CLARA BARTON’S CHANGE OF BASE
SPRING OF 1863
The events we have been describing bring Miss Barton to the end of
1862. The greater part of the year 1863 was spent by her in entirely
different surroundings. Believing that the most significant military
events of that year would be found in connection with a campaign
against Charleston, South Carolina, and that the Army of the Potomac,
which she had thus far accompanied, was reasonably well cared for in
provisions which were in large degree the result of her establishment,
she began to consider the advisability of going farther south.
Her reasons for this were partly military and partly personal. The
military aspect of the situation was that she learned in Washington
that the region about Charleston was likely to be the place of largest
service during the year 1863. On the personal side was first her great
desire to establish communication with her brother Stephen, who still
was in North Carolina. When Charleston was captured, the army could
move on into the interior. If she were somewhere near, she could have
a part in the rescue of her brother, and she had reason to believe
that he might have need of her service after his long residence within
the bounds of the Confederacy. Her brother David received a commission
in the Quartermaster’s Department, and he was sent to Hilton Head in
the vicinity of Charleston. Her cousin, Corporal Leander T. Poor,
in the Engineers’ Department, was assigned there, partly through
her influence. It seemed as though that field promised to her every
possible opportunity for public and private usefulness. There she could
most largely serve her country; there she could have the companionship
of her brother David and her cousin, Leander Poor; there she could most
probably establish communications with Stephen, who might be in great
need of her assistance. It is difficult to see how in the circumstances
she could have planned with greater apparent wisdom. If in any respect
the outcome failed to justify her expectations, it was because she
was no wiser with respect to the military developments of the year
1863 than were the highest officials in Washington. Her request for
permission to go to Port Royal was written early in 1863, and was
addressed to the Assistant Secretary of War.
This request was promptly granted, and she was soon planning for a
change of scene. The first three months of 1863, however, were spent in
Washington, and we have few glimpses of her activities. In the middle
of January she rejoined the army, acting on information which led her
to believe that a battle was impending.
It should be stated that Clara Barton’s diaries are most fragmentary
where there is most to record. She was much given to writing, and,
when she had time, enjoyed recording in detail almost everything that
happened. She was accustomed to record the names of her callers,
and the persons from whom she received, and those to whom she sent,
letters; her purchases with the cost of each; her receipts and
expenditures; her repairs to her wardrobe, and innumerable other little
items; but a large proportion of the most significant events in her
public life are not recorded in her diaries, or, if recorded at all,
are merely set down in catchwords, and the details are given, if at
all, in her letters. Of this expedition in the winter of 1863 we have
no word either in her diary, which she probably left in Washington, or
in her letters which she may have been too busy to write, or which, if
written, have not been preserved. Our knowledge of her departure upon
this expedition is contained in a letter from her nephew Samuel Barton:
SURGEON-GENERAL’S OFFICE
WASHINGTON CITY, D.C., January 18th, 1863
MY DEAR COUSIN MARY:
Your very acceptable letter, with Ada’s and Ida’s, was received last
Thursday evening. I could not answer sooner, for I have been quite
busy evenings ever since it was received. Aunt Clara left the city
this morning for the army. Her friend, Colonel Rucker, the Assistant
Quartermaster-General, told her last Thursday that the army were about
to move and they were expecting a fight and wanted her to go if she
felt able, so this morning she, Mr. Welles, who always goes with her
to the battles, and Mr. Doe, a Massachusetts man, took the steamboat
for Acquia Creek, where they will take the cars for Falmouth and there
join the army. Colonel Rucker gave her two new tents, and bread,
flour, meal, and a new stove, and requested her to telegraph to him
for anything she wanted and he would send it to her. Aunt Sally left
for Massachusetts last Thursday evening....
SAM BARTON
In the State House in Boston is the battle-flag of the 21st
Massachusetts, stained with the blood of Sergeant Thomas Plunkett.
Both his arms were shot away in the battle of Fredericksburg, but
he planted the flagstaff between his feet and upheld the flag with
his two shattered stumps of arms. Massachusetts has few relics so
precious as this flag. Clara Barton was with him at Fredericksburg
and ministered to him there, and remained his lifelong friend. In
many ways she manifested her interest in him, rendering her aid in a
popular movement which secured him a purse of $4000. Sergeant Plunkett
was in need of a pension, and Clara Barton addressed to the Senate’s
Committee on Military Affairs a memorial on his behalf. It was written
on Washington’s Birthday, after her return from the field:
WASHINGTON, D.C., Feb. 22nd, ’63
TO THE MEMBERS OF THE
MILITARY COMMITTEE, U.S. SENATE.
SENATORS:
Nothing less than a strong conviction of duty owed to one of the
brave defenders of our Nation’s honor could induce me to intrude for
a moment upon the already burdened, and limited term of action yet
remaining to your honorable body.
During the late Battle of Fredericksburg, the 21st Massachusetts
Regiment of Volunteers were ordered to charge upon a battery across an
open field; in the terrible fire which assailed them, the colors were
three times in quick succession bereft of their support; the third
time they were seized by Sergeant Thomas Plunkett, of Company E, and
borne over some three hundred yards of open space, when a shell from
the enemy’s battery in its murderous course killed three men of the
regiment and shattered both arms of the Sergeant. He could no longer
support the colors upright, but, planting his foot against the staff,
he endeavored to hold them up, while he strove by his shouts amid the
confusion to attract attention to their condition; for some minutes
he sustained them against his right arm torn and shattered just below
the shoulder, while the blood poured over and among the sacred folds,
literally obliterating the _stripes_, leaving as fit emblem of
such heroic sacrifice only the _crimson and the stars_. Thus
drenched in blood, and rent by the fury of eight battles, the noble
standard could be no longer borne, and, while its gallant defender
lay suffering in field hospital from amputation of _both_ arms,
it was reverently wrapped by Colonel Clark and returned to the State
House in Boston, with the request that others might be sent them; the
21st had never lost their colors, but they had worn them out.
The old flag and its brave bearer are alike past their usefulness save
as examples for emulation and titles of glory for some bright page
of our Nation’s history, and, while the one is carefully treasured
in the sacred archives of the State, need I more than ask of this
noble body to put forth its protecting arm to shelter, cherish, and
sustain the other? If guaranty were needful for the private character
of so true a _soldier_, it would have been found in the touching
address of his eloquent Colonel (Clark) delivered on Christmas beside
the stretcher waiting at the train at Falmouth to convey its helpless
burden to the car, whither he had been escorted not only by his
regiment, but his _General_. The tears which rolled over the
veteran cheeks around him were ample testimony of the love and respect
he had won from them, and to-day his heart’s deepest affections twine
round his gallant regiment as the defenders of their country.
A moment’s reflection will obviate the necessity of any suggestions
in reference to the provisions needful for his future support; it is
only to be remembered that he can nevermore be unattended, a common
doorknob is henceforth as formidable to him as a prison bolt. His
little pension as a Sergeant would not remunerate an attendant for
placing his food in his mouth, to say nothing of how it shall be
obtained for _both_ of them.
For the sake of formality merely, for to you gentlemen I know the
appeal is needless, I will close by praying your honorable body to
grant to Sergeant Plunkett such pension as shall in your noble wisdom
be ample for his future necessities and a fitting tribute to his
patriotic sacrifice.
C. B.
The assignment of her brother David to duty in the vicinity of
Charleston was the event which decided her to ask for a transfer to
that field, or rather for permission to go there with supplies.
It must be remembered that Miss Barton’s service was a voluntary
service. She was not an army nurse, and had no intention of becoming
one. The system of army nurses was under the direct supervision of
Dorothea Lynde Dix, a woman from her own county, and one for whom she
cherished feelings of the highest regard, but under whom she had no
intention of working. Indeed, it is one of the fine manifestations
of good sense on the part of Clara Barton that she never at any time
attempted what might have seemed an interference with Miss Dix, but
found for herself a field of service, and developed it according to a
method of her own. It will be well at this time to give some account
of Miss Dix, and a little outline of her great work in its relation to
that of Clara Barton.
Dorothea Lynde Dix was born April 4, 1802, and died July 17, 1887. She
was twenty-nine years older than Clara Barton, and their lives had
many interesting parallels. Until the publication of her biography by
Francis Tiffany in 1890, it was commonly supposed that she was born in
Worcester County, Massachusetts, where she spent her childhood. But
her birth occurred in Maine. Unlike Clara Barton she had no happy home
memories. Her father was an unstable, visionary man, and it was on one
of his frequent and futile migrations that she was born. Her biographer
states that her childhood memories were so painful that “in no hour
of the most confidential intimacy could she be induced to unlock the
silence which, to the very end of life, she maintained as to all the
incidents of her early days.” She had no happy memories of association
with school or church, or sympathetic friends. The background of her
childhood memory was of poverty with a lack of public respect for a
father who, though of good family, led an aimless, shiftless, wandering
life. Unhappily, he was a religious fanatic, associated with no church,
but issuing tracts which he paid for with money that should have been
used for his children, and, to save expense, required her to paste or
stitch. She hated the employment and the type of religion which it
represented. She broke away from it almost violently and went to live
with her grandmother in Boston.
There she fell under the influence of William Ellery Channing, and was
born again. To her through his ministry came the spirit that quickened
and gave life to her dawning hope and aspiration.
How she got her education we hardly know, but she began teaching, as
Clara Barton did, when she was fifteen years of age. And like Clara
Barton she became a pioneer in certain forms of educational work.
Dorothea Dix opened a school “for charitable and religious uses,” above
her grandmother’s barn, and in time she inherited property which made
her independent, so that she was able to devote herself to a life of
philanthropy.
In 1837, being then thirty-five years of age, and encouraged by her
pastor, Dr. Channing, in whose home she spent much of her time, she
launched forth upon her career of devotion to the amelioration of
the condition of convicts, lunatics, and paupers. In her work for the
insane she was especially effective. She traveled in nearly all of the
States of the Union, pleading for effective legislation to promote the
establishment of asylums for the insane. Like Clara Barton she found
an especially fruitful field of service in New Jersey; the Trenton
Asylum was in a very real sense her creation. The pauper, the prisoner,
and especially the insane of our whole land owe her memory a debt of
lasting gratitude.
By 1861 her reputation was well established. She was then almost sixty
years of age and had gained the well-merited confidence of the medical
profession. She was on her way from Boston to Washington, and was
spending a few days at the Trenton Asylum, when the Sixth Massachusetts
was fired upon in Baltimore on April 19, 1861. Like Clara Barton she
hastened immediately to the place of service. On the very next day
she wrote to a friend: “I think my duty lies near military hospitals
for the present. This need not be announced. I have reported myself
and some nurses for free service at the War Department, and to the
Surgeon-General.” Her offer was accepted with great heartiness and
with ill-considered promptness. She was appointed “Superintendent of
Female Nurses.” She was authorized “to select and assign female nurses
to general or permanent military hospitals; they not to be employed
without her sanction and approval except in case of urgent need.”
Whether the United States contained any woman better qualified to
undertake such a task as this than Dorothea Dix may be questioned.
Certainly none could have been found with more of experience or with a
higher consecration. It was an impossible task for any one, and, while
Miss Dix was possessed of some of the essential qualities, she did not
possess them all. Her biographer very justly says:
The literal meaning, however, of such a commission as had thus been
hastily bestowed on Miss Dix--applying, as it did to the women nurses
of the military hospitals of the whole United States not in actual
rebellion--was one which, in those early days of the war, no one so
much as began to take in.... Such a commission--as the march of events
was before long to prove--involved a sheer, practical impossibility.
It implied, not a single-handed woman, nearly sixty and shattered
in health, but immense organized departments at twenty different
centers.”[8]
The War Department acted upon what must have appeared a wise impulse
in turning this whole matter of women nurses over to the authority of
a woman known in all the States--as Miss Dix was known--and possessing
the confidence of the people of the whole country. But she was not only
sixty years of age and predisposed to consumption, and at that time
suffering from other ailments, but she had never learned to delegate
responsibility to her subordinates. It had been well for Clara Barton
if she had known better how to set others to work, but she knew how
better than Dorothea Dix and was twenty years younger. Indeed, Clara
Barton was younger at eighty than Dorothea Dix was at sixty, but she
herself suffered somewhat from this same limitation. Dorothea Dix could
not be everywhere, and with her system she needed to be everywhere,
just as Clara Barton under her system had to be at the very front in
direct management of her own line of activities. But Dorothea Dix,
besides needing to be simultaneously on twenty battle-fields, had to be
where she could examine and sift out and prepare for service the chosen
from among a great many thousand women applying for the privilege of
nursing wounded soldiers, and ranging all the way from sentimental
school-girls to sickly and decrepit grandmothers. Again, Mr. Tiffany
says:
Women nurses were volunteering by the thousands, the majority of them
without the experience or health to fit them for such arduous service.
Who should pass on their qualifications, who station, superintend, and
train them? Now, under the Atlas weight of care and responsibilities
so suddenly thrust on Miss Dix, the very qualifications which had so
preëminently fitted her for the sphere in which she had wrought such
miracles of success began to tell against her. She was nearly sixty
years old, and with a constitution sapped by malaria, overwork, and
pulmonary weakness. She had for years been a lonely and single-handed
worker, planning her own projects, keeping her own counsel, and
pressing on, unhampered by the need of consulting others, toward her
self-chosen goal. The lone worker could not change her nature. She
tried to do everything herself, and the feat before long became an
impossibility. At length she came to recognize this, again and again
exclaiming in her distress, “This is not the work I would have my life
judged by.”
By that, however, in part her life-work must be judged, and, in the
main, greatly to her advantage and wholly to her honor. We can see,
however, the inevitable limitations of her work. Up to that time, she
had dealt with small groups of subordinates from whom she could demand
and secure some approach to perfection of organization and discipline.
This she could not possibly secure in her present situation. Again we
quote the discriminating words of her biographer:
But in war--especially in a war precipitately entered into by a raw
and inexperienced people--all such perfection of organization and
discipline is out of the question. If a good field hospital is not
to be had, the best must be made of a bad one. If a skillful surgeon
is not at hand, then an incompetent one must hack away after his own
butcher fashion. If selfish and greedy attendants eat up and drink
up the supplies of delicacies and wines for the sick, then enough
more must be supplied to give the sick the fag end of a chance. It
is useless to try to idealize war.... All this, however, Miss Dix
could not bring herself to endure. Ready to live on a crust, and to
sacrifice herself without stint, her whole soul was on fire at the
spectacles of incompetence and callow indifference she was doomed
daily to witness. She became overwrought, and lost the requisite
self-control.... Inevitably she became involved in sharp altercations
with prominent medical officials and with regimental surgeons.[9]
It is necessary to recall this in order to understand Clara Barton’s
attitude toward the established military hospitals. She was not, in any
narrow or technical term, a hospital nurse. She stood ready to assist
the humblest soldier in any possible need, and to work in any hospital
at any task howsoever humble, if that was where she could work to
advantage. But she knew the hospitals in and about Washington too well
not to appreciate these infelicities. She had no intention whatever of
becoming a cog in that great and unmanageable machine.
Clara Barton held Dorothea Dix in the very highest regard. In all her
diaries and letters and in her memoranda of conversations which her
diaries sometimes contain, there is no word concerning Dorothea Dix
that is not appreciative. In 1910 the New York “World” wired her a
request that she telegraph to that newspaper, at its expense, a list
of eight names of women whom she would nominate for a Woman’s Hall of
Fame. The eight names which she sent in reply to this request were
Abigail Adams, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone Blackwell, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Frances Dana Gage, Maria Mitchell, Dorothea Dix, and Mary A.
Bickerdyke. It was a fine indication of her broad-mindedness that she
should have named two women, Dorothea Dix and Mother Bickerdyke, who
should have won distinction in her own field and might have been deemed
her rivals for popular affection. If Clara Barton was capable of any
kind of jealousy, it was not a jealousy that would have thought ever to
undermine or belittle a woman like Dorothea Dix. Few women understood
so well as Clara Barton what Dorothea Dix had to contend with. Her
contemporary references show how fully she honored this noble elder
sister, and how loyally she supported her.
At the same time, Clara Barton kept herself well out from under the
administration and control of Miss Dix. In some respects the two women
were too much alike in their temperament for either one to have worked
well under the other. For that matter, neither one of them greatly
enjoyed working under anybody. It is at once to the credit of Clara
Barton’s loyalty and good sense that she went as an independent worker.
But the hospitals in and about Washington were approaching more and
more nearly something that might be called system, and that system was
the system of Dorothea Dix. Clara Barton had all the room she wanted
on the battle-field. There was no great crowd of women clamoring to go
with her when under fire she crossed the bridge at Fredericksburg. But
by the spring of 1863 it began to be less certain that there was going
to be as much fighting as there had been in the immediate vicinity of
Washington. There was a possibility that actual field service with the
Army of the Potomac was going to be less, and that the base hospitals
with their organized system would be able to care more adequately for
the wounded than would the hospitals farther south where the next great
crisis seemed to be impending.
These were among the considerations in the mind of Clara Barton when
she left the Army of the Potomac--“my own army,” as she lovingly called
it--and secured her transfer to Hilton Head, near Charleston.
[8] Tiffany, _Life of Dorothea Lynde Dix_, 336, 337.
[9] Tiffany, 338, 339.