Clarissa Harlowe Barton was the founder and first president of the American Red Cross. Though she started out just helping heal her older brother, who suffered from a farm accident when they were children, she grew up to be the angel of the battle field. She was even inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1973!

Clara was born on December 25th, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts. She grew up loving the outdoors, and her older brother David taught her to ride a horse bareback when she was only 5 years old. Clara´s father was Captain Stephen Barton, a soldier in a crusade against the Indians in the northwest. Sarah Stone Barton was Clara´s mother, whom there is not much known about. Clara also had several other older siblings: Stephen Barton, David Barton, and Sally Barton. Clara and Sally were particularly close friends through her whole life.

In 1833, Clara´s brother David fell from the rafters during a barn raising, leaving him with a serious head injury. Clara, at only 12 years old, stayed by his side for over 2 years, missing school and continued to treat him as a self-taught nurse, even after the doctors had given up. He eventually made a full recovery, thanks to her.

Clara was a very shy person. In an attempt to help her overcome this, her parents persuaded her to become a teacher. She earned her first teacher’s certificate when she was 17, and from there became a teacher for around 12 years. This included opening free schools for children of working parents that could not afford to send their children to school.

In 1855, she retired from her teaching career when she moved to Washington D.C. She worked there as a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office, and was the first woman in the federal government to receive pay equal to a man´s. She received abuse from the other male clerks for 3 years before being demoted and then fired for her ¨Black Republicanism.¨

In 1861, the Baltimore riot occurred, which was the first fighting of the American Civil war. Injured victims in Massachusetts were sent by train to Washington D.C., which also happened to be the town where Clara was living at the time. Clara traveled to the train station and nursed around 40 men. She then went on to personally provide food, clothing, supplies and treatment to the sick and wounded from her own supply. She also helped the soldiers by giving emotional support, like writing letters home to their families, giving them someone to talk to, and reading aloud books and newspapers. As she did these things, she quickly began to recognize these men. She had grown up with some of them, and some were also her former students.

Clara immersed herself in this work more and more, collecting medical supplies for union soldiers. She used her own home as a storage unit for supplies and distributed them to those in need with the help of several other women, although the War department opposed them. Clara knew that soldiers were dying everyday, not just because of their wounds, but because they weren’t getting treatment fast enough. She knew that if she could be on the battlefield to treat them as soon as possible, they would have a much greater chance of survival. Finally, in August 1862, Clara got permission from Quartermaster Daniel Rucker to work on the front lines, after gaining support and donations from many Ladies aid societies. 

Clara started her work at the battle of Antietam. Wounded soldiers were everywhere; the slopes, the gullies, beneath trees, on the grass. Entire hillsides were covered with them. She went one by one, bandaging each soldier’s wounds, giving them water and hot soup and stew, wrapping them in blankets to keep them warm, and giving them hope. She treated both union and confederate soldiers, and saved many, many lives. In one instance, she had to cross a bridge over a river with a general to treat soldiers on the other side, while there were confederate soldiers shooting at anyone who crossed the bridge. 

After the Civil war, Clara still had a job to do. She was receiving hundreds of letters from soldiers and families begging her to help them find family members that they had lost touch with during the Civil war. And Clara wanted to help every one of them. This, of course, was a pretty big job. In February 1865, she wrote to President Abraham Lincoln to ask for his permission and assistance in locating the missing union soldiers. She received her answer the following month, authorizing her, on behalf of the United States Government, to locate all information on missing soldiers, including prisoners of war. Just 2 days after she received her answer from Lincoln, he was assassinated. In the end, Clara ended up locating 22,000 missing men, and across the next 4 years burying 20,000 union soldiers and marking their graves. 

From 1865-1868, Clara did more and more work to help those in need. She traveled all across the country to give speeches about her experiences in the civil war to raise money for her ´The Search for the Missing Men´ project, even though she disliked public speaking. She worked with Susan B. Anthony and started an association with the women’s suffrage movement. She became acquaintances with Fredrick Douglas, and was an activist for civil rights. But Clara´s schedule was getting more and more busy, and she kept working and working non-stop. One day she opened her mouth to give another lecture in Portland Maine, and nothing came out. The doctor informed her that she was overworked and exhausted, and recommended she stop work to rest for 3 years. 

There was one problem though: She couldn’t stay in America. By now, everyone knew who she was, and she wouldn’t be able to rest. So, the doctor sent her to Europe, thinking she wouldn’t be recognized there, but he was wrong. A group of people in Europe already had a job for her. While living in Geneva, Switzerland, Dr. Louis Appia introduced Clara to The International Red Cross. The International Red Cross treaty was signed by 31 countries in 1865, right at the end of the American Civil war. The treaty states that no one can shoot at the nurses and doctors treating the wounded on the battlefield, and will even stop firing to let the wounded be carried off the battlefield. America, however, had refused to sign this treaty. Clara promised herself that she would return to America and persuade them to sign the treaty. 

A few months later, the Franco-Prussian war broke out in Europe. Clara then joined the International Red cross and assisted the Grand Duchess of Baden to help treat the wounded soldiers in this war. She then assisted in supplying work to the poor by the request of German authorities in 1871, after the Siege of Paris. When Clara returned home to America, she met with President Rutherford B. Hayes to speak with him about The International Red Cross. Rutherford pointed out that America does not fight in many wars like Europe does, and he did not think that America would ever face such a terrible war as the Civil war again. 

But Clara Barton did not give up. She finally won in 1881, using the argument that the American Red Cross would also help with calamities such as natural disasters, like tornados, floods hurricanes, and forest fires. Clara became the first President of the American Red Cross. She helped many, many people through the The American Red Cross. The organization assisted refugees, soldiers and prisoners during the Spanish-American war, helped in the floods of the Ohio river in 1884, gave Texas food and supplies during the famine of 1887, helped Illinois recover from a tornado, brought doctors to help after the Johnstown flood of 1889, helped Florida through the yellow fever epidemic. In 1897, Clara opened the first American International Red cross headquarters in Turkey. 

Clara worked in Hospitals in Cuba until she was 77 years old! Her last project as President of the American Red Cross was helping victims of the Galveston, TX Hurricane in 1900. Clara resigned as President in 1904 and later founded the National First Aid society, while continuing to live in her home in Glen Echo, Maryland. She published her book The Story of my Childhood in 1907. On April 12th, 1912, she died in her home of pneumonia at age 90. She never married or had any children. Clara Barton is one of the important figures in our history, whom many people around the world owe their lives too. The American Red cross is such a large feature of our Nation and we have Clara Barton to thank for that. She truly was the Angel of the Battlefield.