Clara Barton

Barton was born in Oxford, Massachusetts, a small farming community. She was named after her father's sister, Clarissa Harlow Barton. Her father was Captain Stephen Barton, a member of the local militia and a selectman who influenced his daughter's patriotism and humanitarianism. He was a soldier under the command of General Anthony Wayne in his violent removal of Indigenous peoples in the Northwest Territory. He was also the leader of progressive thought in the Oxford village area. Barton's mother was Sarah Stone Barton.

In 1825, when she was three years old, Barton was sent to school with her brother Stephen, where she reportedly excelled in reading and spelling. At school, she became close friends with Nancy Fitts. Barton was very timid as a child, and Fitts was her only known childhood friend.

Beginning in 1833, when Barton was eleven years old, she acted as a nurse to her brother David for two years after he fell from the roof of a barn and suffered a severe head injury. In nursing her brother, she learned how to deliver prescription medications and perform the practice of bloodletting, in which blood was removed from the patient by leeches attached to the skin. David eventually made a full recovery.

Clara Barton's parents tried to encourage her to be more outgoing by enrolling her in Colonel Stones High School, but Barton became more timid and depressed and would not eat. She was brought back home to regain her health.

When she returned, Barton's family moved to help the widow of Barton's cousin, who had been left to manage four children and a farm after the death of her husband. Barton helped to perform maintenance and repair work on the home her family was going to live in. After the work was done, she was very concerned about being a burden to her family. Therefore, she began to play with her male cousins, participating in their activities, such as horseback riding. When Barton injured herself, her mother decided that she should focus on developing more traditionally feminine skills and invited a female cousin to help develop Barton's femininity.

To assist Barton in overcoming her shyness, her parents persuaded her to become a schoolteacher. She studied at the Clinton Liberal Institute in Clinton, New York. She achieved her first teacher's certificate in 1839, at 17 years old. Barton led an effective redistricting campaign that allowed the children of workers to receive an education.

Barton became an educator in 1838 and served for 11 years in schools in and around Oxford, Massachusetts. Barton fared well as a teacher; she knew how to handle children, particularly the boys since as a child she enjoyed her boy cousins' and brothers' company. She learned how to act like them, making it easier for her to relate to and control the boys in her care. After her mother's death in 1851, the family home closed down. Barton decided to further her education by pursuing writing and languages at the Clinton Liberal Institute in New York. In this college, she developed many friendships that broadened her point of view on many issues concurring at the time. The principal of the institute recognized her tremendous abilities and admired her work. This friendship lasted for many years, eventually turning into a romance. As a writer, her terminology was pristine and easy to understand. Her writings and bodies of work could instruct the local statesmen.

While teaching in Hightstown, Barton learned about the lack of public schools in Bordentown, the neighboring city. In 1852, she was contracted to open a free school in Bordentown, which was the first ever free school in New Jersey. She was successful, and after a year she had hired another woman to help teach over 600 people. Both women were making $250 a year. This accomplishment compelled the town to raise nearly $4,000 for a new school building. Once it was completed, Barton was replaced as principal by a man elected by the school board. They saw the position as head of a large institution to be unfitting for a woman. She was demoted to "female assistant" and worked in a harsh environment until she had a nervous breakdown along with other health ailments, and quit.

In 1855, she moved to Washington, D.C., and began work as a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office; this was the first time a woman had received a substantial clerkship in the federal government and at a salary equal to a man's salary. For three years, she received much abuse and slander from male clerks. Subsequently, under political opposition to women working in government offices, her position was reduced to that of copyist, and in 1858, under the administration of James Buchanan, she was fired because of her "Black Republicanism". After the election of Abraham Lincoln, having lived with relatives and friends in Massachusetts for three years, she returned to the patent office in the autumn of 1860, now as temporary copyist, in the hope she could make way for more women in government service.

Barton's wartime diary entries show she was a devout Christian. She specifically had a strong belief in divine providence, writing for instance that she "believed that Providence had ordained Lincoln's election." Upon hearing of the death of an acquaintance's child, she wrote, "God is great; and fearfully just, truly it is a fearful thing to fall into his hands. [H]is ways are past finding out." Furthermore, while reflecting on whether or not to return home early from her visit to the Sea Islands in 1863, she wrote, "Gods [sic] will not mine be done – I am content, how I wish I could always keep in full view the fact and feeling that God orders all things precisely as they should be – all is best as it is."

Although not formally a member of the Universalist Church of America, in a 1905 letter to the widow of Carl Norman Thrasher, she identified herself with her parents' church as a "Universalist".

My dear friend and sister:

Your belief that I am a Universalist is as correct as your greater belief that you are one yourself, a belief in which all who are privileged to possess it rejoice. In my case, it was a great gift, like St. Paul, I "was born free", and saved the pain of reaching it through years of struggle and doubt.

My father was a leader in the building of the church in which Hosea Ballow preached his first dedication sermon. Your historic records will show that the old Huguenot town of Oxford, Mass. erected one of, if not the first Universalist Church in America. In this town I was born; in this church I was reared. In all its reconstructions and remodelings I have taken a part, and I look anxiously for a time in the near future when the busy world will let me once more become a living part of its people, praising God for the advance in the liberal faith of the religions of the world today, so largely due to the teachings of this belief.

Give, I pray you, dear sister, my warmest congratulations to the members of your society. My best wishes for the success of your annual meeting, and accept my thanks most sincerely for having written me.

Fraternally yours, (Signed) Clara Barton. While she was not an active member of her parents' church, Barton wrote about how well known her family was in her hometown and how many relationships her father formed with others in their town through their church and religion.

With regards to politics, Barton firmly supported President Lincoln and the Republican Party during the war. In 1863, she rebuffed a request from a Copperhead Democrat, T.W. Meighan, to denounce the Republican Party. In her letter to Meighan, Barton also stated, "I am a U.S. soldier you know [...] and, as I am a soldier, and not a statesman, I shall make no attempt at discussing political points with you." Further, she wrote that with regards to politics, "I am supposed to be profoundly ignorant." While the historian Stephen B. Oates reads these statements as ironic, this is disputed by Nina Silber (a historian of women in the Civil War era). Silber claims that "Clara Barton came to believe her job had very little to do with politics" and "emerged from the war more aware than ever of women's political weaknesses." While Oates labels Barton a "committed feminist", Silber compares her to other nurses such as Mary Ann Bickerdyke and Cornelia Hancock, who clung to patriarchal ideas of male hierarchical authority and the arrangement of "separate spheres" during the Civil War. Barton became a proponent of women's suffrage after conversing with her friend, Gage, on the topic.

Although Barton never married, she may have had romantic relationships with males at least during the Civil War years.

Barton was an admirer of the poetry of Lord Tennyson and Walter Scott.