes and faces seemed so familiar. Samuel Shugert and Joseph Fales were still in the Patent Office; Charles Mason resided in the city, earning his living as a patent lawyer. Clara's old room in Almira Fales's boarding house was available. The two impressive fountains in the courtyards of the Patent Office building still made “cool the air in the sultry days of summer.” Picking her way through the muddy streets and up the long stairs to the office door, newfangled hoopskirts in hand, she felt as though her absence had been nothing but a pause in a long continuum.4
Washington itself was much the same. “As in 1800 and 1850, so in 1860,” Henry Adams wrote, “the same rude colony was camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek Temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads.”5 Yet the political air had a different quality in the days following the election of Abraham Lincoln. The southern states had long agitated over the policies of this man and his party, whose platform against the expansion of slavery seemed at odds with everything they valued. About the time Barton was patiently enduring the twelve-hour railroad journey from New York to Washington, the state of South Carolina declared the end of its own patience with the Union's policies toward slavery and tariffs, and the nation's capital became a whirligig of excitement. Those with Southern leanings predominated in the town; they guffawed at the pretenses of that awkward lawyer from Illinois and slapped each other on the back in congratulation of the South's audacity and spirit. Just what the action of South Carolina and the states that followed it would lead to was anyone's guess, and everybody did guess. A spirit of debate and the airing of long pent-up opinions filled the atmosphere, and the speculation about the country's future was the favorite topic in drawing rooms and alleys.6
Miss Barton, sitting at her desk in the ladies’ section of the Patent Office, held close to her conviction that a moderate course would prevail. No rabid abolitionist, she had opposed the mass meetings and fiery oratory that the North had offered a year earlier in support of John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. The South, she believed, had a right to feel fearful in the face of such misplaced zealotry. But she had scarcely expected them to dissolve the Union, and now, in January 1861, she did not think their hotheaded move would be permanent. “Would it be of the least interest if I should talk to you of political excitement and ‘secession’?” she asked cousin Elvira Stone. “I believe the latter to be wearing out in its infancy and if wisely left alone will die a natural death, long before maturity.”7 Like Robert E. Lee, who expected that “the wisdom and patriotism of the country will devise some way of saving it,”8 like countless others with hope or naivete in their hearts, Barton chose to view the Union as undividable. What rankled her was the bravado shown by Southern sympathizers, who saw triumph for the culture of the slave states and boasted of it in the streets of the nation's capital. “Nothing is or has been more common than to see little spruce clerks and even boys strutting about the streets and asserting that ‘we had no government—it merely amounted to a compact but had no strength,’” she wrote furiously a few months later. “I have listened to harangues of this nature in the few past months until my very brain whirled—and now from the bottom of my heart—I pray that the thing may be tested.”9
The political fever in Washington reached its highest degree with Abraham Lincoln's arrival in the city. Threats on his life and rumors of rioting had been so numerous that the lean westerner had quietly entered the town the day before he had planned to, disguised in an old slouch hat and baggy coat. Many thought he would not live to become president, but Barton reported to her friend Annie Childs that the “4th of March has come and gone, and we have a live Republican President, and, what is perhaps singular, during the whole day we saw no one who appeared to manifest the least dislike to his living.” She had attended the inauguration, thought the speech acceptable and the delivery good, but had turned down an invitation to the inaugural ball because of a bad cold. Sensing few of the ominous rumblings that foretold the coming conflict, she retained a haughty indifference to the earnest Southern leaders, viewing them as something akin to naughty children,