In December 1868, she lost her voice, and her doctor advised her to take a break from lecturing and travel to Europe. A tiny woman, just five feet tall, in lace collars and crinolines, she shared platforms with Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and Sojourner Truth. She also launched a lecture tour, delivering more than 200 speeches throughout the Northeast and Midwest about her war experiences to raise money for relief efforts. Near the end of the war, President Abraham Lincoln approved her proposal to open the Missing Soldiers Office, where she identified 22,000 Union servicemen who had died in captivity and notified their families. “I do not think a surgeon would have pronounced it a scientific operation,” she later wrote, “but that it was successful I dared to hope from the gratitude of the patient.” A surgeon who was also tending to the wounded that day coined her famous epithet in a letter to his family: “In my feeble estimation, General McClellan, with all his laurels, sinks into insignificance beside the true heroine of the age, the angel of the battlefield.” Barton subsequently tended to hundreds of wounded in Virginia, Maryland and South Carolina.īarton also worked to improve the fortunes of formerly enslaved people, drafting them as nurses in battlefield hospitals and teaching them to read. She also accepted a young man’s plea to extract a bullet from his face. Petersburg, Russia, during an International Red Cross conference in June 1902.Īt the Battle of Antietam, where thousands of lives were lost in the war’s bloodiest day, she was giving water to a soldier when a bullet tore through her sleeve, killing him. Tillinghast, an American Red Cross supporter, with Barton and Russian Adm. Capitol in the Senate chamber, and soon took her skills to the front lines.ī.F. The week after the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Barton began nursing Union soldiers at an improvised camp inside the U.S. Patent Office (in the building that is now the National Portrait Gallery), where she was one of the few women on staff. Instead, she began teaching school when she was 17 and eventually founded schools of her own, one in her home state and another in New Jersey, then moved to Washington, D.C. Gwynne, and soon she longed to be a soldier. But her brothers trained her to be “a superb rider and a crack shot with a revolver,” writes historian S.C. “In the earlier years of my life I remember nothing but fear,” she wrote in her 1907 autobiography. He made a full recovery from serious cranial trauma.īorn on Christmas Day 200 years ago, in North Oxford, Massachusetts, Clara was a timid child. For nearly two years she remained at his bedside, applying leeches and dispensing medicine. Half a century before she founded the American Red Cross, Clara Barton had her first nursing experience at age 11, when her older brother fell off a barn roof.
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