THE PERSONALITY OF CLARA BARTON
At the beginning of her public career, Clara Barton was short of
stature and slender as she was short. Her form rounded out in middle
life, but she never exhibited any approach to stoutness. She was so
well proportioned as to give the impression of being taller than she
was. When she spoke in public, if she stood beside a presiding officer,
it was seen that she was small of stature, but when she stood alone,
she gave the impression of being, and was often described as being,
above medium height. Her maximum height, attained in adolescence,
was five feet two inches in moderately high-heeled shoes. The author
measured her in her later years, and she was exactly five feet tall
without her shoes.
Her carriage was erect, except for a slight stoop in the shoulders.
There never came any sag in her person, any letting down of her erect
standing. Her spine below the shoulders was carried to the end of her
life as erect as in youth. As she stood or sat, she never had the
bearing of an old person. When seated, she commonly kept her back well
away from the back of the chair, depending upon nothing external to
assist her in maintaining her erect bearing.
She walked quietly, deliberately, and flat-footedly. She put her whole
foot down at once. There was a certain firmness in her gait which
indicated strength of character and resolute purpose. She did not dart
or rush or drift or flutter; she walked, and her walk was of moderate
speed and of marked decision.
Her hair was brown, and in her younger days she had great wealth of it.
She took good care of it; and, while there was less of it in her later
years, it retained its fine texture, its soft silky wave, and its rich
brown color. The writer asked her once if she had a single gray hair.
She replied that she thought she had one, but had forgotten just where
it was.
Her eyes were brown, and in some lights appeared black. I find at least
one description of her as she appeared on the lecture platform in which
she was described as tall, with hair and eyes black as the raven’s
wing. The reporter is not to be blamed for his departure from truth.
She looked tall when she stood alone, and her eyes and hair appeared as
he described them, when seen in some lights.
Her features were regular. Her nose was prominent and straight. Her
mouth was large, and very expressive. Her features were remarkably
mobile. Her forehead was both high and wide, and in her middle life
she wore her hair so that its full breadth and height appeared beneath
the graceful parting of the hair. In her later years her hair was
combed down over the temples on either side, and remained parted in the
middle. Her chin was a very firm chin. It did not protrude, neither did
it recede. There was not the slightest suggestion of a lantern-jaw;
but there was a clear-cut prominence of the chin that suggested a firm
decision and a tenacious purpose. She said to the writer, “Every true
Barton knows how to possess an open mind and teachable disposition with
a firmness that can be obstinate if necessary, and no one can be more
obstinate than a Barton.” Obstinate she certainly could be, but she
was reasonable to a marked degree. No one who saw her shut her mouth
when she had made a decision could cherish any doubt of her tenacity of
purpose; and her chin was anything but a weak one.
She did not stare, but she had a habit of fixing her eyes upon an
object or a person which did not put arrogance or pretense at ease.
She could, on occasion, look through a person as if she discerned his
inmost thoughts. But ordinarily her look into one’s face was gentle and
companionable and sympathetic.
Clara Barton affected none of the arts by which women advanced in years
attempt to appear young. On the other hand, she had no intention of
growing old. She said to me that she did not see why people should be
so curious about anybody’s age; what did it matter? So far as she was
concerned, there was no secret about it; but when people had learned
the date of her birth, how could they know whether she was old or young?
She did not greatly like to be asked for her “latest photograph.” The
photograph which she liked best, the one which she had framed and which
the author has just as it stood on her desk, was the familiar Civil War
portrait.
On December 30, 1910, she wrote in her diary, concerning her friend,
Julia Ward Howe, whose death she mourned, and whose biography she had
read through with keen interest:
I notice a strife over the placing of Mrs. Howe’s portrait in Fanueil
Hall. The art committee object to it, but the people demand that it
be placed there. No reasons on the part of the art committee are yet
given. The painting is by Mr. Elliott, husband of Maude. I wonder at
the idea of people having their pictures taken after time and age
have robbed them of all their characteristic features. I regard this
as a mistake. I want the last picture of the friends I love to show
them in their strength and at their best. Mrs. Howe’s picture as now
painted would have shocked even herself in strong middle life. Why not
show the world the writer of the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” as she
was when she wrote it? Is it the rush of the curious for the “latest
photo”? I think the idea wrong. I wish the art committee would insist
on a picture of Mrs. Howe at the age of forty years.
When Clara Barton was in her eighties, she often, as was her custom,
would sit upon the floor, _à la_ Turk, with her work spread around her.
When her work was finished, she would rise, with the suppleness of a
girl, without touching her hands to the floor.
She had an almost morbid shrinking from the infliction of pain, or from
the taking of life. She was not strictly a vegetarian. If she was at
another’s table and meat was offered her, she ate it sparingly.
She carried through life a pulse ten beats slower to the minute than
that of an ordinary woman of her years, but her pulse beat steadily
and reliably. A half-cup of coffee stimulated her almost to the point
of intoxication, and a child’s dose of medicine was too much for her.
So simply did she live that when she died at the age of ninety-one
there was not a physical lesion, not a diseased organ in her body. Her
physician, who for thirty years had been her almost daily companion,
Dr. J. B. Hubbell, declared that, barring accident, or some acute
attack, such as that which actually caused her death, she could easily
have lived to be one hundred years of age and still not have been
technically old.
There was nothing about her voice or manner that suggested a really
aged person. Senility was farther removed from her at ninety than from
most women at sixty. A California octogenarian was compiling a book of
personal testimonies by aged people and wrote to her asking for the
secret of her long life. Her answer was contained in four words, “Low
fare, hard work.” If to this she had added anything, it should have
been a self-forgetful purpose, a serene spirit, and an upholding faith.
From her father Clara Barton inherited a spirit of broad philanthropy
and wide human interest. From her mother she inherited a warm heart and
a very hot temper. It was this temper that gave her self-control. She
kept it perfectly under her bidding, and that lowered voice was the
sign of mighty resolution and smouldering passion under the control of
a conquering will.
Clara Barton was a lifelong believer in woman’s suffrage. She was a
close friend and a warm admirer of Susan B. Anthony, and shared her
aims and hopes for her sex. She believed in women receiving the same
wages as men for the same work. She was never as militant an advocate
of the rights of women as Miss Anthony, however. Temperamentally she
was of quite another disposition. In her later years she saw with
marked disapproval what she regarded as the unwomanly efforts of women
to advance their cause. This she believed hurt the cause more than it
helped it, and whether it helped or hurt she did not like it.
A lady who was about to undertake a long journey by rail spoke to Clara
Barton of her dread of it. Railway travel, she said, always tired her
out and made her sick. Miss Barton said, “Travel rests me.”
Her friend asked her how she managed it. She replied:
“I delegate to the conductor and the engineer the full responsibility
for the running of the train. I do not overeat, nor take with me candy
or other needless food to upset my digestion just when I am getting
less than my usual exercise. I carry with me a book and a note-book.
When I think of something that I want to remember, I jot it down; when
I see something that interests me, I make note of it. I read as long
as I enjoy reading; and when I grow tired of that, I close my eyes and
rest, and let the train go on.”
Her friend replied, “That all sounds very simple; I will try it.”
She returned from her journey, reporting that she had had a delightful
time, and that she had alighted from the train at each end of the trip
less weary than when she started.
The directions which Clara Barton gave were those which she herself had
tested.
Clara Barton lived long, and her life had many changes. Account has
been given of certain episodes in her young womanhood in which she was
loved and did not return the affection of the men who loved her. The
question has been asked and should be answered whether in her later
years she had any experience which made up for the lack of love in
her youth. Some stories, nearly or quite apocryphal, have been told
concerning the men who are supposed to have loved her and whom she
loved, but whom she refused because she loved her work more.
The lovers of her youth were all good, worthy men, as good as the
average New Englander. There is nothing to be said concerning any one
of them that is not to his credit; but no one of them was the equal of
Clara Barton. There was no tragedy about her experience, neither was
there any consciousness of the ecstasy of a love completely possessing
her. These affairs left her something of loneliness, but no memory of
bitter grief or cruel disappointment. She could write, and did once
write, some tender, sentimental verses about a sad parting, but the
sadness did not break her heart, nor permanently cloud that of any of
her lovers.
The time came when all this was changed. She lived in Washington, amid
a wide circle of friends, among them men of every station in life. No
longer was she possessed of ambition beyond that of any man of her
age and acquaintance. There were men whom she knew and men whom she
liked, who had ambitions equal to her own and ideals with which her
own had much in common. During the Civil War she might have chosen any
one of scores of grateful men, as her husband. But she seems hardly
to have given matrimony a thought in those years. After she became
famous, she was less readily accessible to any multitude of lovers,
but at least one man to whom she had been kind sought to reward her
with his heart and hand, and, after she had returned from Europe, at
least one man whom she met abroad pressed upon her his ardent and
unrewarded affections. If she had married any one, she would have
married an American. No offer of matrimony from a man not of her own
land would seem to have made any appeal to her. This offer of marriage
she regarded rather with amusement than with serious consideration. It
was honorable, but in her judgment most unsuitable, and she refused
with a smile,--not the smile of contempt, but of good-humor and healthy
merriment.
Among other friends in middle life there were two whom she would seem
to have considered in the aspect of possible lovers.
In the days during and following the Civil War, she came to know
intimately an American professor of wide repute, who at that time was
pursuing extended researches in Washington. He was a widower of about
her own age, a profound scholar, and he became a dear and trusted
friend. For several months their paths were thrown together and for
a time they boarded at the same table. She was interested, not only
in his work, but in himself. The ardor and enthusiasm with which he
worked impressed her. Like herself, he was little bound by precedent,
and was engaged in a task which he confidently believed would increase
the sum of human learning. There was something in a task of this
character that made a direct appeal to Clara Barton. Much as she prized
any kind of useful knowledge, she especially admired the spirit of
the pioneer, and honored the man who blazed new paths and widened the
horizons of learning. Such a man was this friend of hers. He read to
her in many evenings the results of his investigation, and she shared
his enthusiasm for his task. Her two nephews, Bernard and Sam, then in
Washington, were wont to poke quiet fun at him and to joke their aunt
about the possibility of his becoming an uncle of theirs and swamping
the family with his knowledge of subjects which the boys cared little
about. She took their raillery in good part. But one day, when she
thought it had gone a little too far, she reproved her nephews and made
a spirited defense of the professor. She said, “You need not wonder
that, notwithstanding all your attempts to make fun of him, I admire
a man of his profound learning and high character.” Her nephews then
believed that their respect for each other had merged into affection,
but, as the years went by and he and Clara gradually lost sight of
each other, they came to think that they might have been mistaken,
that the two were good friends and nothing more. So far as the author
is aware, there exists no evidence from which an answer can be had to
the question of how much they really cared for each other, or, if they
cared, why they did not marry. The author has his own conjecture, and
it is only a conjecture, but it is this: Both he and she were at that
time at the beginnings of a great work. How long either one would need
to continue to labor and sacrifice before success was won, neither
could determine.
The last and in some respects the most interesting, as certainly the
most distinguished, among Clara Barton’s matrimonial possibilities,
came to her late in life. During the Civil War she became acquainted
with a man who even then was held in high regard, and was attracting
the attention of his own State and to some extent of the Nation. Rising
largely by his own exertions to a position of eminence, he became one
of the leading men of the generation. Through all the years when she
was pursuing her war relief work, with scant appropriation for postage,
he cheerfully loaned her his frank and was her friend. Through many
long years they knew each other and always held each other in esteem.
He was in Washington and so was she, and there was little need of
interchange of letters between them; nor is there in the letters that
are preserved any indication of personal affection. Those letters
grew out of particular events when one or the other of them was away
from Washington, and for the most part they had no significance as
indicating the extent to which they may have cared for each other.
But there came a time when his work and her work brought them into
close and more constant relations. They were both at the zenith of
their respective careers. At that time he was a widower. Both were free
and they could have married without the sacrifice of any important
interest. The home which they might have established would have been a
congenial one.
At that time Clara Barton took a brief vacation and went to Oxford
where she prepared a new wardrobe, including a white satin dress. To
her niece Mamie she confided that an occasion of unusual significance
was in prospect, and that more would be known of it later.
Just at this time this distinguished statesman died. His death was a
great shock to Clara Barton. She made no public lamentation; she never
hinted even to those who were nearest to her that her grief was other
than that which she might properly feel for an honored friend of many
years. Her nieces believed that his death prevented their marriage. Her
nephew, Stephen, says:
Their friendship was long and intimate, and it would not have been
strange if they had cared for each other. In many respects their lives
would have been well adapted to each other. But if their regard for
each other ever expressed itself in terms of love, or approached the
prospect of marriage, I do not know it. It may have seemed to either
or both of them a pleasant possibility, but they were mature people,
each with a great work to do; and if his death cut short what was
growing from friendship into love, I do not know it. Such a feeling
either one of them might very worthily have held toward the other. I
know that she held him as a dear and trusted and honored friend, and
he esteemed her likewise.
If Clara Barton loved this able and good man, she bore her
disappointment as she was accustomed to bear her disappointments,
in self-restrained and dignified silence. Her silence shall remain
unbroken. If they loved, it was a love worthy of them both; if they
were good friends and only good friends, it was a friendship honorable
to both.
So far as the author has been able to learn from those who were closest
to Clara Barton during her lifetime, and so far as it is disclosed by
her diary and letters, this is all there is to be known concerning the
love affairs of Clara Barton.
There were times when Clara Barton felt keenly her isolation. But, in
1911, she recorded in her diary some of the domestic trials of some of
her friends, and added, “After all, _Aloneness_ is not the worst thing
in the world.”
While extremely modest, Clara Barton was far from being a prude. She
was never terrified by appeals to respectability, nor could she be
frightened by any warning concerning men or women whom gossip condemned.
In 1884, when she was on her steamboat, _Joseph V. Throop_, assisting
in the Ohio River floods, the boat one night tied up at a landing, and
a goodly number of people came on board. Among the rest were two young
women. One of the prominent ladies of the town found opportunity to
whisper to her that these were young women whose social standing was
not above question. “Then they will need help all the more,” she said;
and she gave those two girls an hour of her evening. Such warnings
she often received, and, far from accepting them as her basis of
discrimination, she invariably reacted in the other direction.
She never undertook any work without first carefully thinking it
through in an effort to discover just where it was to end and how it
was to be provided for. She had no sympathy with people who start good
movements for other people to support when their well-meant but poorly
reckoned endeavor fails. “They get hold of a log they can’t lift,” she
said, “and they make a great call for some one to come and lift it for
them.” That was never the way in which she did things. She thought them
through in advance.
Clara Barton worked slowly. While she formed her decisions promptly in
emergencies, she formulated them carefully and with painful precision.
It was not by doing things easily she accomplished so much, but by
rising early and working late and keeping constantly at the thing she
wanted to do. She attempted to use stenographic assistance, but with
only moderate success. She had to work out her letters and addresses
in her own way. A certain kind of routine work her secretaries did for
her, to her great relief, but her real work she had to do herself.
She coveted the ability to work more rapidly. She admired that ability,
and perhaps overvalued it, in others. She once wrote to me: “Where do
you find time to do so many things? One of the griefs of my life is to
see other persons getting things done--really _done_--and I accomplish
so little. I don’t see how they do it.”
No more could they see how she did it; but she did it by working with
an industry and devotion that never found an easy way of accomplishing
results.
A friend of hers was deeply interested in a movement for which he
wished the endorsement of Clara Barton. She believed in the work he was
doing, and was willing to commend it; but she wanted to know a little
more about it, and then she wanted time to think out what she wanted
to say about it. He became very desirous of having her commendation
in time for a particular use; and his wife invited Clara Barton to
their home to dine. She willingly accepted, and enjoyed the visit. She
knew the family, and held them in high esteem. After dinner, and some
conversation, the man produced a typewritten statement of some length
which he had prepared, endorsing his work. This he read to her, and she
liked it. But when she understood that he had prepared this for her to
sign, she was shocked. She refused to sign it.
Her friend could not at first understand her scruples. Did she not
believe in this work? She did. Had she not expressed to him her
approval and signified her willingness to furnish him a statement which
he would be at liberty to publish? She had. Had she not listened to his
reading of this very statement with expressions of hearty approval?
She had. Was there anything in it she would like to change? If so, she
was at liberty to make any erasure or interlineation she desired. No;
there was nothing she cared to change, except that she cared to change
everything in it.
He assured her that he was asking nothing of her which men of the
highest honor did not do constantly; that in a busy world people had
to avail themselves of assistance such as he offered her; that his own
standards of honor were high, and he would never think of asking her
to sign a statement which did not fully express her own convictions.
All this she understood, and she did not censure him. But she could
not do what he asked of her. The statement which he had prepared was
not hers. The opinions expressed were in full accord with her own, and
the language was as good as any she could have chosen, and there was
nothing in the document to which she could object; but it was not hers.
Her idea of a document which she could sign as her own was one which
she should have thought out on first wakening, perhaps in the middle
of the night, and sketched in pencil on the pages of the little pad at
the head of her bed, and then thoughtfully copied in her own hand with
careful weighing of each word and phrase. That would have been her own.
Certainly that was a needlessly narrow conception of the extent to
which she might honorably have employed the minds and willing hands of
others in her own too heavy toil. But it was a conception grounded in
the highest possible conviction of honor.
Clara Barton was a self-willed woman. So was Mother Bickerdyke. So was
Dorothea Dix. So, most emphatically and uncomfortably for those who
withstood her, was Florence Nightingale. If comparisons were in order,
which they certainly are not, she was not the least considerate of the
four of other people’s opinion, nor most reluctant to admit herself in
the wrong. Like Florence Nightingale, she had opportunities of marriage
in her youth, and resolutely turned to other work under force of a
strong conviction, and that conviction had mighty impelling power.
Lytton Strachey, in his remarkably penetrating sketch, says:
Every one knows the popular conception of Florence Nightingale.
The saintly, self-sacrificing woman, the delicate maiden of high
degree who threw aside the pleasures of a life of ease to succor the
afflicted, the Lady with the Lamp, gliding through the horrors of
the hospital at Scutari, and consecrating with the radiance of her
goodness the dying soldier’s couch--the vision is familiar to all.
But the truth was different. The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as
facile as fancy painted her. She worked in another fashion, and toward
another end; she moved under the stress of an impetus which finds no
place in the popular imagination. A Demon possessed her. Now demons,
whatever else they may be, are full of interest. And so it happens
that in the real Miss Nightingale there was more that was interesting
than in the legendary one; there was also less that was agreeable.
The disposition of Florence Nightingale lacked much of being angelic.
When she encountered the stupidity of official red-tape or the
brutality and indifference of army surgeons, her words blistered.
She hurled invectives and she employed sarcastic nicknames, and she
denounced everything and everybody who opposed her. But when she
arrived in Scutari forty-two wounded men out of every hundred were
dying, and when she left them her hospitals showed a death-rate of
twenty-two out of every thousand. Clara Barton had a tongue less sharp
than Florence Nightingale’s, but she had a will no less inflexible.
Both women had soft voices, which they never raised. Men fled from the
soft tones and vitriolic words of Florence Nightingale. When Clara
Barton grew angry, she lowered her voice. Instead of a woman’s shrill
falsetto, men heard a deep and determined tone quietly affirming that
the thing was to be done in this way and in no other. Few men withstood
that tone.
Some readers of this book, I am sure, have been shocked to read the
opinion of Dr. Bellows of the Sanitary Commission concerning the
uselessness and worse of the ordinary woman nurse in war hospitals.
That opinion was shared by Dorothea Dix, by Clara Barton, and to an
even greater degree by Florence Nightingale.
Not very long after Florence Nightingale had reached Scutari with her
thirty-eight nurses, and about the time when she was having to ship
some of them back, her official friends in England thought to win her
eternal gratitude by sending to her forty-six additional nurses, under
the personal direction of her old friend, Miss Stanley. But she refused
to accept them, and sent in her resignation. She would not have these
“women scampering through the wards” and upsetting all her regulations.
“They are like troublesome children,” she said. Even the religious
ones were given to what she called “spiritual flirtations” with the
soldiers; and, as for those who had not the fear of God or the dread
of hell-fire, there were drunken orderlies and dissolute officers and
unmarried chaplains to be considered.
I have wondered what Dorothea Dix would have said if forty-six nurses
not of her selection had been suddenly dumped upon her; I think she
would have gone into hysterics and shipped them all back. Clara Barton,
I believe, would have set them to emptying slops and scrubbing floors
till she found the few out of whom she could make nurses. She would not
have written the kind of letters about them which Florence Nightingale
wrote. She would have scolded a little in her diary, and have written
the committee who had sent them a letter of thanks, requesting them
not to send any more until she asked for them, and meantime to send
her some bandages and some lemons. But she would have felt much as
Florence Nightingale felt. They were both self-willed women. They
needed all their will-power. It was well they had it.
Many interesting parallels suggest themselves between the work of Clara
Barton and that of Florence Nightingale.
They were contemporary in a remarkable degree. Florence Nightingale was
a few months the older and died a few months sooner than Clara Barton,
but both lived to be more than ninety years of age. Miss Nightingale
was born May 12, 1820, and died August 13, 1910; Clara Barton was born
December 25, 1821, and died April 12, 1912. They faced the question
of marriage in much the same fashion, and each one gave herself in
much the same spirit to her life-task. They were not unlike in their
religious faith and in its practical expression. The long, confidential
letters of Florence Nightingale, written painfully when she ought
to have been in bed, remind us of the detailed epistles which Clara
Barton found time to write, mostly late at night. Each had a love of
humor which stood her in good stead; Miss Barton’s had less sting in
it than that of Miss Nightingale, but otherwise it was not unlike,
and it was a great help to both of them. Each had a gentle voice, and
each knew how to use it effectively without raising it. Each protested
to the end of her life that her real work was not that of the popular
imagination, that of personally ministering to any considerable number
of sick or wounded soldiers, but a work of direction and organization;
and neither succeeded in making the public believe it. Not long before
her death, Clara Barton relieved her mind in her diary concerning the
sort of newspaper article which invented fairy-tales of this sort:
“Oh, these women reporters!” she said in her diary. “They never get
anything right. They are forever telling and inventing the same old
kind of gush!” Florence Nightingale also had a profound distrust of the
limitations of members of her own sex; but also she knew, as did Clara
Barton, the brutality, the stupidity, and the inefficiency of men.
Miss Nightingale often wondered if there were in all the army enough
officers of sympathy and conscience to have saved Sodom. Sometimes she
doubted if there was one.
All the women who went to the battle-front and were worth their
carfare were women of strong will. Mother Bickerdyke, in her rough
and great-hearted way, was a lady; but when she faced an incompetent
surgeon and drove him out of the hospital and he appealed to General
Sherman, the General confessed himself powerless: “She ranks me,” he
said. Dorothea Dix was a lady to the very depth of her sensitive soul,
a devoted, consecrated Christian lady; but she could be very properly
disagreeable on occasion, and she brooked no interference with her
authority. Florence Nightingale was a lady, born and bred; but vitriol
was mild compared to some of her outbursts. Clara Barton was a lady
to her very finger-tips; and she had had enough of experience in
Washington among officials and men of influence so that she knew how on
occasion to be much more diplomatic and gracious than most other women
with her responsibilities. Moreover, she shrank from giving pain, and
was careful of her words. But she had as strong a will as had Florence
Nightingale, and, while she was as a rule more amiable than that lady
in her more violent moods, she got things done. People sometimes found
her arbitrary, impatient, and obstinate; had she been less so, it had
gone hard with the interests which she cherished. She was capable of
being arbitrary, impatient, and obstinate, and the same is true of each
of the other women whom her name calls to mind. But among them she was
not the least gentle, considerate, and self-forgetful. She required
that things should move, and move in the direction of her decision; but
she was at heart, and on most occasions in her demeanor, quiet, gentle,
affectionate, and calm.
Clara Barton had many devoted and loyal friends. They were held by her
in warm and enduring affection; and some of them, for her sake and her
work’s sake, made generous sacrifices. She had other friends who came
to her in bursts of generous enthusiasm. These also were in good part
sincere, and if some of them found her habits so simple and her task so
heavy as to afford them smaller share than they had hoped in personal
association with her, they were none the less generally firm in their
friendship. It was not to be expected that every one could live
permanently on her high plane of single-mindedness. Some of her friends
were a trial to her, for it was not easy for her to understand why,
when they once knew the task she was working at, they did not manifest
stability of purpose and perseverance in well-doing. But these she
counted her friends. When one of these left her roof because the fare
was too plain, Clara Barton said, “She is not willing to wash herself
seven times in Jordan.”
There were others--and in the course of her long life there were a
number of them--who came to her with ardent protestations of affection
and of devotion to her cause, who in time wearied of the strain, or
resented her strong hand in management, or who came to believe that
they themselves could do better the work which she had undertaken. Some
of them betrayed her most sacred confidences, and returned her evil for
good.
Few women were so ill-fitted by nature to bear this kind of
disappointment as Clara Barton. She was morbidly sensitive, and given
to self-accusation. How unworthy she must be, she thought, if these
persons did not continue to love her. The wounds of their defection
went unhealed. Yet here was one of the finest triumphs of her nature.
She never cherished permanent resentment.
One time a friend of hers recalled to her a peculiarly cruel thing that
had been done to her some years previous, and Clara Barton did not seem
to understand what she was talking about.
“Don’t you remember the wrong that was done you?” she was asked.
Thoughtfully and calmly she answered, “No; I distinctly remember
forgetting that.”
Friends deserted Clara Barton, but she never deserted a friend. If
a friend of hers was evil-spoken against, that only increased her
loyalty. She would not believe evil unless compelled to do so, and, if
compelled, she interpreted the wrong, if possible, in terms of charity.
Only baseness and treachery and betrayal of trust won her scorn.
At one time, in connection with her relief work on the rivers, a man
who had acted as her local agent was arrested for burglary. She was at
a distance and wires were down. She refused to believe him guilty.
When later details made it impossible to doubt that he had done
essentially the deed with which he was charged, she still believed that
there must be some explanation. Later it developed that the offense was
technical, and grew out of a dispute as to the ownership of certain
premises which he had entered, and the other claimant, instead of
suing him for trespass, sought to do him the greater injury by having
him arrested for burglary. How the question of the ownership of the
property was ultimately settled, I do not know, but her confidence in
the man as one incapable of willful crime was justified.
Consul-General Hitz, of Switzerland, long her friend, became a banker
in Washington. Apparently he had little talent for the banking
business, and undertook to finance the Swedenborgian Church, of which
he was a member, out of the revenues of the bank. Of his guilt before
the law there appears to have been no question; as to his essential
honesty Clara Barton had no doubt. She did not condone the offense,
nor question that the amount taken must be made good; but she did not
believe that so good a man and so true a friend ought to remain in
prison. After high influence had been exercised unavailingly on his
behalf, she persisted, and he was released.
Her voice has already been mentioned. Its key was about the average
pitch of a woman’s treble voice. In conversation it was flexible, and
very pleasant. On the platform it was clear and penetrating. Her tones
were not musical, but were distinctly agreeable. Her inflections were
those of the gentlewoman of the old school. There was a soothing,
conciliatory, almost caressing quality in her voice. It had no
harsh notes. It was diametrically opposite to all that was harsh and
strident. It was gentle, winsome, and in every accent suggestive of
courtesy and good-breeding. When she lived abroad, no one accused her
of a high, harsh, nasal American voice. It was a New England voice, but
as soft as that of any Southern lady of the old days.
But when Clara Barton grew very much in earnest, her voice changed.
That change was one of the most remarkable things about her. It did not
rise. It did not grow harsh or self-asserting. It dropped a half octave
or, as it sometimes seemed, a full octave. It was a deep, full voice.
It was almost bass. Her eyes darkened as her voice went down, and
flashed lightning to her tones’ quiet thunder. She had a temper, which
she kept well under control, but when she spoke in a low tone, those
who heard her knew that its fires were red.
She was modest in her dress, but she had an eye for bright colors. In
her youth she was a painter, and she learned how to mix colors on her
palette. She never felt so sure of her good taste in the matter of
dress as she did of her ability to make pleasing contrasts on canvas.
She trusted much to the good judgment of her friend, Annie Childs. When
she followed her own judgment, she inclined to green, which she loved
to set off with red. Red was her color, and she said, the Barton rose
was the Red Rose, all the way from the Wars of the Roses down. She
loved red roses. She loved red apples. She liked to wear red ribbons
and trimmings. With a background of green, red was always safe. In her
youth and young womanhood she often determined to vary her costume,
and repeatedly went to the stores determined to buy something beside
green. Her nieces said, “If Aunt Clara says she is going to town to buy
a brown dress, we know that she will buy a brown dress; for Aunt Clara
invariably does exactly what she says she will do. So we know that she
will select and pay for a brown dress. But we also know that by the
time she gets it home the color will have changed; when she opens the
package, it is sure to have become green.”
In later years, dressmakers took her in hand, and widened the range
of her choice. But she seldom appeared in any gown that did not lend
itself to a little dash of red; and when she wore just what delighted
her own eyes, her dress was green, with a complementary dash of red.
Something must be said about her habit of economy, and it must be said
with some care lest it give a very wrong impression. Clara Barton was
economical to a very marked degree. If a list of her actual economies
were here given, it would produce on many minds the impression that she
was stingy. This would be wide of the truth. If a valid distinction
may be made between two words that are nearly synonymous, she was
parsimonious, but was not penurious.
She was reared in a community and in a family where want was unknown,
but where money was earned by hard work, and capital was accumulated
by thrift and economy. It was part of her birthright and of her
being. There was about her nothing that inclined her to waste or even
extravagance.
She entered into life early as a teacher, at first at a small salary.
She had opportunity to save, and she did save. Her necessary expenses
were small, and she began at the outset to save money. She continued
to save money. She had good business judgment, and, excepting for a few
times when she permitted her sympathies or her friendships to get the
better of that judgment, her investments, conservatively made, were
remunerative.
When she first went abroad in 1869, she knew that she had money enough
to support her as long as she lived. If she recovered her health, the
lecture platform was still open to her, and she could earn and save
above all expenses from four thousand dollars to six thousand dollars
a year. If she returned an invalid, she had the income on about thirty
thousand dollars, which was more than she needed. In no year of her
life, probably, did she spend upon herself as much as eighteen hundred
dollars. Even when she traveled abroad, her expenses were moderate,
and she never drew on her principal for her own support. But eighteen
hundred dollars or two thousand dollars a year, which was about what
her investments brought her, did not invite reckless extravagance, She
knew that she must exercise reasonable economy, and her tastes were
such that this was no hardship.
When, therefore, she sat up at night rather than take a sleeping-car,
it was not wholly that she was unwilling to pay for the price of the
berth. She had been accustomed to doing so until an attempt was made
to rob her, after which she was greatly disinclined to the use of the
sleeper. Her prime reason for sitting up was that she disliked sleepers
after that night. But she was not at all averse to saving two dollars.
She slept few hours in the night, and was accustomed to sleeping under
unfavorable conditions. She thought she rested quite as well sitting
in a corner of her seat as lying in a stuffy and dark berth.
Her lunch at home was often a few crackers and a red apple, and the
more nearly she regulated her diet when journeying in accordance with
her custom at home, the better life went with her. So her bag often
contained a little package of the kind of crackers which she liked,
and one or more big red apples. If she sat in her seat and ate these,
it was not primarily because she was unwilling to pay a dollar for
her lunch; she had the dollar, and she had no ambition to leave any
considerable sum of money behind her when she died. On the other hand,
she was not unmindful of the good she could do with the dollar in some
other way. And she did that good with it. She was parsimonious with
herself; she was generous toward others.
To enumerate her economies would misrepresent her. It would seem that
she was niggardly. The contrary was true. She abhorred waste. She could
not tolerate extravagance. But she could draw her last dollar, and
did draw her last dollar from investment, to put into her search for
missing soldiers, and she could do it and did do it without whining and
without fear. Even the possibility that she might die a pauper did not
terrify her or win from her in her diary any more than a half-mirthful
recognition. She economized in things she did not greatly care for that
she might do the things that were to her of supreme importance.
She did not hoard money. The amount which she had at the end of her
lecturing career, she did not greatly increase, nor, until she got deep
into the work of the Red Cross, did it materially diminish. In order
to support the Red Cross work in its earlier stages, she drew upon
her principal, and she did not to the end of her life restore it to
what it had been before. But she never complained of this, nor did it
in the least worry her. Year by year she had sufficient income, with
reasonable economy, to supply all her needs. Now and then she delivered
an address and received a hundred dollars. Occasionally she replied
to a request of newspaper or magazine for an article, and received a
check in return. For a year she received a salary from the State of
Massachusetts as matron of the Reformatory for Women at Sherborn. The
annuity paid to her by the Massachusetts General Hospital gave her a
little more margin. She was free from worry as to her own finances.
I have not found in her diary or her letters a single sentence in
which she expressed anxiety about her own financial future. There were
several times when she was not sure what she ought to do next, and
in her decisions she was not unmindful of financial necessities. But
she did not keep in constant thought her own need of saving money for
herself. She saved, because it was natural for her to save, and because
she had causes at heart which she wished to save for.
Careful in her expenditures upon herself, Clara Barton lavished her
love upon others. She cherished her friends, and there was little that
she was not willing to do for them. More than once she jeopardized
plans of her own for the sake of unselfish ministry to others, some of
whom had little claim upon her. She received under her own roof, fed at
her table, sheltered at her fireside, and assisted from her purse not
a few people who later proved ungrateful; indeed, those who wrought
her most pain were those whom she had befriended and of whom she later
learned that they sought not her, but hers.
Yet it would not be fair to give any impression that the number of
ingrates among her companions was large. Relatively, it was small.
Those who loved her loved with a fervent loyalty; and there are few
things more beautiful than the adoring and grateful affection which
those bestow upon her memory who knew her longest and best. A strong
individualist, she inspired in those who came to know her well that
perfect confidence and grateful devotion which are the crowning test of
leadership. There were those, who, for her sake and that of any cause
which she held dear, would have gone with her singing to the stake, and
she would never have permitted one of them to go there unless she went
first.
The author was her relative, her friend of many years. He loved her
and admired her; but he has felt his own praises weaken and pale and
disappear in the presence of those who, working in intimate association
with her through the years, proclaimed to him her virtues in terms that
but for their sincerity and the knowledge of those who spoke would have
seemed extravagant. The surest proof of her genuine goodness is the
unfaltering devotion of those who knew her best, and for that reason
loved her most.
Clara Barton was a woman of tact. She needed all the tact she had
and more. In every field in which she labored, she was flooded with
volunteer workers who wanted to help. Some of them were competent; more
were not. I recently talked with my long-time friend, Father Field,
sometime head of the Cowley Fathers, and learned that he was at the
Johnstown flood, and saw much of Clara Barton. They rode together in
a buggy over a road filled with trees and house-roofs and he feared
she would be thrown out, but she told him to drive on; she had driven
over worse roads, and with bullets besides. He said that her greatest
difficulty as he saw it there was the number of people of good impulse
but little discretion who rushed into Johnstown to help. Dr. Bellows
said a blunt word about the women who made their journey to the
battle-field, that most of them were in the way. This was unfortunately
true of many of the well-meaning people who rushed to the assistance of
Clara Barton in time of flood or fire. Assistance she must have, and
must take what was offered. But the handling of this untrained force
was a matter which called for the greatest tact as well as executive
ability.
Not only so, but, when the work in a particular field was over, there
were always those who had come as volunteer workers who insisted on
bestowing themselves upon Clara Barton to make Red Cross work their
life-work. Some of them were competent, and she was glad of them. But
in the course of her years of experience she accumulated a series of
misfit volunteer assistants, some of whom it was not easy afterward to
get rid of.
She had little love of music. She did not sing or play any musical
instrument. When traveling abroad, if forced to attend the opera, she
saved the time from utter waste by writing a home letter while singers
of world-wide repute performed and sang before her. Having a low and
soft voice, she disliked the high notes of women’s voices. Good,
melodious quartet music she heard with mild enjoyment, and if she can
be said to have liked any music it was that of male voices. A chorus
of men always pleased her. Some of the war songs always thrilled her,
though more for the associations than the music. There was one song,
popular during the later years of the Civil War, which she never heard
often enough. It was the song of an old slave, who, dying years before
the war, had believed that he would rise on the day when freedom came
to his race. The author also remembers it, as it was taught to him
almost before he could walk:
Nicodemus the slave was of African birth,
He was bought for a bagful of gold;
He was reckoned as part of the salt of the earth,
And he died years ago, very old.
’Twas the last word he said as we laid him away
In the stump of an old hollow tree,--
“Wake me up,” was his charge, “at the first break of day,
Wake me up for the great jubilee.”
_Chorus_:
Then run and tell Elijah to hurry up, Pomp,
To meet us at the gum-tree down in the swamp,
To wake Nicodemus to-day.
It was sung at the minstrel shows after the Emancipation Proclamation;
but it was not as a minstrel show song that Clara Barton enjoyed it.
There was a solemn dignity about the old slave’s faith that inspired
her; and the authoritative tones of the words “Wake Nicodemus” thrilled
her through and through.
Her lack of love of music reached its climax in her abhorrence of
piano-drumming. For piano music she had some little love, but not
enough to compensate for the annoyance for having a piano where it
could be pounded by any visitor, skilled or unskilled. For many years
she refused to have a piano in her house. At last she permitted one
to be procured, and she gave it house-room, and sometimes heard it
played with satisfaction. But when she was hard at work and wanted to
concentrate her thought, she found no joy in the thoughtless hammering
which an open piano seemed to invite. There was a time for all things,
even for piano-playing, and in its proper time and place she could
permit it and enjoy a part of it; but she did not want the menace of
it from early morn till dewy eve and several hours thereafter. Her
home was a very open place of entertainment, and she could not well
inquire, before admitting a person who needed shelter, what were his
or her habits and ability with respect to the torture of piano keys.
So she would have preferred a home with only such music as was brought
in where,and when it was wanted. But she accepted the piano as in some
sort inevitable, and it did not annoy her as much as she had expected.
If Clara Barton did not care for music, she did dearly love poetry.
From her earliest childhood she was reading it, committing it to
memory, copying it, and writing original lines of her own. There lies
before me, as I write, her first copy-book. The strokes and curves
she learned to imitate are there, then the letters, lower case and
capitals, then the first words, “thoughtful,” “Nation,” and “National,”
and the sentence, chosen perhaps for its varied arrangement of letters
with the simplest stem and curve, and partly because it was not well
for a New England child at school to begin life with any illusion about
its essential character, “Man was made to mourn.”
Who was the teacher who set her these copies we do not know, but
she copied them well. The first poetic lines that she was given to
transcribe were these, melodious but not precisely soothing to the
juvenile mind:
Then rose the cry of females, shrill,
As goss-hawks whistle on the hill,
Denouncing misery and ill,
Mingled with childhood’s bubbling thrill
Of curses stammered slow;
Answering, with imprecation dread,
“Sunk be his home in embers red,
And cursed be the meanest shed
That e’er shall hide his houseless head
We doom to want and woe!”
This was rather strong sentiment for a timid and sympathetic little
girl, and she would probably have shuddered at it in prose; but in
verse she probably committed it to memory as she was in process of
copying it.
This completed the childhood work, and the book is filled, in her more
mature hand, with complete poems, “The Pilgrim Fathers,--where are
they?” “The Burial of Arnold,” “The Hour of Prayer,” “Warren at Bunker
Hill,” “The Indian’s Lament,” “The Fall of Tecumseh,” and other poems,
heroic, patriotic, devotional, and ending with “Farewell to the Bride.”
Later she procured a bound volume, and in it she copied her favorite
poems, and wrote others of her own, in her most careful and painstaking
hand. Her “copper-plate” penmanship was never more exquisite than in
this volume, in which her own poems and the poems she loved are written
in order as she found or composed them.
No quality in Clara Barton was more marked than the breadth of her
sympathies. She shuddered at the thought of needless pain. I have a
crude little picture, a page out of a child’s book, which she found
in her childhood and preserved to the end of her life. It is entitled
“What came of firing a gun.” A dead bird lies on the ground, and is
approached on the one side by a boy with a gun in his hand and on the
other by a horrified girl. It is not a great work of art, but it tells
its story and conveys its lesson.
She never gave needless pain. She regarded all life as akin to the life
of God, and sacred with the imprint of God’s own image. She looked upon
all life that can suffer or enjoy, the life of bird and beast and fish,
as something on which it is a sin to inflict needless pain.
From the time she saw, in her little girlhood, the killing of an ox,
and felt that the blow that struck and crushed its skull had struck her
own head, she never saw pain without feeling it. She could have said
with Whitman of the suffering she saw--
My wounds on me grow livid as I lean
Upon my staff and look.
She did not merely sympathize with suffering; she suffered. She not
only was glad of other people’s joy; it was her joy. She rejoiced with
those that did rejoice and wept with those that wept. Not often do her
diaries record her weeping; and the tears she records as having shed
are oftener for others’ sorrows than for her own. Her sympathy was
genuine, and of the sort which can truly be called vicarious. She took
it upon herself.
Her sympathies were so strong that she would have been useless in
the presence of danger and pain but for her remarkable self-control.
I asked her once how she acquired this, and she said it was simply
by forgetting herself. She saw something that needed to be done, and
went about the doing of it so promptly, so completely absorbed by the
necessity of it, that she forgot to be horrified by the sight of blood,
forgot to faint as timid females were supposed to do. Days and weeks
and months and years of it she would endure and never once give way.
Then would come a revulsion and a horror and a weakness and a collapse.
Again and again she held herself in hand through nervous strain that
would have crushed most women or men, and when it was all over went
nervously to pieces.
It appears a pity that, being capable of maintaining her self-control
till the end of the crisis, she could not still have maintained it when
the need was over. But it was a part of her delicately strung organism
to bear any manner of strain while the need lasted, and then to snap.
The remarkable fact is, not that she ultimately gave way, but that she
endured so long and so much.
Clara Barton was a woman to her finger-tips. Nothing that she saw or
suffered ever coarsened her or made her oblivious to the finer things
of life. Nothing that came of her association with men--and rough
men at that--made her anything less than a woman and a lady. She was
distinctly feminine. She had her own way of ignoring any incident
occurring in her presence at which she might have been expected to
be shocked, but of stickling at any trivial act which implied that
she was indifferent to proprieties. Teamsters, with their wagons deep
to the hubs in mud, might swear at their mules and she would never
hear it; but at night by the camp-fire she could rebuke with a quiet
and effective word or look the slightest approach to impropriety
of word or deed. She was no prude when she had a duty to perform,
and conventionalities meant little to her in the presence of human
need. But on her return to home life, she was gentle, ladylike, and a
stickler for proprieties.
She had no love for the mannish woman. She was much in the society
of men. In many respects she preferred the society of men to that of
women. She entered into their joys and experiences appreciatively. But
in it all she was distinctly feminine. She was a woman always, a lady
always. People who expected to meet in her a big, aggressive female,
with a long stride and a heavy voice and a domineering attitude, were
amazed. She was a little, undemonstrative gentlewoman of the old school.
One of Clara Barton’s most outstanding qualities was her almost
complete disregard of precedent. The fact that a thing had always been
done in a given way was evidence to her that it could be done again in
that fashion, but was of almost no value to her as proving that that
was the best way to do it. She always had faith in the possibility of
something better. It irritated her to be told how things always had
been done. She knew that a very large proportion of things that have
been done since the creation have been blunderingly done, and she was
always ready to listen to suggestions of better ways. Having once
decided upon a course that defied the tyranny of precedent, she held
true to her declaration of independence, and saw her experiment through.
In this she was not reckless or iconoclastic. She simply forbade
herself the cheap luxury of a closed mind. If no better way presented
itself, she was content with the old way of doing. But she was
eager for any new thing that might improve upon the past. Hers was
preëminently a forward-looking mind and a soul with face ever toward
the sunrise.