Researchers explore newly uncovered info on American Red Cross founder Clara Barton

Clara Barton was a "trailblazer"who became "arguably the most famous woman in America" during the Civil War, according to authors of a recent book about Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross.

“Clara Barton: Civil War Humanitarian” was published in 2022 by the National Museum of Civil War Medicine to mark Barton’s 200th birthday and to bring together all the current research on the famous nurse. Three of the book's 14 authors spoke last month at the Heart of the Civil War Heritage Area's final "Porch Program" for 2023, at the historic Newcomer House in Keedysville.

John Lustrea, the museum's former director of education, said Barton’s real contributions to the treatment of wounded soldiers were more organizational than clinical.

“She was innovative in that she was one of a very small number of women who arrived to preform medical care on the battlefield, sometimes while the battle was happening,” he said after the event. “Civilian volunteers taking it upon themselves to assist, that was a foreign concept at the time. Clara Barton was very much a trailblazer in that way.”

Her other big area of innovation, Lustrea said, was in organizing donations from the public to support the Union war effort.

“She starts soliciting donations, initially from people she knows,” he said during the program. “As the war goes on, she gets in the newspaper, so she acquires all manner of goods to the point she has to rent several warehouses to store it all.”

Lustrea, now visitor services manager at Visit Frederick, said Barton's work to help Union soldiers made her “arguably the most famous woman in America” when the Civil War ended.

But he emphasized that she had never planned to be a national icon.

“It’s easy for us to forget that Clara Barton did not set out to do any of this when the war began,” he said. “It sort of happened to her in some ways, and then of course she ran with it.”

She came to Washington, D.C. to be a clerk in the U.S. Patent office before the war, becoming one of the first women to draw a federal paycheck in her own name.

After the Baltimore riot of April 1861 — right at the start of the war — she was among a crowd of onlookers who saw wounded Union soldiers from the 6th Massachusetts Militia arrive in Washington by train and quickly recognized many of the young men from her hometown. Several of the wounded had been her pupils when she was a schoolteacher.

“So instantly, the Civil War is incredibly personal for Clara Barton,” Lustrea said.

Because the government had been unprepared to receive the casualties, the soldiers stayed in the Senate chambers of the U.S. Capitol. Barton gathered up supplies, brought them to the Capitol, and sat in the vice president’s chair to read newspaper accounts of recent conflict to the wounded men.

“She gets the bug from this, if you will,” Lustrea said. “She’s like, ‘Wow, this made me feel good, this was personally fulfilling. I want to do something to help the war effort and I seem to be good at this sort of thing.’”

Helping families of missing soldiers

While much of her story has been known for a long time, the book draws on information that that has been newly uncovered in the past several years, thanks to the museum's management of the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum in Washington.

A Government Services Administration employee discovered a trove of Barton’s personal effects in the attic of an old building on 7th St. that was slated for demolition in 1996. The building proved to be her one-time home and office, from which she ran an all-volunteer effort to locate soldiers who never returned from the war.

NMCWM turned the building into a museum in 2015 and has been using the items found there to learn more about Barton’s life.

Olivia Peterson contributed a chapter to the book about the items that were found in the Missing Soldiers Office. She’s currently an assistant with the heritage area, but was the collections manager at the Museum of Civil War Medicine for several years.

She said the trove contained about 900 letters, most of which were addressed to Edward Shaw, Barton’s landlord and neighbor. There were also many articles of men’s’ clothing, including hundreds of socks, which Peterson assumes Barton intended to repair for the benefit of soldiers.

“There are just hundreds and hundreds of objects that were found and kept from the site, and the big takeaway for me was how incredibly lucky they were to find the objects to begin with,” she said during the program. “The fact that they survived in that space for so long being untouched and then being discovered and reinterpreted, it’s really lucky that whole instance happened.”

In addition to the items found at the site, the museum has inspired many private holders of items associated with Clara Barton to make their artifacts public in recent years.

Jake Wynn, the senior marketing and communications manager for Visit Frederick, worked for a time at the Missing Soldiers Office museum as director of interpretations. The museum “seems to be a magnet” for people who are connected to Clara Barton, he said.

He was in the museum one day when a woman told him she was in possession of a letter from Barton regarding the woman’s ancestor, a Union soldier who had died in the infamous Andersonville prison. She provided the museum with a copy of the letter, which was published in the Barton book.

Lustrea said the discovery of this letter was important because, of the more than 60,000 letters Barton and her volunteers sent regrading missing soldiers, only about 30 are known to researchers.

Tracey McIntire, the museum's director of communications, contributed a chapter highlighting Barton’s important role as a woman involved with the war.

She tells the story of a “most unusual soldier” from the Battle of Antietam who refused treatment for a serious wound from a male doctor. The doctor implored Barton to convince the solider to let himself be treated. Barton discovered the solider was a woman in disguise who was afraid of being arrested for her deception.

“Of course she doesn’t want to be examined,” she said. “Well, Clara convinces her ‘You need to be taken care of; it’s OK. We’ll fix your wound up.”

McIntire said the woman recovered from her wound, married the soldier whom she was looking for in the battle, and later gave birth to a daughter named Clara.

Erik Anderson is a freelance history and theater writer.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Researchers discuss the Civil War activities of Clara Barton