Clara Barton
1821 – 1912 · United States
Known for: American nurse and relief organiser who founded the American Red Cross
“She carried supplies to the wounded before anyone else thought to send them.”
Biography
Clara Barton was born on Christmas Day 1821 in Oxford, Massachusetts, the youngest child of a farming family, and was so timid that her parents sent her out to teach in the hope of curing it. At eleven she nursed her brother David through two years of convalescence after he fell from a barn roof, learning to give medicines and to sit with the sick. She taught for eleven years in Massachusetts schools, then opened one of the first free public schools in New Jersey at Bordentown and built it up to hundreds of pupils, only to be passed over as its principal in favour of a man. In 1855 she took a clerkship at the United States Patent Office in Washington, the first substantial federal post held by a woman at a man's salary, and endured years of hostility for it.
When the first casualties of the Civil War reached Washington in April 1861, Barton went to the railway station and nursed them herself, then turned her lodgings into a storehouse. Unwilling to wait on the army's supply lines, she gathered bandages, food and lanterns by public appeal and drove wagonloads of them to the fighting at Cedar Mountain, Antietam and Fredericksburg, working among the wounded while the guns were still firing, which earned her the name Angel of the Battlefield. After the war, with Lincoln's authorisation, she opened the Office of Missing Soldiers and established the fate of more than twenty thousand men, and she helped mark the graves at the Andersonville prison camp. Travelling in Europe for her health, she learned of the Geneva Convention and the International Committee of the Red Cross, and served alongside its workers in the Franco-Prussian War.
Back home she campaigned for a decade for the United States to accede to the Geneva Convention, and in 1881 she founded the American Red Cross, leading it as president until 1904. Under her the organisation took on peacetime disaster work, an extension she pressed for that became known as the American Amendment: relief after the Michigan forest fires, the Johnstown flood of 1889, the Sea Islands hurricane and the Galveston hurricane of 1900, which she directed herself at nearly eighty. She resigned the presidency at eighty two amid criticism of her intensely personal way of running things, and founded the National First Aid Association of America. She died at her home in Glen Echo, Maryland, on 12 April 1912, aged ninety. The society she built remains the country's principal disaster relief organisation.