Clara Barton, Soldier or Pacifist?

Ellen Langenheim Henle

Civil War History, Volume 24, Number 2, June 1978, pp. 152-160 (Article)

Published by The Kent State University Press

DOI: 10.1353/cwh.1978.0011

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cwh/summary/v024/24.2.henle.html

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CLARA BARTON,
SOLDIER OR PACIFIST?

Ellen Langenheim Henle

The idea that women can be soldiers touches a sensitive nerve

among the American people. A recent editorial in The Washington
Post, "Why Should Girls Have To Play With Guns Too?," evoked
so many letters from readers that an entire page in a subsequent
issue was devoted to the debate on women's future role in the
American Military. The actual role of American women in the armed
services has increased substantially in the last decade and the day
for debating a "proper" role for women may have passed. West
Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy now admit women.
Female Marines are being trained for combat despite legal prohibi-
tions against using women in actual combat. And the Army Chief
of Staff advocates drafting women if the draft is restored.1
American women have participated in wars from the earliest days.
They served with regiments in the French and Indian War—as
laundresses, seamstresses, and cooks. There have been camp-
followers in all wars: prostitutes from Philadelphia even journeyed
out to Valley Forge during the American Revolution to warm things
up a bit for the frozen soldiers there. Thousands of women served
as nurses in hospitals during the Civil War. In this century, Ameri-
can women have worked in munitions industries, flown transport
planes for the military, and gone directly to the front as Red Cross
nurses.2
1 See The Washington Post, Aug. 20, 1977. See also "Women in Combat; A
Matter of Rights?," ibid., Feb. 14, 1977 and "Female Marines Get Training in Field
Tactics at Quantico," ibid., April 7, 1977. Preliminary versions of this paper were
given at the Office of Military History, Washington, D.C., March, 1977 and at a
Conference on the History of Women, College of St. Catharine, St. Paul, Minnesota,
October, 1977.
2 See Walter H. Blumenthal, Women Campfollowers of the American Revolution
(Philadelphia, 1952) for an interesting account of women in this war. There are
several good secondary sources on women in the Civil War: Mary E. Massey,
Bonnet Brigades (New York, 1966); and Agathe Young, Women and the Crisis:
Women of the North in the Civil War (New York, 1959). Good primary published
material on women in the Civil War include Frank Moore, Women of the War
(Hartford, 1866) and Linus P. Brockett and Mary Vaughan, Woman's Work in the
Civil War (Rochester, 1867). See Portia Kemodle, The Red Cross Nurse in Action
1882-1948 (New York, 1949) for information on wartime nursing since the Civil
War. There is a real need for a good comprehensive history of women's varied
roles in twentieth-century wars.
152
 Historians have done little to shed light on women's roles in war.
This is partly because women's history was considered unimportant
by many professional historians until the last decade. Many of those
currently doing research in the field of women's history have a
pacifist bias which affects their choice of subject matter. In a session
on women and war at a recent professional meeting, all three papers
were devoted to female pacifists. The historians giving the presen-
tations expressed their concern at "the increasing role of women
in the United States armed forces." They were also bothered by the
fact that "some of them [women] were demanding combat train-
ing and assignments."3
The life and writings of one American woman who was actively
involved in three major wars of the nineteenth century may illumine
the history of women and war and contribute new perspectives
to the modern debate on women's future role in the military.
Clara Barton was a Civil War heroine, founder of the American
National Red Cross in 1881, and its first president for over twenty
years. Miss Barton, born in 1821 in Oxford, Massachusetts, par-
ticipated in the Civil War as a battlefield nurse and as a one-
woman relief worker bringing needed medical supplies and food to
the front lines in her army wagons. In the Franco-Prussian War,
she followed the German troops into Strasbourg after a month-
long seige and stayed there for six months organizing a relief pro-
gram for poor women in the city. In the Spanish-American War in
1898, when she was seventy-six years old, she went to Cuba to
direct Red Cross relief in the field. She retired from the Red Cross
in 1904, helped establish the First Aid movement in America in her
declining years, and died at her Glen Echo home, outside Washing-
ton, D.C., in 1912.4
Clara Barton viewed war as a fact of life and wanted women to
have some part in it. When Julia Ward Howe, author of the "Battle
Hymn of the Republic", organized a women's peace movement in
the fall of 1870 at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Barton
wrote to a close relation; "I can never see a poor mutiliated wreck,

A very few women have served disguised as male soldiers in American wars:
Clara Barton nursed one such wounded female at Antietam. See Elizabeth C.
Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and M. J. Gage (eds.), History of Woman Suffrage,
II (Rochester, 1881), 18-23 for a description of women soldiers whom these
feminists believed numbered in the hundreds in the Civil War.
3 "Women Pictured as Facing Conflict in Favoring Pacifism and Feminism,"
New York Times, Dec. 29, 1976.
4 For a biography of Barton see the author's Ph.D. dissertation, "Against the
Fearful Odds; Clara Barton and American Philanthropy," Case Western Reserve
University, 1977. There are more than twenty-one published books and pamphlets
on Clara Barton but many of these ignore her feminism and all ignore her role as a
middle-class, ambitious woman operating in the upper-class world of American
philanthropy that existed in the late nineteenth century.
153
154civil war history

blown to pieces with powder and lead, without wondering if visions

of such an end ever flitted before his mother's mind when she
washed and dressed her fair-skinned baby." She agreed with Howe
that "Woman should certainly have some voice in the matter of war,"
but she was not convinced that a peace movement for women was
the solution.5
Barton believed woman's secondary status as a citizen was di-
rectly related to her exclusion from war. She felt men denied women a
role in the decision to go to war because women lacked the suffrage
and she likewise was convinced that men justified denying the vote
to women because women had no military responsibility to the state.
Such reasoning seemed to her circular: woman "shant say there
shall be no war—and shant take any part in it when there is one
and because she dont take part in war, she mustn't vote and be-
cause she can't vote, she has no voice in government. . . . 'Three
blind mice—cut off their heads with a carving knife—three blind
mice.' "e
In believing women ought to have the vote and a role in war,
Barton was more radical than several feminists of her day. Horace
Greeley reportedly once asked suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton:
"But if you women voted, what would you do in time of war?"
Mrs. Stanton flippantly remarked, "Stay at home as you did and
urge others to go to the front."7 Clara Barton did not take such a
light-hearted attitude toward the question. She was proud she had
made it to the battlefield with food, supplies, bandages, liquor, and
her nursing services for the soldiers, while most women who served
as nurses in the Civil War did so in hospitals far removed from the
fighting. Barton was proud of these women as well as of herself
because together they had advanced the cause of women's emanci-
pation by a generation through their role in the Civil War.8
One reason she could feel women ought to participate more
directly in war was her confidence that women could be as brave
under fire as men. She herself was fearless. In the Civil War, one
wounded man was shot while she held him in her arms. At least
once a bullet passed through her own clothing leaving her un-
harmed. She had little fear of death: she relished facing and over-
coming dangerous situations. She once explained her battlefield
work in the Civil War to a friend: "My position is one of my own
choosing, full of hardship and fraught with dangers."9 Those who
5 Clara Barton to Fannie Childs Vassall, Dec. 25, 1870, Barton Papers, American
Antiquarian Society.
¦ Ibid.
' Quoted in Ida H. Harper, "Women in War," Argonaut [n.d.], Barton Papers,
Library of Congress.
" Clara Barton, Lecture Notes [1868?], ibid.
9 Clara Barton to Elvira Stone, Aug. 30, 1863, ibid.
 CLARA BARTON155

met her on the lecture circuit after the war were impressed with
her steady gaze which conveyed the feeling that she had that
"magnetic power that always accompanies true courage."10
Any doubt she may have had about her sex's bravery under fire
ceased when she toured the hospitals of Strasbourg after the city
capitulated to the Germans in September 1870. Barton observed
that more than half those wounded in the seige were women. To
fellow feminist Josephine White Griffing, in Washington, D.C., Bar-
ton wrote: "Large wards of women wounded by cannon shot was a
phase in military observation new even to me. But I saw nothing in
this [to] cavil at, nothing to raise a cry over." Then she added: "I
see no reason why women have not the same privilege to be shot
that they have to be protected, the same right to danger that they
have to safety, and this is at least a practical demonstration that
they have the same liability."11
While Clara Barton realized the dangers of war, she also knew
and appreciated the excitement and sense of adventure that often
accompanies war. When President Lincoln first called for volun-
teers in April 1861, she was so moved by patriotic feeling that
she half-seriously explained to a cousin that he should not be sur-
prised if he chanced "to hear of my having entered the service."12
While she could not enlist as a soldier, she managed to witness
major battles in that war from Cedar Mountain, to Antietam, to
Morris Island, to the fighting below Richmond in late 1864. She
loved the army so much that when she had to return from the field
to Washington at one point she chaffed at having to give up military
life for civilian life where she was once again "no more than any-
body else" and had only "a five cent seat in a street car to go
through the world and only a civil house to live in."13
This attitude that war could be an exciting adventure colored her
later work in the Red Cross. When she first rushed off to the scene
of a natural disaster, the flooding of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers
in 1884, she was struck by the similarity between natural crises
and war. She enthusiastically wrote from her headquarters among
the flood victims that "It seems very much like the Old War days to
be going to the field."14 And her work with the Red Cross in Cuba
10Alton [Illinois?] Democrat, Dec. 4, 1867.
11Clara Barton to Griffing, Dec. 22, 1870. Barton Papers, LC. The bombardment
of civilian populations in the Franco-Prussian War marked the beginning of modern
warfare where civilians have been considered a legitimate target.
12Clara Barton to Ira Moore Barton, Apr. 14, 1861, Ira Moore Barton Papers,
American Antiquarian Society.
13Clara Barton to David Barton, Apr. 2, 1864, vol. 29, Barton Papers, American
Antiquarian Society.
14Clara Barton to A. S. Solomons, Feb. 13, 1884, quoted in Abram V.. Goodman,
"Adolphus Solomons and Clara Barton," American Jewish Historical Quarterly 59
(Mar., 1970), 338.
156civil war history

in 1898 led her to later view Red Cross war work as "the milder
romance of war."15
There are several factors which explain why Clara Barton found
war so attractive a theater for action. As a child, she identified
with her father who had served as a non-commissioned officer with
General Anthony Wayne in the Northwest Territory in the 1790's.
Mr. Barton, called "Captain" by his family and friends, coached
his youngest daughter in military lore, taught her to use red and
white Indian com to work out winning military strategy, told her
tales about his own military experience, taught her to revere his
military heroes Andrew Jackson and Napoleon, and made her wish
to be a soldier like him. One of the proudest moments of her youth,
which she remembered clearly at the end of her long life, was an
occasion when she hurt herself in a skating accident. The doctor
called in to treat her was impressed by her acceptance of pain and
turned to her father and said: "That was a hard case, Captain, but
she stood it like a soldier."16 Later she explained her personal
stoicism to a companion in this way: "I am so nearly related to my
good old father that it is neither easy nor natural for me to complain
or count over my griefs aloud."17
If her father's influence inclined her toward the military life, her
own love of athletics and need for physical exercise contributed to
her appreciation of army life. In an era when many young women
accepted the view that ladies did not need exercise, Clara Barton
refused to do so. As a child, her brothers taught her to ride the
wildest colts, to hammer, and to throw a ball as straight as any
boy. Her schoolmates were struck by her need for physical activity
when other young ladies seemed not to need it. In her fifties, she
took up rowing and challenged a much younger woman to a foot
race in a public park. In her seventies she went camping in Yellow-
stone with her relatives. And in her final years, she was known to
take a hammer and go out to mend broken boards in the boardwalk
up to her Glen Echo home. This love of physical activity and the
outdoors found expression in her experiences in war where she
lived in tents, marched through the woods and rode over the fields,
lived on military rations, and found an acceptable outlet for her
endless energy.
Clara Barton's view of herself as a soldier was central to her
personality. Not only did she go to the front in three wars by choice,
she thought about war and army life at other times in her life. In
the 1870's she suffered a nervous breakdown and explained to a

15Clara Barton, The Red Cross (Washington, D.C., 1898), 19.

16Clara Barton, Story of My Childhood (N.Y., 1907), 62.
17Clara Barton to Dida [Ida Riccius?], May 30, 1877, vol. 13, Barton Papers,
American Antiquarian Society.
 CLARA BARTON157

soldier how much she wanted to recover and get back in step with
life but "My regiment has removed and I don't know where to
find it."18 Just before her death, in bed, at the age of ninety, her
thoughts were still on war. She dreamed she was "back in battle."
She compared her own pain to that a soldier bears on the battle-
field and concluded, quite characteristically, "I am ashamed that
I murmur!"19
Publicly, Clara Barton took several steps to involve her sex
more with the military. She supported moves within the Grand Army
of the Republic, the powerful veterans' lobby that emerged after
the Civil War, for a woman's auxiliary to the GAR. In 1888 at the
International Women's Conference in Washington, she volunteered
some of her speaking time to a representative of the Women's Relief
Corps, the newly formed auxiliary to the GAR. It seems likely
Barton saw this organization as an opportunity to expose more
women to civic and charitable responsibilities and to military life.20
Barton also saw the American Red Cross as a vehicle for involving
more women in war work. She took pride in the fact that the na-
tional Red Cross organizations in Europe, which were all-male, had
women's auxiliaries. Her own Red Cross organization was composed
of almost as many women as men at its charter meeting in 1881.
This led her later to fear that some might think it just another
women's organization and to miss its historic significance.
Feminists Susan B. Anthony and Frances Willard understood the
importance of involving women in Red Cross work and consistently
gave Clara Barton support in her years as president of the or-
ganization.21
Privately, Clara Barton wished that women might have more
than military auxiliaries to veterans' organizations. She wanted
women to be able to obtain a military education at a military
academy. In a letter, never before published, which she wrote in
1863 in the midst of the Civil War to a soldier-friend, she explained
her vision:
But after all, I have an idea that the elevation and character, and education of
women has something to do even with the Military world. If it were left to me to

1S Clara Barton to John J. Elwell, published in New York Daily Tribune, Mar. 6,
1873.
19Percy H. Epler, Ufe of Clara Barton (N.Y., 1915), 433.
20See Clara Barton's scrapbooks for 1870-71, Barton Papers, LC, in which she
clipped items on a women's auxiliary and corresponded with veterans about the
naming of such an auxiliary after her. See also Report of the International Council
of Women (Washington, D.C., 1888).
21See author's thesis, chapter three, which describes a rival all-woman's or-
ganization which challenged Barton's Red Cross in 1881-1882 for representation
with the Geneva Red Cross Committee. This women's organization, calling itself
the Women's National Relief Association, hoped to recreate the women's group
that backed the Sanitary Commission in the Civil War.
158civil war history

recommend the process by which a nation should be raised to the highest standard
of Military fame—whose warriors would constitute its chief glory—I should com-
mence by instituting Military Academies for its women—for the daughters who will
one day become the Mothers of its armies—they should be active, and brave, and
strong, and fearless, capable of understanding the plan of a campaign, but women,
ay ladies still—and the soldier boy, the natural son of such a mother would be worth
just one thousand drilled doughheads who had merely, without foundation, been
run through West Point.22
Ironically, even here, Barton, a single woman directly participating
in war, could only justify a military education for women as
mothers who would rear better soldiers. Considering that the
rhetoric of motherhood was popular at the time, perhaps she be-
lieved that she was radically criticizing Victorian society by advo-
cating a military academy even for mothers and not just for single
women with a mission like herself.
The popular image of Clara Barton, held by her contemporaries
and by Americans today, is of a woman who was the American
Florence Nightingale. Because of her work as a nurse in the Civil
War and her role as head of a humanitarian organization that has
aided victims of natural disasters, people view Clara Barton's career
as that of a nurturant female involved in natural and man-made
crises.
On the other hand, it is clear from a close look at her life and
words that she was as much a frustrated would-be soldier, in a
century when women had no opportunity for a career in the mili-
tary, as she was a model of nurturant womanhood. In a very real
sense, her career grew out of her efforts to fashion an alternative to
a strictly military career, which would enable her to participate in
war anyway. In three wars she had to overcome prejudice against
women serving at the front. She earnestly hoped that in future wars,
"There will be women there, and they will not be hindered and
belittled and turned back and thwarted in their purposes. . Z'23
The contrast between Barton's view of herself and the historic
view of her as a gentle humanitarian reformer is partly explicable
when one realizes that she often saved her more militant views for
private correspondence and presented herself to the American public
in a more genteel guise. In a public lecture after the Civil War, she
said: "The war side of war could never have called me to the field,
body and soul, I hated it. Only the desire to soften some of its
hardship, allay some of its miseries for those who must go ever
induced me."24 Those who attended her lectures found they could
accept her as she presented herself when they might have been
22Clara Barton to John J. Elwell, Nov. 14, 1863, Elwell Papers, Western Reserve
Historical Society.
23Clara Barton, Lecture Notes [1868?], Barton Papers, LC.
24Clara Barton, Lecture Notes on the Franco-Prussian War, ibid.
 CLARA BARTON159

more critical if she had been as frank with the public as she was
with her friends and relatives. One reviewer compared her as a
lecturer to outspoken feminists like Lucy Stone and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton. He felt Barton was "a woman who has not laid aside her
womanhood when consenting to speak in public, and whose claims
to favor depend on a record of charitable ministrations in behalf of
the Army of the Republic, appropriate to her sex, and not on a
masculine campaign against abuses if not wholly imagined, greatly
exaggerated."25 [emphasis added]
On one level Clara Barton may have thought of herself as a
soldier but on another she genuinely believed she worked for peace.
She was convinced there was "not a peace society on the face of
the earth today, [1881] nor ever will be, so potent, so effectual
against war as the Red Cross of Geneva."26 She believed civilians,
serving as Red Cross volunteers, would discover that "deck it as you
will, it [war] is agony."27 This would make wars less popular
among the civilian populace. To those who thought peace societies
might be better she responded, "Oh yes, my friend, as much better
as the millennium would be better than this, but it is not here."28
By convincing herself that she worked for peace through the Red
Cross movement, Barton overlooked or ignored ways in which the
Red Cross could facilitate war. Had she herself not once described
Red Cross work as a "milder romance" of war? As an efficient
civilian relief organization, a national Red Cross could ease the burden
on the state by relieving it of some of the costs of caring for its
wounded. Soldiers might prove less reluctant to fight if they knew
they would be well cared for by a Red Cross organization in the
event of capture or being wounded. Civilians might gain a more
direct sense of participation in war through the Red Cross and
might become more supportive of a given war. The earliest and
most outspoken supporter of the International Red Cross movement
in the nineteenth century was militaristic Prussia. And it was the
Grand Duchess Louise of Baden, daughter of Emperor William I,
herself the founder of the modern German Red Cross, who be-
friended Clara Barton in 1870 and served as a model for Barton
within the Red Cross movement in Europe.29 Andrew Carnegie
recognized the ways in which the Red Cross aided war when he
refused to give money to Barton's organization because he felt it
25The Mercuryl?], Jan. 16, 1868, newsclipping in ibid.
26Barton, Red Cross, 71.
27Ibid.
28Ibid.
29See Martin Gumpert, Dunont: Story of the Red Cross (N.Y., 1938) and Henri
Coursier, International Red Cross, trans. M. C. S. Phipps (Geneva, International
Committee, 1961) and author's dissertation, chapter three, for accounts of the origins
of the Red Cross movement in Europe and the United States.
did little to prevent war but merely patched up some of war's
undesirable results by caring for the wounded.30

Clara Barton was a complex person—she was both attracted and

repelled by war. She found it exciting, a challenge, and wanted
women involved in it on grounds of justice and patriotism. She
also genuinely longed for peace and felt that the Red Cross was a
pragmatic way to deal with the inhumanity of war, more pragmatic
than a peace society.
It is undoubtedly true that Barton's reputation as a humanitarian,
as one who personally aided many and whose organization since
has aided millions, is well-deserved. On the other hand, it is equally
true, if less well-known, that she privately wished to see woman
an equal with man in the matter of war. Clara Barton, the "Angel
of the Battlefield," wished to see women step down from their
pedestal and march alongside men in times of war and peace.
In the modern debate over the future of American women in
the armed forces, there is little reason to doubt that Clara Barton
would approve of increased opportunities for her sex in this field,
including education at military academies and a role in combat.
Did she not write, in 1870, "I see no reason why women have not
the same privilege to be shot that they have to be protected, the
same right to danger. . ."31
30See letter from Carnegie's secretary, Jan. 2, 1902, to Mary Logan among the
Logan Family Papers, LC.
31Clara Barton to Griffing, Dec. 22, 1870, Barton Papers, LC.

160