Good morning, it's Tuesday, May 21. On this date in 1881, Clara Barton and a group of like-minded exemplars founded the American Red Cross. As the modifier before "Red Cross" suggests, it was an idea borrowed from abroad and imported to these shores. In a moment, I'll explain how that happened, while also offering a further word on the amazing Ms. Barton.
I have written about Clarissa Harlowe Barton several times since beginning this newsletter over a decade ago, but she's one of those people who is worth revisiting from time to time, as the lessons she taught this country – or tried to teach – are enduring.
She was born on Christmas Day 1821 in the Massachusetts town of North Oxford. The youngest of five children, she was educated mostly by her siblings and was a teacher herself by the age of 17. She pursued a career as an educator, but by the time Abraham Lincoln became president, Clara, as she preferred to be called, was working in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C.
When the Civil War broke out, 39-year-old Clara Barton answered the call without waiting to be asked. Hearing that the recruits of the 6th Massachusetts Infantry had been attacked in Baltimore by Southern sympathizers, she rushed to the (then-unfinished) U.S. Capitol where the soldiers were bivouacked, to see if they needed medical attention or other help.
It turned out Barton knew some of the young soldiers – "my boys," she called them – and had taught some of them back home. Eschewing a salary, she began nursing, cooking, counseling, and caring for the U.S. Army's wounded warriors. It wasn't easy work. "My business," she explained, "is staunching blood and feeding fainting men."
Union soldiers dubbed her the "Angel of the Battlefield," but she was more than that. Possessing an organizational genius and can-do attitude that was the envy of most of Mr. Lincoln's generals, she eventually became the officially designated superintendent of U.S. Army nurses.
Barton's great gift was perceiving a societal need, a talent she complemented with a willingness to fulfill that need herself. In the waning days of the Civil War, for instance, she received Lincoln's blessing to launch a letter-writing campaign to identify and find missing soldiers. It was an effort that lasted until 1868.
Seeking some rest afterward, she traveled to Europe in 1869. Some vacation: While she was in France, the Franco-Prussian War broke out. Wearing the insignia of the International Red Cross, she rushed into breach, distributing relief supplies to the people of Strasbourg. Inspired by the work of the Red Cross, Clara Barton brought the idea back to the United States and slowly built support for it.
President Rutherford B. Hayes, fretting over the question of foreign influence, shied away from a formal U.S. affiliation. Barton found a more receptive audience in Hayes' successor, James A. Garfield, but before he could act, Garfield was cut down by an assassin's bullet. So it was that Clara Barton, nearly 60 years of age, convened a series of meetings of fellow philanthropists in Washington. The first took place on May 12 at the home of Sen. Omar Conger, a Republican from Michigan. Some of the meetings were hosted by Adolphus Solomons, who really should be considered the co-founder of the American Red Cross. Solomons was a prominent Jewish leader in 19th-century Washington who had helped convince Lincoln to add Jewish chaplains to the Union Army and later housed Charles Dickens in his elegant home at 1205 K Street.
Solomons was a natural Dickens ally – he owned a bookshop. But I digress. On this date in 1881, the American Red Cross was officially formed. It was formally recognized the following year in a presidential decree from Chester A. Arthur, and received its first congressional charter in 1900.
Clara Barton retired in 1904, having served as head of the American Red Cross for 23 years. After stepping down, she lived out the remainder of her life in her Maryland home, which is now a small National Historic Site located in the suburban Washington hamlet of Glen Echo. Some of her sentiments still echo in our hearts.
"It has long been said that women don't know anything about war," she once wrote. "I wish men didn't either. They have always known a great deal too much about it for the good of their kind."
Carl M. Cannon is the Washington bureau chief for RealClearPolitics. Reach him on Twitter @CarlCannon.
