Clara Barton: From Patent Office Clerk to Founder of the American Red Cross

On the afternoon of September 17, 1862 — the bloodiest single day in American history, the Battle of Antietam in western Maryland — a forty-year-old woman in a brown dress and red bow was kneeling beside a wounded Union soldier near the Pry House field hospital, holding his head as a surgeon attempted to extract a Confederate bullet. A second bullet passed through the loose sleeve of her dress, missed her arm by an inch or two, and killed the soldier she was tending. Clara Barton, who would later be called the “Angel of the Battlefield,” never noticed the hole in her sleeve until later that evening. She had been the only woman the army had allowed onto the field. She had driven her own mule wagon there from Washington, DC, the night before, with a load of medical supplies she had personally raised, packed, and delivered.

By the time she died in Glen Echo, Maryland, on April 12, 1912, she had nursed soldiers through the American Civil War, identified more than 22,000 missing Union dead through her postwar Office of Missing Soldiers, founded the American Red Cross, and led it for twenty-three years. This is the documented life behind the legend.

Before the War

Barton’s early career was unremarkable. She taught school in New Jersey and Massachusetts from age 17, founding a free public school in Bordentown, New Jersey, in 1852 that grew to 600 pupils — at which point the school board hired a man to be its principal at twice her salary. She resigned and moved to Washington, DC, in 1854, where she became one of the first women employed as a clerk at the US Patent Office under Commissioner Charles Mason. Her wage of $1,400 a year was equal to male clerks’ pay, a rarity. The Buchanan administration reduced her position to a piecework “copyist” role in 1857; the incoming Lincoln administration reinstated her in 1860.

The Civil War

Barton’s wartime work began informally. After the Sixth Massachusetts Infantry was attacked by a Baltimore mob on April 19, 1861 — the first Union blood spilled in the war — she helped tend to wounded soldiers at the US Capitol and Senate chamber, where they had been brought for treatment. The improvised effort persuaded her that the army’s medical system was inadequate for the scale of casualties coming. She began advertising in Massachusetts newspapers for donations of food, bandages, clothing, and medicines, set up a warehouse in Washington, and from August 1862 onward — having received passes from Quartermaster General Daniel Rucker and Brigadier General William Hammond — drove her own supplies in mule-drawn wagons directly to Union field hospitals.

The defining engagements were Cedar Mountain (August 9, 1862), Second Bull Run (August 28–30, 1862), Antietam (September 17, 1862), and Fredericksburg (December 11–15, 1862). At Antietam she arrived at the Pry House and the Smoketown Hospital before most of the army’s official medical supplies; the field surgeons were performing amputations with corn husks instead of bandages until her wagons rolled in. At Fredericksburg she crossed the Rappahannock under fire on a pontoon bridge to reach the city’s wounded. At the Bermuda Hundred campaign and the siege of Petersburg in 1864, she ran a Union army hospital near the front. President Lincoln, in March 1865, formally appointed her “General Correspondent for the Friends of Paroled Prisoners” — an official government position created for her work tracing missing soldiers.

The phrase “Angel of the Battlefield” was apparently coined by Dr. James I. Dunn, a Union surgeon at Antietam, in a letter home that was later reprinted. The popular nineteenth-century romanticisation of Barton’s wartime image obscured the actual nature of her work, which was overwhelmingly logistical, administrative, and physically gruelling rather than tender. She was, in functional terms, a one-woman supply company.

The Office of Missing Soldiers and Andersonville

At the war’s end perhaps 100,000 Union soldiers were officially missing, with their families left without information. From a third-floor boarding house room at 437½ Seventh Street NW in Washington, Barton opened the Office of Missing Soldiers in March 1865. With a small staff and Lincoln’s official endorsement, she eventually responded to more than 63,000 written inquiries from families and identified the fates — usually deaths — of approximately 22,000 men.

The Office’s largest single project was Andersonville. Henry Wirz’s prison camp in Sumter County, Georgia, had held about 45,000 Union prisoners over its operational period (February 1864 – April 1865) and had buried 12,920 dead in mass trenches. Barton learned of the existence of a clandestine death register that had been kept by a captured Union soldier, Dorence Atwater of the Second New York Cavalry, working in the prison hospital. Atwater had copied the names and grave numbers of each Union dead during his imprisonment and smuggled the list home. With Atwater, an army expedition under Captain James Moore, and a contingent of US Colored Troops, Barton arrived at Andersonville on July 25, 1865. Over the following month they identified and marked 12,912 of the 12,920 graves. On August 17, 1865, Barton raised the US flag over what became the Andersonville National Cemetery.

Atwater was court-martialled and imprisoned in 1865 for refusing to surrender his original list to the War Department — he wished to ensure its use for families rather than its bureaucratic disappearance — and Barton lobbied successfully for his pardon and the publication of his list, which appeared in the New York Tribune in February 1866. The Office of Missing Soldiers closed in 1868.

Europe and the American Red Cross

Suffering from exhaustion, Barton travelled to Europe in 1869, ostensibly for rest. In Geneva she met Dr. Louis Appia of the International Committee of the Red Cross, founded by Henry Dunant in 1863 in response to the Battle of Solferino. The Committee had drafted the First Geneva Convention of August 22, 1864, providing protection for wounded soldiers and the neutrality of medical personnel. Twelve European nations had signed; the United States had not.

When the Franco-Prussian War broke out in July 1870, Barton volunteered with the International Red Cross, working at Strasbourg, Belfort, and Paris with German and French wounded. She returned to the United States in 1873 determined to bring the country into the Geneva Convention and establish an American national Red Cross society.

It took eight years. The Hayes administration refused; the Garfield administration was more receptive but Garfield was assassinated four months into his term. President Chester A. Arthur signed US accession to the Geneva Convention on March 1, 1882. Before that, Barton had already, on May 21, 1881, formally founded the American Association of the Red Cross in Washington, DC, with herself as president, Frederick Douglass and a small group of supporters on the founding board.

Her tenure as president lasted twenty-three years. The American Red Cross’s first relief operations were not military but civilian — fires, floods, and tornadoes — beginning with the Thumb Fire that devastated rural Michigan in September 1881. The 1889 Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania, in which the South Fork Dam failed and killed more than 2,200 people, brought the organisation national attention; Barton personally arrived in Johnstown on June 5, 1889, with supplies and stayed for five months. She also led ARC missions to the 1893 Sea Islands hurricane in South Carolina, the 1898 Spanish-American War in Cuba (where, at age 76, she ran a relief operation at the front lines), and the 1900 Galveston hurricane in Texas.

The organisation, however, was outgrowing her personal management style. After internal disputes and a federal investigation into the ARC’s finances, Barton resigned the presidency on May 14, 1904, aged 82. She moved permanently to her home at Glen Echo, Maryland, just outside Washington, and continued to write and correspond extensively until her death from pneumonia on April 12, 1912.

The “Love Lost” Question

Popular biographies often emphasise a doomed romance — usually identified as a fiancé who died in the Civil War — as the emotional engine of Barton’s later humanitarian work. The documentary evidence does not support a tidy story. Barton never married and left no private writing identifying a single lost love. She had close personal friendships with several men over her life, including the Union officer Colonel John J. Elwell, with whom she had a documented intimate relationship while she was stationed in South Carolina in 1863–64; Elwell was married, and the relationship ended when his wife arrived from Ohio. Various nineteenth-century writers conflated and romanticised these episodes into the “Angel of the Battlefield” narrative. The most reliable modern biography, Stephen B. Oates’s A Woman of Valor (1994), treats the question with appropriate scepticism: there was no single dead fiancé driving Barton’s career, and the framing imposes a sentimental shape on a life that does not require one.

What Most Accounts Get Wrong

Three distortions are worth noting. The first is the depiction of Barton primarily as a nurse. She was not formally trained as a nurse and did not consider herself one. Her role in the Civil War was logistical: raising supplies, organising transport, getting matériel to surgeons. The bandaging she did personally was incidental to that organisational work.

The second is the assumption that the American Red Cross was inevitable once Barton wanted it. It took her eight years of personal lobbying to get the US government to ratify the Geneva Convention, against the indifference of three successive administrations. The institution exists because Barton, in middle age, declined to take a refusal for an answer.

The third is the framing of her later resignation from the ARC as the result of declining capacities. She was 82 at the time and had run the organisation as a personal fiefdom — by 1904 the ARC needed institutional reform and Barton was reluctant to provide it. The 1904 reorganisation under the new president Mabel Boardman professionalised the agency and produced the structure that survives today. Both judgments — Barton’s founding and the post-Barton reform — were correct in their respective contexts.

Why It Still Matters

The American Red Cross remains one of the largest humanitarian organisations in the United States, congressionally chartered in 1900 and re-chartered in 1905. Barton’s home at Glen Echo, Maryland, is preserved as the Clara Barton National Historic Site, administered by the National Park Service. Her boarding-house office at 437½ Seventh Street NW in Washington — accidentally rediscovered in 1996 in an attic during a planned building demolition, still containing her papers, supplies, and “missing soldiers” correspondence — is now the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum. The Andersonville National Cemetery she helped found is part of Andersonville National Historic Site.

For more on the Civil War era, see our pieces on Civil War letters and the personal experience of the war and Robert Smalls.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Clara Barton?

Clara Barton (1821–1912) was an American nurse, humanitarian, and the founder of the American Red Cross. She gained national prominence during the Civil War as an independent supplier of medical materiel to Union field hospitals, ran the postwar Office of Missing Soldiers (1865–68) that identified approximately 22,000 missing Union dead, helped found the Andersonville National Cemetery in 1865, and established the American Red Cross in 1881, serving as its first president for 23 years.

What did Clara Barton do during the Civil War?

Barton raised supplies through newspaper appeals, assembled them in a Washington warehouse, and personally drove mule-drawn wagons of food, bandages, medicines, and clothing to Union field hospitals. She was present at Cedar Mountain (August 1862), Second Bull Run (August 1862), Antietam (September 17, 1862), Fredericksburg (December 1862), Bermuda Hundred (1864), and the siege of Petersburg (1864–65), among other actions. She often arrived at the front before the army’s official medical supplies. At Antietam a bullet passed through her sleeve, killing the soldier she was tending.

What was the Office of Missing Soldiers?

The Office of Missing Soldiers was a federally endorsed operation Barton ran from her boarding-house room at 437½ Seventh Street NW in Washington, DC, from 1865 to 1868. President Lincoln formally appointed her “General Correspondent for the Friends of Paroled Prisoners” in March 1865. With a small staff she responded to more than 63,000 inquiries from families and identified the fates of approximately 22,000 missing Union dead. The office was rediscovered intact in 1996 in a Washington attic during a planned building demolition and is now the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum.

Did Clara Barton found the American Red Cross?

Yes. She founded the American Association of the Red Cross in Washington, DC, on May 21, 1881, after eight years of lobbying the US government to ratify the 1864 First Geneva Convention. President Chester A. Arthur signed US accession to the Convention on March 1, 1882. Barton served as the organisation’s first president from 1881 to 1904. The Red Cross’s first major operations were civilian disaster relief — the 1881 Thumb Fire in Michigan, the 1889 Johnstown Flood, the 1900 Galveston hurricane — and at age 76 she personally ran a relief operation in Cuba during the 1898 Spanish-American War.

Did Clara Barton ever marry?

No, she never married. Popular accounts often emphasise a doomed romance with a Civil War officer as the emotional engine of her later humanitarian work. The documentary record does not support a single tidy story; she had several close personal relationships across her life, including a documented intimate friendship with Colonel John J. Elwell during her Civil War service in South Carolina, but no surviving evidence of a single dead fiancé.

Where is Clara Barton buried?

Clara Barton died of pneumonia at her home in Glen Echo, Maryland, on April 12, 1912, aged 90. She is buried in the family plot at North Cemetery in Oxford, Massachusetts, the town of her birth. Her Glen Echo home is preserved by the National Park Service as the Clara Barton National Historic Site.

Sources

1. US National Park Service — Clara Barton National Historic Site
2. Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum
3. US National Park Service — Andersonville National Historic Site
4. American Red Cross — The Story of Clara Barton
5. Stephen B. Oates, A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War (Free Press, 1994)
6. Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Clara Barton: Professional Angel (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987)
7. Ishbel Ross, Angel of the Battlefield: The Life of Clara Barton (Harper, 1956)
8. Dorence Atwater, A List of the Union Soldiers Buried at Andersonville, with introduction by Clara Barton (New York Tribune, 1866)