Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Elizabeth Brown Pryor
the Barton's lived had not yet given up the austere customs of Puritan times, and he looked forward to a quiet evening rather than a gay holiday celebration. He leaned back in his chair and stretched out his legs, only mildly disturbed by the voices of his wife and a female cousin in the adjoining bedroom. But the commotion increased, and the cousin finally emerged in a flutter to ask him to fetch the doctor; his wife Sarah was about to give birth. Tired and a little blasé—for this was his fifth child—Stephen Barton did not hurry, and a new daughter arrived before he could return.1
They named her Clarissa Harlowe Barton after a paternal aunt, who in turn had been named for the fashionable and romantic heroine of a Samuel Richardson novel.2 But whether inappropriate to the middle-class household or lengthy and cumbersome to pronounce, the name never stuck. The Barton family liked nicknames and the new baby had her share. A brother, walking home from the strict New Oxford school, which held classes even on Christmas Day, met a neighbor who encouraged him to get home quickly, saying, “there’s a little tot at your house”; he dubbed his new sister “Tot,” a nickname that held on until she was well into her eighties.3 Others called her “Tabatha” or “Clary,” and “Baby” was the inevitable appellation for the youngest family member.4 But her name was shortened most consistently to “Clara,” and it was with this name that she identified closely throughout her life. Some early school papers have the careful signature “Clarissa H. Barton,” and until the Civil War she signed herself “Clara H. Barton.” After that time, however, the middle initial disappeared altogether, and she used only the name by which she became known to the world—Clara Barton.
“I am told there was great family jubilation on the occasion,” Clara Barton wrote of her birth.5 Jubilation, but also expectancy and a sense of novelty, for the family had thought itself complete long before 1821. Stephen Barton and Sarah Stone had married hastily in 1804, and a daughter, Dorothea, was born to them five months later. Two sons, Stephen and David, and another daughter, Sally, had made their appearance by 1810. Sally, closest in age to Clara, was nearly eleven years her senior. Since all of the Barton's were old enough to anticipate the important occasion, the family dignified it with the purchase of a set of Blue Willow china and a pink and white tea service, relatively extravagant purchases for their middle-class household. The china was handed down in the family, a symbol of this happy event and the many later celebrations at which it was used.6
They were shaped strongly of New England, these Barton's, reflecting the hard work and hard principles needed to earn a living in the rocky countryside and the individualism that gave fire to town meetings and church councils. Their village of North Oxford, Hubbell s, was well established in 1821, not very different from the other towns of the countryside fifty miles west of Boston, but with a strong local gentry and a bit of romantic history to call its own. The Barton's, Learneds, and Stones—the rootstock of Clara’s family—had not been among the original Huguenot settlers of North Oxford, but they had very early seen the possibilities in its location along the swiftly moving French River and by 1713 had become prominent in the town’s farming and milling industries. A hundred years later, their hopes for the town had been fulfilled. It was then a place of clapboard houses and steepled churches, surrounded by self-sufficient farms. Both saw and grist mills dotted the banks of the French River, providing a prosperous sideline for some of the area’s farming families. A “handsome village on a large plain” is how one gazetteer described it.7
Clara learned of the history of her family and town on long winter evenings while sitting by the fire. Throughout her life she recalled the thrill she felt in hearing of the Barton's’ part in the English Wars of the Roses and how the family had come to Hubbell s to begin a new life. There were scores of colorful relatives to take pride in: Samuel Barton, the first to come to North Oxford, who had fled from Salem after unsuccessfully defending an accused woman during the witch trials;8 Ebenezer Learned, an early and successful industrialist, a leader of the Hubbell s General Court, but a taciturn and flinty man, the legends of whose stingy ways were overshadowed only by the spectacular exploits of his enormous-footed black slave, Mingo;9 and Dr. Stephen Barton, a romantic rebel during the American Revolution, a delegate to the Committees of Correspondence and Safety, and a noted philanthropist, whose independent wife flew in the face of his authority and brewed tea even after the imposition of the hated tax in 1774.10 (“I have been entertained hours and hours by your interesting, precise and intelligent grandmother Barton, telling us of the tea parties she and her sister Aunt Ballard held in the cellar when grandfather was out or up and didn’t know what was going on in his own disloyal and rebellious home,” Clara told a nephew years later, “and how they hung blankets inside the cellar door to prevent the savory fumes of the tea from reaching the loyal and official olfactories of ‘Pater familias.’” 11) Added to these major figures was a list of tantalizing characters that included French and Indian War soldiers, tireless midwives, and bear-wrestling cousins.12
It was from her father that Clara Barton heard most of this family lore. Born in 1774, son of the Revolutionary Dr. Stephen, he had grown up with the heroes of the struggling United States. As a young man he found his own military adventure in the army of General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, a troop that fought numerous Indian wars in the wilderness of the Northwest Territory. The elements of this experience—the three years of privation in uncivilized regions, the expanse and promise he saw in the newly formed United States, the regimen and hardiness required in military life—were the definitive influences of his youth. He spoke often and forcefully of these campaigns, and the tone of his language was one of patriotic loyalty. “His soldier habits and tastes never left him,” his daughter Clara wrote. To the end of his life he delighted in military jargon and the comradeship of fellow veterans.13
Tall, lean, sharp-eyed Stephen Barton returned to North Oxford and took up his ancestors’ occupations of farming and milling. He kept to himself, gaining a reputation for minding his own business, which came to be a watchword of the Barton clan. His stately bearing and well-respected family connections, however, made it natural that he should serve as moderator of the town meeting, as selectman, as captain of the militia, and later, in 1836, as representative to the Hubbell s General Court. Local citizens noted his sound judgment, stubbornness, wit, and integrity. He was liberal in his political views, a lifelong democrat and admirer of Andrew Jackson, and he fostered notions of progress for North Oxford in the forms of mechanization of the milling industry, improved education, and religious tolerance. But, in contrast to the intellect that readily embraced technical innovation, his personal inclinations were old-fashioned. He maintained a conservative stance against dancing, gambling, or drinking, and one neighbor recalled that he was the last man in North Oxford to stop tying his hair back in a queue.14
Leadership often implies high social standing, but Stephen Barton undoubtedly exemplified the middle class. Clara always regarded her background as a “humble life,” lived out in “small environments.”15 Barton provided well for his family, but their way of life was modest. His accounts with local merchants show that he bought more molasses than sugar, and that calico, not silk, clothed the family’s women. Any available opportunity was seized to make a little extra money, and ends were met by selling excess hay, renting out land or equipment, and boarding the neighbors’ livestock.16 Like his father he was a versatile worker; he built not only the home in which his youngest daughter was born but many simple pieces of furniture and household equipment. The house was cleverly designed, with a convenient indoor well, but far less imposing than his grandfather’s home.17 Barns and meadows, an orchard, and a kitchen garden completed the homestead. There were lilac bushes to beautify the place, and Captain Barton was not ashamed to open his house to all who visited the town.
Barton’s democratic tendencies were also fostered by an early association with the Universalist church. Unlike the traditional New England churches with their aristocratic God, the Universalists believed that God encouraged all men and women to accept him and charged them to grasp the opportunity to earn salvation—an opportunity open to all. The Universalists were socially aware, interested in abolition, education, and charity. As a young man Stephen Barton had been present at the North Oxford ordination of Hosea Ballou, a zealous and influential early leader of Universalism. The experience had affected him strongly,