Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Elizabeth Brown Pryor
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and her father talked much of the war in the last few weeks they had together. Captain Barton believed the Union would triumph but knew he would not live to see it; he therefore “committed himself and his country into the hands of a good and just God.”60 Clara sat patiently at his bedside, listening to the old soldier and telling him of her own war work. She worried aloud about the sick and wounded soldiers, soliciting her father's advice about how and where to give the most expedient aid. She had hoped to go to the battlefield, she told him, but was struggling with her sense of propriety, for women in the camps were often considered—and treated as—prostitutes. He brushed aside her fears, maintaining that a respectable woman would meet with respect from even the roughest soldiers. He then gave Clara a command that she would always recall: “As a patriot he bade me serve my country with all I had, even my life if need be; as the daughter of an accepted Mason, he bade me seek and comfort the afflicted everywhere, and as a Christian he charged me to honor God and love mankind.”61 As a symbol of his faith in her decision he handed her his gold Masonic badge to wear for luck and protection.
Near mid-March Stephen Barton's condition worsened, his imminent death evident in the wasting away of his desire to live. He wrote his will and put his other business affairs in order but took no food or water for some days. Late in the evening on March 21, in Clara's words he “straightened himself in bed, closed his mouth firmly, gave one hand to Julia and the other to me, and left us.”62 The local papers heralded Captain Barton as a “brave and true man,” and the house and grounds were crowded for the funeral, held in David's home.63 Clara watched as they lowered him into the grave, next to her mother—gone over a decade now—and recognized that she was alone in a way she had never been before. Her “last earthly guide” was gone, her mentor, the most inspired and inspiring of her kin.64
The long hours of vigil at her father's deathbed had given Clara an opportunity to mull over her urge to join the army in the field and to determine the best method of preparing to do so. She had Henry Wilson's backing, but she needed someone with direct influence in the army who would supply her with passes and protection if she moved toward the lines. Most officials were not anxious to see Barton, or any woman, in the field, asserting that the women caused serious morale problems and at the first sight of a gun would “skeedaddle and create a panic.” Their wealth of supplies was viewed as a slap in the face of the quartermaster's department, and their presence in hospitals was an embarrassment to the obviously needy medical corps.65 General Ethan Allen Hitchcock, an aging leader of the volunteer forces, given to nosebleeds and esoteric philosophic quotations, refused Barton permission on the grounds that she would be an “unreasonable, meddlesome body, requiring more waiting upon” than she would give to others.66 Barton had already begun to badger friends in official Washington for permission to go to the front. While in Hubbell s she decided to petition John Andrew, the governor and commander-in-chief of the Hubbell s forces, for a recommendation. Accordingly, the day before her father's death she wrote him a stilted, calculating letter, full of self-justification, references to venerable Bartonian service to the country, and allusions to her rebel-hunting activities in Washington. Assuring him that she had “none but right motives,” she waited anxiously for a reply.67 Governor Andrew answered her letter quickly with the promise of a “letter of introduction, with hearty approval of your visit [to the troops] and my testimony to the value of the service to our sick and wounded.” As she was soon to find, however, it would take far more than this to get her official permission to follow troops to the field.68
Barton did not leave North Oxford immediately but remained to help clear away her father's effects and settle his estate, of which she was virtually the sole legatee. Captain Barton had believed in disposing of his property where it could be of the greatest benefit. David and Stephen Barton had been given land and milling equipment as young men; Sally received a generous settlement at her marriage, not to mention continual handouts during the financial ups and downs of her life with Vester Vassall. Only Clara had gone uncared for. Now she was the recipient of a modest acreage, a house, two horses, and some antiquated farming equipment. It was not a large legacy, but she was determined to administer it properly and as her father would have wished. One of her first acts was to make provision for the perpetual care of the family graves in the old North Oxford cemetery.69
Frustration grew upon Clara, along with boredom and a feeling of uselessness. “You must feel lonely there and anxious to get away,” Irving sympathized, proceeding to give detailed war news, which only heightened her desire to get into the fray.70 A few weeks later she wrote plainly of her envy to a young cousin, stationed in the muggy swamps of North Carolina. No account of his hardships could diminish her ardor for the soldier's life. “Why can’t I come and have a tent there and take care of your poor sick fellows?” she asked with some resentment. “I should go in five minutes if I could be told that I might.” She hinted that Dr. S. L. Bigelon, a brigade surgeon and distant relative, could request her services if he wanted to, but she feared that he disliked women.71 Finally, feeling she had done all she could for her family and herself in Hubbell s, she returned to the martial spirit and frantic activity of Washington.
Surrounded again by scenes of war that had seemed far removed in her home town, Barton felt a heightened urge to follow the cannon. Almira Fales had gone down the peninsula between the York and James rivers that spring; she was hardly talkative about her experiences, but her strength of purpose reinforced Clara's own. She was “full to aching” when she viewed the teeming hospitals, and touched beyond words by the frequent visits of hometown boys and former pupils who often left some personal items with her to be sent home if their names should appear on the black list.72 Yet she thought these urban hospitals abundantly supplied, and her aid seemed hollow and effortless. “I cannot rest satisfied,” she complained to Captain Denney, “it is little that one woman can do, still I crave the privilege of doing that.”73 She was certain there were numerous ways she could be useful at the field, and though General Hitchcock might think otherwise, she was convinced that she was “stronger, better acclimated, had firmer health, better able to forego comforts than ladies in general. I had almost said men.” She raged mostly at the injustice of the accusation that she would hike up her crinoline and flee at the very first threat of danger. Time and again she assured herself that she would not “either run or complain if I were left under fire.”74
Completely frustrated, she tried to forget the war, at least temporarily. But the heroic scenes and simple life of the soldiers continued to challenge, exhilarate, and haunt her as nothing had before. She was sensible of the discordant serenity of commonplace events when acted out against the backdrop of the terrible conflict. She read avidly the poets’ prolific works in every penny journal and ladies’ magazine, musing, “What did our poets do for subjects before the war?” She might as well have asked what she herself had done for conversation, for dreams, for paragraphs in her cherished correspondence. “I’m as bad as England,” she finally concluded after a last attempt to purge herself of the martial spirit, “the fight is in me, and I will find a pretext.”75
seven
Colonel Daniel H. Rucker scanned the crowded waiting room of his office somewhat impatiently. It was a hot July day and the quartermasters office was, as usual, filled with petitioning citizens and irate soldiers, who had come to leave baskets for favorite sons or brothers, collect their back pay, or angrily demand remuneration for property confiscated or damaged by the Union army. The sea of faces had paraded by Rucker for so many days now that he had stopped seeing them individually, and although he was a kindly man, with a genial face and comfortable stomach, he could no longer view these cases as particular tragedies. Checks went out, answers and small comfort were dispensed, but the actions had become automatic, the responses given by rote.1
He was surprised therefore to find his eye caught by a small, plainly dressed woman sitting in the corner. She was not beautiful; at best her face was full of interest and the character of middle age. Yet there was an arresting quality to this woman, something that commanded attention and respect.2 Rucker called her over to his desk; to his surprise she burst into tears when he asked what she wanted. “I want to go to the front,” she choked out. Attempting to keep his patience, Rucker explained