Aiding the Wounded

Clara Barton (1821–1912)
From The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It

Interesting Links

“Clara Barton at Fairfax Station” (Roy Blumenfeld, Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum)

“Clara Barton and The American Red Cross” (Clara Barton Birthplace Museum)

Previous Story of the Week selections
• “A Woman’s Recollections of Antietam,” Mary Bedinger Mitchell
• “The Nameless Dead,” Kate Cumming
• “Death of a Pennsylvania Soldier,” Walt Whitman
• “The Colored Cooper,” Clifton Johnson

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The Civil War: The Second Year Told by Those Who Lived It
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“The Influence of Women,” illustration by American artist Winslow Homer (1836–1910). Published with the caption, “Our Women and the War” in the September 6, 1862, issue of Harper’s Weekly. (Art Institute of Chicago)

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When Clara Barton was eleven years old, her brother David, thirteen years her senior, was part of a crew building a large barn when a ceiling rafter snapped in two and he fell onto the planks covering the unfinished cellar. Although he insisted he was fine in the hours following the fall, within days he was suffering from a severe fever and headache. “He had been my ideal from earliest memory,” Barton wrote in a memoir.

I was distressed beyond measure at his condition. I had been his little protégée, his companion, and in his nervous wretchedness he clung to me. Thus, from the first days and nights of illness, I remained near his side. . . . I learned to take all directions for his medicines from his physician (who had eminent counsel) and to administer them like a genuine nurse. . . .

I realize now how carefully and apprehensively the whole family watched the little nurse, but I had no idea of it then. I thought my position the most natural thing in the world; I almost forgot that there was an outside to the house.

Barton nursed her brother for two years at their home in Oxford, Massachusetts. Reflecting on the various treatments recommended by doctors “twenty miles around,” she later joked that she seemed to have “given him poison enough to have killed him many times over.” Regardless, he eventually made a full recovery, later served as Assistant Quartermaster for the Union army, and died in 1888 at the age of 79.

Barton’s next experience as a nurse wouldn’t occur until she was 39 years old, at the beginning of the Civil War—and her new career began with the conflict’s earliest injuries. On April 19, 1861, the 6th Massachusetts Regiment was attacked by a secessionist mob as it passed through Baltimore on its way to Washington. Five soldiers and a dozen civilians were killed in the fighting. Forced to abandon their supplies and equipment, the troops, including approximately forty injured soldiers, regrouped and finished their journey. Barton, who was employed as a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office, presented herself at the facility for the wounded. As she wrote to her cousin William:

They say the “Massachusetts Boys” are equal to anything they undertake. . . . The wounded at the Infirmary are all improving—some of them recovered and joined the regiment. We visited the regiment yesterday at the Capitol; found some old friends and acquaintances from Worcester; their baggage was all seized and they have nothing but their heavy woolen clothes—not a cotton shirt—and many of them not even a pocket handkerchief.

With the assistance of several friends and other women who had shown up to help, she worked to resupply the soldiers with adequate clothing and toiletries.

In the months ahead, Barton quickly realized that the Union was utterly unprepared for the impending arrival of casualties in Washington, and even less ready to aid soldiers maimed on the battlefield. For the next year, she worked tirelessly to collect and distribute bandages, clothes, food, and other supplies for the sick and wounded. She initially trafficked goods through her own rooms but soon rented a warehouse and distributed her supplies freely among the tented army camps that sprang up around the city. When soldiers told her what they needed most—tobacco—she threw aside her opposition to smoking. “You would smile at the sight of the half yard slabs of plug lying this moment on my table waiting for Dr. Sidney’s Basket of Whiskey to accompany it,” she wrote to a cousin. A letter to her father in May confirmed her fervor:

I don’t know how long it has been since my ear has been free from the roll of a drum. It is the music I sleep by and I love it. . . . We must be ready to bind the wounds or bear them of our own, if necessary. I shall remain her while anyone remains, and do whatever comes to my hand. I may be compelled to face danger, but never fear it, and while our soldiers can stand and fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them.

In the summer of 1862, despite significant opposition from officers and field surgeons, Barton received approval from Quartermaster Daniel Rucker to bring supplies to the front. Operating independently of the army and the U.S. Sanitary Commission, she led a group, including her associates Almira Fales and Ada Morrell, that furnished nursing care and supplies directly to Virginia battlefields, including Cedar Mountain, Second Bull Run, South Mountain, Antietam, and Fredericksburg. The following year, a contemporary chronicler, Linus Pierpont Brockett, summarized the accounts of soldiers and officers who witnessed Barton’s bravery at Antietam in a report on philanthropic war efforts:

A young and gentle woman, in whose veins flowed some of the best blood of Massachusetts, toiled as few men could have done, staunching wounds which might otherwise have proved fatal, administering cordials to the fainting soldier, cheering those destined to undergo amputation, moistening lips parching with thirst, giving nourishing food to those who had sunk from wounds and exhaustion, and ever and anon, closing eyes that had looked their last upon earth, or receiving and noting messages of love to absent ones, from those about to depart to the silent land.

In the years immediately after the war, Barton crisscrossed the country recounting her experiences to audiences. Her lecture included passages that were polished and revised from a letter she had written to a friend in the aftermath of the Second Battle of Bull Run, when thousands of wounded soldiers outside of Fairfax Station had to be evacuated to Alexandria before the rapidly advancing Confederate army. Barton, Morrell, the remaining volunteers, and members of the medical staff accompanied the final group of soldiers on the last train as enemy sharpshooters opened fire and the cavalry rode into view. We reprint that letter below in its unadorned form, which was transcribed for the first time fourteen years ago for inclusion in the four-volume Library of America anthology of eyewitness accounts of the Civil War.

Notes: Major General Jesse Reno commanded a division in the Ninth Corps of the Army of the Potomac; he was killed ten days later at the Battle of South Mountain. Barton notes the deaths of Major General Philip Kearny and Major General Isaac Stevens at Chantilly on September 1 and of Colonel Fletcher Webster, a son of Daniel Webster and the commander of the 12th Massachusetts Infantry, who was killed at Second Bull Run on August 30. The Island was the name for the area of southwest Washington bounded by the Potomac River, the Anacostia River, and the Washington Canal.

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For this week’s selection, we reproduce Barton’s letter in its entirety below. You may also download it as a PDF or view it in Google Docs.

Aiding the Wounded

Washington, D.C. Sept. 4 / 62

Mr. Shaver,
Dear friend,

Yours awaited me on my return from Fairfax Tuesday [September 2] evening (or night rather). I left here on Sunday morning in the rain in company with Mr. Wells, Mrs. Morrell, Mr. Haskell, Mr. Alvord, &c. &c., took the train at Morgan Bulleys office, and soon found ourselves at Fairfax. I can not tell you the scenes which awaited our eyes,—the wounded were constantly arriving—but no hospitals this time, only God’s great one under the blue canopy. The men were brot down from the field and laid on the ground beside the train and so back up the hill till they covered acres, the bales of hay for forage were broken open and the ground was “littered” like “bedding” for horses,—they came till dark and then it was dark indeed. One lantern on the ground made a requisition for candles drew a few, the wind blew just enough to put them out every few minutes, and the men lay so thick we could not take one step in the dark, by midnight there must have been three thousand helpless men lying on that hay.

We had two water buckets—5 dippers. The stores which we carried to eat, besides hard crackers,— My one stew pan which I remembered to take, and this made coffee for them, all night we made compresses and slings and bound up and wet wounds, when we could get water, fed what we could, travelled miles in the dark over these poor helpless wretches, in terror lest some ones candle fell into the hay and consume them all, at length morning came, and we sent up the train with 1250, next 1000, next 1100, next 950, and so on. Still the ambulances came down, and the cars went out and we worked on, took the meat from our own sandwiches & gave it to them and broke the bread into wine and water to feed the poor sinking wretches as they lay in the ambulances.

On Monday the enemies Cavalry appeared in the wood opposite, & a raid was hourly expected. (I neglected to tell you that Mrs. Fales sent to me before I started to know if she could go with me and I had the train wait, and sent back an ambulance for her and her stores,—and this made three ladies (Mrs Corner is away) ) On Monday PM all the wounded then in were sent off, and the danger became so iminent that Mrs Fales thought it best to leave, although she only “went for stores.” I begged to be excused from accompanying her, as the ambulances were up to the field for more, and I knew I should never leave a wounded man there if I knew it, though I were taken prisoner 40 times. At 6 clock it commenced to thunder an lightning, and all at once the artillery began to play joined by the musketry about two miles distant, we sat down in our tent, and waited to see them break in but Reno’s forces held them back. The old 21st Mass. lay between us and the enemy and they couldnt pass. God only knows who is lost. I do not for the next day all fell back. Poor Kearney, Stephens & Webster were brought in, and in the PM, Kearney’s and Heintzleman’s divisions fell back through our camp on their way to Alexandria. We knew this was the last. We put the thousand wounded we had then into the train. I took one car load of them, Mrs M another. The men took to horse, we steam off, and two hours after there was no Fairfax Station, reached Alexandria at 10 oclock at night. And Oh the repast which met those poor men at the train. The people of the Island are the most noble band I ever saw or heard of. I staid in my car and fed the men till they would eat no more. Then the people would take us home and feed us, and after this we came home. I had slept 1 1/4 hours since Saturday night but I am well and strong and wait to go again if I have need.

Our forces are all back again in the old places around the city. McClellans army here again and he in command of it all. I am going to search for my friends now. I have told you nothing of the old friends who met me among the wounded and dying on that bloody field. I have no heart to tell it to day but will some time. Can you read this. Oh how I needed stores on that field. To day 2 huge boxes from Jersey have arrived. I dont know when we shall need them next. I will write you a more readable letter in reply to your last to me.

Yours, C.H. Barton

Transcribed from the manuscript in the Clara Barton Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California.