Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Elizabeth Brown Pryor
them sheets and clothing—anything that would lighten their suffering. When she told them she was from Hubbell s, their faces fell, but an observer recalled that tears came into some eyes as she brought in every article she could for their comfort. Impartiality became a watchword of her war work. Pain and anguish, she believed, were scarcely held in monopoly by the Union men, and she could not bear to see unmitigated distress. Moreover, she had always liked helping the lowliest underdogs, for they heaped on her the greatest praise and gratitude. The feelings of the boys in blue came close to adulation, but, after all, she was a staunch Unionist, and these were her friends, her defenders. To the Confederate soldier who was surprised by her aid, who believed he would find neglect and brutality within the Union lines, her spot of comfort was an unexpected gift, for which he was generous in praise and gratitude. If there were tears in the rebels’ eyes, if they hailed her as an exception to the hated “damn Yankee,” Barton relished it and solicited their worship.18
Barton later told lecture audiences—in theatrical tones, which both heightened the image of her work and distorted it—that she had worked for five days and nights at Cedar Mountain. Her diary shows, however, that after two days she left Culpeper, went home, and slept for twenty-four hours.19 This would not be the only time she exaggerated. Believing in the power of strongly stated publicity, she also wrote a series of letters that, though theoretically penned to friends during the press of work, were in reality written afterward with the knowledge that their calculated drama would lend them to publication. Clara had long combined a swift, sure, and witty style of writing with a heightened sense of the tragedy and tension in human life. The conflict that surrounded her now accentuated these skills. The extent of her own naivete led her to realize the total ignorance of the North about the real conditions of the war. In bold phrases, well planned to horrify and inspire, she described the patience of the men, their wants, and their noble cause. After Culpeper, she wrote the first of these letters, describing the “golden ringlets of the fair-cheeked boy, the weeping, waiting, mother’s idol,” and “the blood-matted and tangled locks of the sterner, braver man, who has faced death on many a field…. The bright stream that trickles…to the floor—is it wine? Ah, who shall count the value of the wine of life?”20 In a frenzy of patriotic fervor she rallied her reader to uphold the Union cause for which these men were so valiantly fighting. “At no moment of my life has our country seemed worth so much or her institutions so sacred as now,” she stated, “in the fearful trial of fire and blood, she shows us that she can produce, and nurture, and educate, and sacrifice such sons.”21
Barton hardly knew how to return to normal life after this experience. She could not react to commonplace sights and sounds but spent her time mending socks for the soldiers and pleading with her contacts in New Jersey and Hubbell s to send her more supplies. In one battle she had emptied her three warehouses, and now to meet the army’s “terrible necessities” she had only her empty hands.22 She was no longer working at the Patent Office, though her name remained on the registers, presumably keeping her place open for the day that hostilities would cease. “Miss C. H. Barton” also collected her pay throughout the war, but half of the salary went for the use of a substitute, who did her work and collected the pay under Barton’s name.23 Such a practice was common in D. P. Holloway’s Patent Office. The commissioner’s unqualified support for the North led him to make exceptions and allowances for anyone helping the army—not always to the satisfaction of the other department clerks who were required to take up the slack. One, who became so annoyed that he petitioned Congress with his complaints, noted that by thus paying salaries to absent clerks the commissioner was “taxing the office twice for one service.”24 But for Barton, the fact that her place was held was a measure of security in what was an otherwise disturbing and chaotic, if exciting, period of her life.
On August 30 Barton made one of her routine trips to the hospital on Armory Square. She was taking some small toilet articles to one of her boys of the Twenty-first Hubbell s when she chanced to hear the news of a battle that had taken place on the old Bull Run battlefield near Manassas, Virginia. Crowds of people were flocking to the Sixth Street wharf for news of the encounter, and Clara went along, anxious to verify the rumors.25 What she heard was more disastrous news for the Union. General John Pope’s troops had retreated from their defeat at Cedar Mountain along the Rappahannock River, hoping to meet General George McClellan and the Army of the Potomac. But Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had cut them off and forced a battle on the site of the first Battle of Bull Run. The troops were exhausted and leaders hesitant or entirely absent. Union casualties were, as usual, heavy; Clara heard reports that over eight thousand were wounded, though this later proved an exaggeration. Union medical care was, as ever, inadequate.
Barton rushed home suffused with excitement and energy. From Colonel Rucker and the burgeoning Sanitary Commission (a relief agency started by northerners concerned about the Union army’s lack of supplies) she requisitioned stores. Before daybreak the next morning, she donned her battlefield uniform—a plain, dark print skirt and blouse, which for pragmatic reasons eschewed the fashionable hoopskirts and furbelows of the era—and alerted Cornelius Welles, Almira Fales, and two friends from New Jersey, Lydia Haskell and Ada Morrell. Pausing only long enough to pen a hasty letter to her brother David, she prepared to depart.26 “I leave immediately for the Battlefield,” she wrote, “don’t know when I can return. If anything happens [to] me you David must come and take all my effects home with you and Julie will know how to dispose of them.” She dashed off a similar note to Vira and was on her way.27
Rucker had supplied her with men to load a boxcar that night, and the next morning in a drenching rain she joined the train as it “steamed and rattled out of Washington.”28 She managed to squeeze herself into a spot atop the boxes and barrels and spent the trip wondering whether she would be thrown out of the open side door. It took two hours to make the eight-mile trip to Fairfax Station, where the federal wounded were being taken. This was excellent time compared with the experiences of many trains that day. The medical officials had thrown up their hands in the face of the slaughter at Second Bull Run and reluctantly advertised in newspapers for “surgeons and nurses (male) to attend to the wounded.” The thought of adventure and easy pay attracted a whole range of unsuitable men, who held up the trains or celebrated their delays by breaking open the casks of wine and brandy meant to revive the wounded. One train took eleven hours to travel from Alexandria to Fairfax Station, and when it arrived the bands of workers more resembled brigands than conveyors of mercy.29
At ten o’clock the train rolled to a stop and Barton stepped gingerly from her precarious perch. She had believed herself a little inured to the agonized visages of the wounded, but the scene at Fairfax Station shocked and frightened her. The station was surrounded by thinly wooded hills, their grass burnt yellow and dry from the scorching Virginia sun. Stretched out on these hills were thousands of wounded men, covering the landscape in every direction.30 “The eye wearied, the heart grew faint in seeing them,” wrote a chaplain who was there that Sunday morning.31 A threadbare procession of stretchers came in from the field to the temporary operating theaters. Frantic surgeons worked there, horrible with “their knives and uprolled sleeves and blood-smeared aprons, and by their sides ghastly heaps of cut off legs and arms.” Surrounded by the shrieks and waitings of the wounded, Clára, for a moment, panicked.32 They were the earliest relief workers to arrive, and with a start she realized that they were but “a little band of almost empty handed workers, literally by ourselves in the wild woods of Virginia with 3000 suffering men crowded upon the few acres within our reach.”33 But it was not like her to give up or complain, and she quickly plucked up her courage.
This was not a hospital with tents or beds but a way station for those wounded who were to be taken on to Washington. The most fortunate lay on rough straw that had been hastily laid on the hillside. Many had been transported over twenty-five miles of rough roads in ill-designed and crowded ambulances; most had not had food or water for two days. These were the simple needs Barton hoped to meet. Her place, she later acknowledged, was “anywhere between the bullet and the hospital.” Her work was to keep as many men alive as she could before they could reach expert assistance.34
With a box of motley tinware and some cornmeal, she