Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Elizabeth Brown Pryor
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the rolls as a temporary copyist at the standard rate. Mason, anxious to retain Barton's good services but reluctant to make any move that might goad McClelland into dismissing the female clerks entirely, probably developed the system of classifying Barton as one type of employee and rewarding her as another. As Barton was to declare, it was all a little “subrosa.”27 It may also have served Mason's purposes to keep Barton's real status a secret, for he again needed her help in straightening out intraoffice problems.
“I have been this day in my old place in the Patent Office,” noted Mason in his diary on November 3. “I do not know how well I shall be pleased with it after all. I shall have some very unpleasant duties to discharge in general of the clerks and examiners.…I fear I shall be obliged to discharge some of them.”28 Intemperance was a problem among the employees, a sticky situation since several prominent political appointees were among the offenders. Worse, however, was a network of frauds he believed was threatening the impartiality of the office. Several clerks were evidently selling patent privileges illegally, an old temptation about which he had complained to Congress as early as 1853.29 Moreover, there were apparently a number of in-house rivalries and jealousies cropping up, which were difficult to control and damaging to morale. “I have been so disgusted with the office seeking manoeuvering all around me,” a Patent Officer worker declared.30 Calling on Barton's tight-lipped assistance, Mason set about untangling the personnel knots.
Clara viewed Mason's efforts as a righteous crusade and something of a witch hunt. It appealed to her strong moral outlook and allowed her to indulge herself in a short period of sanctimoniousness. “I found the frauds,” she told a female reporter proudly. “It made a great commotion among the clerks; they knew what it meant and they tried to make the place too hard for me.”31 The only woman regularly in the office now, she took the brunt of any animosity that the men felt against women workers. She wore victory with smugness, and this exacerbated the bitterness that she felt the men had secretly harbored because of her ability to equal or surpass them in their duties. That she made no attempt to hide her close social ties with Mason may also have increased the resentment against her. Lining the halls as she came in to work, the men made catcalls, spit tobacco juice at her, and blew smoke in her face.32 “It wasn’t a pleasant experience,” Barton conceded, “in fact, it was very trying, but I thought perhaps there was some question of principle involved and I lived it through.”33 Indeed, she rose above them, though it did little to dissipate her reputation for haughtiness. In a tone of marked superiority she told a friend that “there is not a spot upon my system that is not perfectly invulnerable to any touch of theirs, all the world who know as I know the relation they have sustained toward me, and know what to expect from them. Any blow that they could slanderously aim at me in these days, would make about as much impression upon me a[s] a sling shot would upon the hide of a Shark—I have got above them.”34 The job that had once been “delightfully pleasant” was now possible to endure only to win her point. By September 1857, the daily trip to the office had become a “weary pilgrimage.”35
It is difficult today to imagine the degree to which Barton's aggressiveness and capability appeared unusual—and in many ways unacceptable—in the 1850s. Such traits as ambition, bureaucratic competence, and leadership were the opposite of those preferred in the Victorian woman. However “accomplished” she might be, a lady was expected to be demure, self-effacing, easily controlled, and interested primarily in children and the home. Within this sphere a woman was exalted and idolized by society, which saw her as the protector of moral values and family sanctity. Outside of it there was little or no place for her. A woman who was not married—who chose not to be married—was already suspect; a woman who enjoyed men's company and forged brazenly into their fields of occupation was due for reproach. When Barton encountered the rows of men who spat upon her each morning, she was, in a sense, facing the judgment of contemporary society, which could not quite believe that it was “nice” for a woman to earn her living or strive for occupational fulfillment. It was for these reasons more than personal habits or proclivities that women who were pioneers in government service often gained a tainted reputation, despite the fact that most of them came from respectable middle-class backgrounds and conducted themselves with self-conscious decorum. There was a rumor that the early clerks “painted” themselves and used indelicate language, but few specific examples could be given.
Similarly, Barton's own reputation for lax sexual conduct during this period was probably based more on the boldness of her employment than any real promiscuity. Reports that she arrived in Washington in the company of Samuel Ramsey, her friend from Clinton, and that her talk of free love and unwillingness to live apart from the professor caused her sister to shun her company are thus suspect, as are later stories of a similar nature about Barton and Senator Henry Wilson. Although Clara may well have been an advocate of free love, neither Sally Barton Vassall nor Ramsey lived in Washington at the time of her early Patent Office employment; the latter story, which featured the birth of two illegitimate children with Negroid features, seems equally unlikely. It is doubtful that men of the stature of Alexander DeWitt or Charles Mason would continue to keep company with a woman who this blatantly breached society's rules. Because she enjoyed and sought the company of men and was adept at their amusements and repartee, Barton was always open to criticism of her feminine conduct. (In later life she would diminish it by modest dress, a low, soft voice, and by actively avoiding confrontation.) Given in addition her persistent drive to work and her air of superiority, there was a rich field for those who wished to gossip or who felt threatened by her unwillingness to abide by a smug society's standards. For the rest of her life Barton would be prey to those who could not or would not understand her motives. There were those who would point to her even at the age of seventy-eight with accusations of lax morality or loose living.36
Employee relations at the Patent Office were strained enough, but the work of the office had also reached a fever pitch. An examiner complained that he had to get to the office at 5:00 A.M. to make any headway in his workload. Barton was copying over a thousand pages a month of “dry lawyer writing” into a ledger too heavy for her to lift. “My arm is tired,” she told her sister-in-law, Julia Barton, “and my poor thumb is all calloused holding my pen.”37 She began to feel that the efforts were not worth the rewards of the job. “We are tired as a dog and almost sick,” she complained in half jest to Bernard, “and it wouldn’t much matter if we were turned out to grass.” Whatever pressures emanated from the office were multiplied by Barton's own compulsion to drive herself, inability to relax, and tendency to set unattainable standards. After taking a few days off to visit Jamestown with a friend, she copied at a frightful pace to make up her work.38 Despite intermittent bouts of malaria, she continued on the job, frequently working until late at night. She took a guilty view of her own foibles and rarely indulged herself either materially or mentally. Once when she misplaced a parasol, she would not buy another of good quality, forcing herself instead to carry a cheap one. In a strangely proud confession of this self-denial, she told Julia that “it was the best I have had all summer, and I walked to church under it today, so much to pay for carelessness.”39
She was tired, her fingers were sore, yet she managed to maintain the intense correspondence with friends, former pupils, and relatives that was so important to her. Barton rarely spoke of her troubles in these letters; even brother Stephen had to plead with her not to bottle up her feelings.40 Her sense of humor was particularly keen at this point in her life, and she joked about many of the rougher aspects of Washington life. Complaining in a light vein of the beastly summer weather, she wrote, “I have no idea where the thermometer stands, if indeed it stands at all, it does better than most people can.”41 And she told Julia, with regard to a current scandal that involved the shooting of a Pension Department worker by a jealous fellow employee, “We are at our same old tricks yet here in the capitol [sic], i.e. killing off everybody who doesn’t just happen to suit us or our peculiar humor at the moment.”42 Barton wrote of politics and her view of the South, which, like that of many New Englanders, tended to be one of both fascination and disdain. Southerners peppered their food—and their arguments—too much for her taste. She had a gift for letter writing, an ability to make the most mundane actions seem fresh and interesting. The enthusiasm she had in the small pleasures of her