CLARA BARTON
It makes you glad to think how proud the English people must have been of Florence Nightingale, doesn’t it?
You will be very happy to know that an American woman did just the same kind of work for American soldiers as Florence Nightingale did for English soldiers. Her name was Clara Barton.
Clara Barton was a Christmas baby.
The Barton family lived in a farmhouse on a hill near Oxford, Massachusetts.
There were four other children, two boys and two girls.
On Christmas morning of 1821, the four children woke to find a lovely Christmas present—a baby sister whom they loved from the minute they saw her. This was Clara Barton.
Little Clara grew up very happily. In winter she loved to coast on the snowy hills and to skate on the ice-ponds, and to take the long walk to and from the country school house.
In summer she played in the green fields and waded in the cool brooks.
She and her brother David used to do many daring, dangerous things.
They would ride upon the bare backs of unbroken colts. They would climb high places.
One day David climbed high into the peak of the roof of the barn. Suddenly a board gave way and David fell.
He was dreadfully hurt.
Although Clara was only eleven years old when this happened, she would not let any one but herself nurse David. For two years she took care of him.
“You will get sick yourself,” her mother told her, but Clara said that she could not leave her brother.
“I would rather nurse sick people than play,” she said.
It was because of her tender care that David got well.
“Clara is a born nurse,” he would say. “She knows just the right things to do.”
Clara BartonClara Barton
You would think that when she grew up, Clara would have studied to be a trained nurse, wouldn’t you?
If there had been trained nurses in that day no doubt she would have done so, but there were none.
Instead, she became a school teacher.
When she was only sixteen, she began to teach in a little district school near her home in Oxford, Massachusetts.
Afterward she taught the first public free school in New Jersey.
She worked so hard in her teaching that her strength gave out, and she decided to do some other kind of work.
You see, she could not bear to be idle.
So she went to Washington.
As you know, Washington is the capital of the United States.
Most of the business of our national government is attended to in this city.
Soon after Clara Barton went there she was asked to take charge of the Pension Office of the government.
She was asked to do this because she could be trusted to do her duty.
When she had been in Washington about three years, the terrible Civil War broke out.
You remember what the quarrel was about, don’t you?
There were fierce battles, after which wounded soldiers lay on the battlefields without help.
The thought of their sufferings touched Miss Barton’s tender heart.
“Oh, if I could only go nurse them!” she thought. She knew that many other kind women were having the same thoughts.
“I will go!” she finally decided.
At first the men in charge of the army did not want her to go, and said that such work was too hard for women.
But Clara Barton, like Florence Nightingale, was not the kind of person to be discouraged by such talk.
She managed to go.
And the very men who had discouraged her found out that the work she did was the most wonderful kind of help.
I wish I could tell you about the noble deeds she did, but this book would not hold all the stories.
She carried food and medicine to the soldiers.
She bound up their wounds and put on their bandages.
Sometimes as she was dressing the wounds of a soldier in the open field a bullet would come whizzing by.
Once one passed between her arm and her body.
She wrote letters for the men to their families, that their loved ones might know where they were.
In the cold winter weather, in the heat of summer, she did everything she could for the wounded and sick soldiers.
You do not wonder that they called her “The Angel of the Battlefield,” do you?
After the war was over she was so tired and worn out that the doctors said she would have to take a long rest. So she went across the ocean to Switzerland.
The story of Miss Barton’s great work had reached Switzerland before she left home.
While she was there in Geneva some gentlemen who had heard the story went to call upon her.
They talked with her about Henri Dunant and Florence Nightingale and about the relief work done in our own Civil War.
They told her that they had formed a society called the Red Cross. The work of the people of the Red Cross was to care for the wounded soldiers.
They said that the people of the Red Cross wore a certain badge, a red cross on a white ground. On the battlefield persons wearing this badge were allowed to give help to the wounded soldiers.
They said that twenty-two different countries in Europe had joined in this work, and they asked Miss Barton if she would try to get the United States to form a Red Cross Society in America.
Miss Barton was very thankful to learn about the Red Cross and promised to do all that she could, for she could understand better than many other people how great a good could come from such work.
When Miss Barton returned from Europe she kept her promise and tried to interest the American people in the Red Cross. But many years of weary waiting and hard trying passed before anything was done.
At last, in 1882, President Arthur signed the Red Cross Treaty and enrolled the United States with the other nations under the Red Cross banner.
This is the story of how the American Red Cross came to be.