Given that today’s a holiday, I’m taking it easy and rerunning a piece from last year. My reason for so doing is that its subject, Clara Barton, is back in the news: the office she used after the Civil War will soon be a museum. It was found untouched recently, and there has been an effort to turn it into a place to remember the efforts she made during those awful years.
The work she did to make sure that families found out the final disposition of their loved ones was still years away when first she showed up on Capitol Hill to help.
On April 17, 1861, a little over a month after Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated, Virginia voted to secede from the Union, leaving Washington DC bordering directly on Secessia (a wonderful word for the Confederacy that has sadly fallen into disuse of late) This would not have been as great a problem if it hadn’t been for a painful lack of Union troops in the Capitol. Two days later, after having battled with secessionists in Baltimore, the 6th Massachusetts Volunteer Militia arrived in the capital, much to the relief of all whose sympathies remained with the Union.
The militamen had among them 30 wounded compatriots, and thus the local health care workers were able to take care of them, but there was no barracks for the rest of the troops to be bivouacked. It was thus decided that they would be allowed to stay in the Capitol, and they ended up in the Senate Chamber, which had only been completed two years earlier. A doorkeeper described them as “a tired, dusty, and bedraggled lot of men, showing every evidence of the struggle which they had so recently passed through” when they arrived, and continued that “it almost broke my heart to see the soldiers bring armfuls of bacon and hams and throw them down upon the floor of the marble room. Almost with tears in my eyes, I begged them not to grease up the walls and the furniture.”
The 6th Massachusetts Regiment, battling its way through Baltimore on the way to the nation’s capital. (LOC)
His entreaties were ignored and the hall, as well as other rooms nearby, soon were disastrously dirty. With the troops housed and fed, they now became increasingly keen to find out what was going on around them, and particularly, what was happening at home. Someone scrounged up a copy of the Worcester Spy, the almost-one-hundred-year old paper that was the source of hometown news to a large contingent within the regiment. Since they could not all read it at once, they asked a woman who had already shown herself to be of service to the troops to do it. She had been supplying them with sundries that they needed, and at their request she read to them.
In a letter she wrote to a friend, she describes the scene: “You would have smiled to see me and my audience in the Senate Chamber of the United States. Oh! but it was better attention than I have been accustomed to see there in the old time.”
The woman was Clarissa Barton, better know as Clara, and from this uncertain beginning, she became known as the “Angel of the Battlefield” and a tireless nurse and organizer. Her crowning achievement was the founding of the American Red Cross, who ensures that the United States will never be as unprepared for tragedies as it was in the early days of the Civil War.