The founder and for twenty-three years president of the American Red Cross began her career as a humble school teacher in about 1840. In 1850 Barton enrolled for a year in the Liberal Institute of Clinton, NY. She moved to Bordentown, New Jersey in 1852 where she opened first "free" or public school and went to Washington as a clerk in the Patent Office in 1854. In 1857, she lost her job in Patent Office when the Democrats won the election, spending 3 aimless years before being called back to the Patent Office in 1860 after the Civil War began.

      After witnessing the battle of Bull Run, she advertised in the Worcester (Mass) Spy for provisions for the wounded. She stored the goods at her own apartment and began distributing goods in 1862 without going through the War Department's Sanitary Commission. Until 1864, her forte would be to provide succor during and immediately after a battle, on the battlefield, not in the field hospitals. At the end of the war, she, too, began working in Army hospitals. Yet, her genius was in procuring and distributing supplies, not in the delivery of the medical care itself for which she is usually remembered.

      In 1865, Barton established an office where she sought to establish information about missing men, informing many families about the plight of their missing loved ones. Using her contacts in the newspaper industry, she published lists of men whose families considered them to be missing then served as a clearinghouse for the responses from comrades and ex-prisoners of war. With the help of a young man who during his imprisonment at Andersonville had been ordered to keep the death roll, she directed the markings of the graves of almost 13,000 men in that notorious Georgia prison.

      From 1866-1868, Barton was on the lecture circuit, describing her wartime experiences. In 1868, overworked, she suffered a breakdown. She went to Switzerland where she learned of the International Committee of the Red Cross which had been formed in Geneva in 1863. In 1864, eleven governments ratified a treaty which declared that wounded soldiers, ambulance drivers, and sanitary personnel of both belligerent and noncombatant countries were neutralized under the emblem of a red cross on a white background. Eventually, in 1877 at the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish war, Barton began a long campaign to create the American Red Cross and to have the American government ratify the Geneva Treaty. Her pleas for an organization to help war-torn areas fell on deaf ears as America was still war weary and isolationist. Modifying her appeal to help the victims of natural disaster, Barton was much more successful. The American Association of the Red Cross was organized in 1881, and the treaty was ratified and signed by President Arthur in 1882.

      Today the Red Cross provides relief to uncounted millions whenever a natural disaster or war occurs. Their personnel and supplies, primarily food, clothing, fresh water, medicine, shelter, and seed, livestock, and agricultural tools to restart family farms, are there whenever a fire, flood, famine, earthquake, hurricane, tornado, or war strikes, saving individual lives and rebuilding devastated communities.

References

      Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul S. Boyer, Notable American Women, A Biographical Dictionary A-F Vol 1, Belknap Press, 1971 pp. 103-107

      Doris Weatherford, American Women's History, An A to Z of People, Organizations, Issues and Events, Prentise Hall, 1994

Return to Women's History Month 2001 Table of Contents

e-mail sunshine@pinn.net