Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Elizabeth Brown Pryor
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was simply part of a continuum; Barton's diary entries are the first daily recording of her depression, not evidence of the first instance of it. It was an “old inquiry,” this questioning of life's purpose. She alluded to a long history of such despair when she confidentially told her nephew that she had “lived over years wishing myself dead.…I could feel no other way at home.”47 Moreover, the problems that faced Barton in Hightstown were much the same as those she encountered in the years before she broke “away from the long shackles” and went to Clinton—they were simply heightened by her unfortunate love affair. She had left her home town, with its unhappy associations of dependence and unrewarding work, only to find herself again a member of a domineering family and submerged in the minutiae of a job that held no challenge. Bound by a society that required far less of an educated spinster than she had to give, Barton was haunted by the horrible spectre of an unchanging and unfulfilled life. Thus, as she again contemplated her future in the thin warmth of the March days, Barton saw little reason to be optimistic. “I know how it will be at length,” she surmised. “I shall take a strange sudden start and be off somewhere and all will wonder at and judge and condemn, but like the past I shall survive it all and go on working at some trifling unsatisfactory thing, and half paid at that.”48
The final term at Barton's school ended on April 20. It had been a most pleasant group of children: “I have never been able to find a blemish in them,” she told her nephew.49 With Charlie's help she completed the repugnant task of billing the students, swept the room, and closed the door for the last time. Barton's feelings at term's end were mixed, for she recognized that the school had filled a distinct need in her. “Would scarce know how to pass my time without it,” she admitted. “Should be very lonely I am sure.”50 Yet she was glad that this obligation was fulfilled and that she was now free to leave Hightstown. A few pleasant excursions with the Nortons, a few days of dressmaking, and she suddenly announced, just as she had foretold, her intention of leaving. She had formulated her plans by herself and preferred to reveal as little as possible to the Nortons. As they accompanied her to the Hightstown depot on May 25, her hosts talked excitedly of activities they would share when she came back. “They thought it a visit, and that I would soon return,” Barton remembered. “I knew that I never would.”51
The train on which she embarked carried her only a short ten miles to the town of Bordentown, New Jersey. Barton herself seems not to have known what drew her to this community. Fifty years later she believed it might have been “historical associations.” The town was, in fact, well endowed in this regard, having served as a home for Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and political theorist Thomas Paine. The town's most famous resident, however, was Joseph Bonaparte, the exiled king of Spain and brother of Napoleon I. The stately villa that had served as his residence had burned to the ground years before Clara Barton arrived, but the stories of his life in Bordentown gave the place a prestige and intrigue that she found seductive. The town had first taken her fancy on a trip she made there in January 1852. She had thought the lack of paint on some buildings gave it a shabby aspect, but its spectacular situation on the Delaware River had filled her with wonder. As headquarters for the Camden-Amboy railroad and the Delaware and Raritan Canal, Bordentown was something of a crossroads of transportation in the 1850s, a thriving community of granite buildings and tobacco factories. Bordentown also had a drawing card in the form of Charlie Norton, who had arrived in late April to teach school. On yet another journey with an uncertain future, it comforted Clara to see a familiar face.52
She did not have an exact goal in mind, and her initial efforts at finding a job in Bordentown proved fruitless. After a few days, Barton traveled the short distance to Trenton, where she spoke with the local school trustee about establishing a public school. Their conversation was lengthy and cordial but inconclusive. She jotted a brief and discouraging memo in her diary—”am just where I was this morning as far as employment is concerned”—but she was forming a challenging idea. The lack of free public schools in New Jersey had disturbed Barton, and she had wondered at the antiquated public opinion that forestalled efforts to alleviate the situation. Why not start a free school, which would serve as a model for other communities in the state? With a renewed sense of purpose she contacted several prominent men in Trenton, who addressed her questions sympathetically but showed no signs of acting on her ideas. One gentleman, a Mr. Cunningham, found Miss Barton herself more appealing than her philanthropic notions, and he spent several days escorting her around the city, holding her attention with promises of influence with the state school board. One afternoon while he was driving her to the local orphan asylum, she caught wind of his less honorable intentions. The next day, angered and depressed over having lost valuable time and opportunities, she journeyed back to Bordentown.53
It was easy for Barton to picture a system of public schools, which would mirror those she had known in Hubbell s. But in New Jersey there were few models that would activate the imaginations of school boards or public officials. Laws providing for the creation of free schools had been passed in the state as early as 1817, though there was no comprehensive legislation until 1846. Public opinion, however, which was concerned with inequities in the distribution of public school funds and the social stigma attached to those attending “pauper” schools, did not keep pace with the legislation. A free school had been established in Nottingham in 1844, and by 1850 there were public classrooms in Trenton and several smaller towns, but these were isolated and often temporary, and the movement failed to catch the public fancy. Not until 1866 did a statewide effort at providing public education find real support in New Jersey.54
It was thus necessary for Barton to marshal every conceivable argument to persuade officials in Bordentown to accept the idea of public education. She talked first to Peter Suydam, the editor of the Bordentown Register and a member of the school board. A genial man and something of a jack-of-all-trades, Suydam was to become one of Clara's favorite companions. At this meeting, however, he seemed to her only a tense and official obstacle to overcome. She told him she had observed that the local subscription schools were taught by persons who were well-meaning and often “elegant,” but whose educational qualifications were strictly limited. When the children's knowledge grew beyond that of the matrons, they became an embarrassment and were barred from the classroom. Worse yet, Barton believed that the brightest children were the first to be “graduated into the street,” for they most blatantly challenged the teacher and pointed up her weaknesses. As a final, if not tactful, argument, she maintained that New England had proved the worth of universal education with its superior productivity and ingenuity. It was time the citizens of Bordentown recognized the “force of ignorance, blind prejudice, and the tyranny of an obsolete public opinion,” and joined the ranks of the more civilized states.55
Suydam listened with interest to the articulate young woman, but he came back with arguments of his own. There had actually been a free school a few years earlier, he explained, but an unsuitable teacher and inadequate class space had caused the experiment to fail. Housing for a school was indeed a problem in the town, as one official school report explained: “Bordentown district…does not possess a single school building which it can claim as its own.” Consequently, should the town wish to revoke a teacher's license or establish a school, it was hampered by being solely dependent on using the private teachers’ quarters for holding classes. These private teachers, Suydam explained, were greatly opposed to free schools, and their dissatisfaction would carry considerable influence among the townspeople. He believed Barton would be ostracized socially, if not subjected to outright ridicule. Finally, Suydam told her, the children themselves would not come because of their fear of the disgrace of being a public charge. Used to roaming the streets aimlessly, the boys would threaten and bully her and keep smaller children from coming to learn.56
Suydam's arguments failed to discourage Barton. She cared little for the approbation of the town and thought the previous failures had been due to the teacher's personality, not the inappropriateness of the free school idea. As for the boys—well, she had already talked with them. Walking through Bordentown's narrow streets, she had encountered “little knots of them” on every corner. When she asked them why they were not in school they dispensed with the expected bravado and replied plaintively, “Lady, there is no school for us.” Barton found nothing derelict in the boys’ behavior; she believed they were