their prejudices and immature.17 One roommate noted “some peculiarities,” such as her habit of eating only two meals a day, but charitably announced that none of her oddities were “bad ones.”18 Barton was also self-conscious about her clothes. With characteristic thrift she had had two dresses cut from one length of material in her favorite shade of green. Though the garments had different trimmings, the other girls thought it odd that she should wear such similar clothes day after day and attached a mysterious significance to the color. Fortunately, among the 150 pupils at the institute she did find several kindred spirits. Barton long remembered “Gentle Clara Hurd” affectionately, but Abby Barker, from Connecticut, and Mary Norton, a Quaker from Hightstown, New Jersey, became her closest chums. These girls, whose jokes and secrets she shared, were to remain lifelong friends and supporters.19
“When at school, her photograph, would have shown you a rather thick-set girl, with head bent a little forward, looking up with small black eyes, through heavy, low eyebrows,” wrote a classmate. Despite this unflattering description, Barton seems to have attracted the attention of a number of men while at Clinton. Indeed, the same writer went on to admit that she “was much admired.”20 One of her most ardent beaus was Charles Norton, her friend Mary's brother, who also attended the institute. He was a genial and intelligent fellow who appreciated Barton's sense of humor, but he was ten years younger than Clara, and she found it difficult to take him seriously. “While she esteemed him as friend,” wrote an acquaintance, “I don’t think she regarded him as a lover.”21 Another person who was intrigued by this dark, serious girl was Samuel Ramsey, a professor of mathematics at Hamilton College. He admired her fine horsemanship, and their long afternoons riding together aroused much speculation among the young women of the institute. Here, too, Clara seems to have drawn the line at friendship. Nonetheless, Ramsey, like Charles Norton, remained a devoted and lifelong friend to Clara Barton, and rumors about a possible romance between the two were whispered until well after the Civil War.22
Other references to men crop up in Barton's writings at this time, but they are generally cryptic, identifying these friends only by their initials. Years later she was to share with Abby Barker happy memories of exchanging secrets about gentlemen friends. The two of them, she recalled, would stand giggling and talking at the top of the stairs before the gas was turned out at ten o’clock. “I have a letter in the pocket of this green dress,” Barton wrote, conjuring up the scene,
you may take it to your room, and tell me tomorrow night, as we stand here gain, what you think of it…. And while Louise Clap is fandangling around, and Sarah Stoddard is putting up the stray locks that won’t stay in place…Abby Barker and the strange girl in the green gown will exchange views over the letter and say how it seems to us, and you can give it back to me, & tell me how you would answer it if you were in my place, & must do it.23
These good friends helped to break the intensity with which Clara pursued her work. Driven by her “habit of study,” she put in long hours at her desk and left an impressive record of scholarship at Clinton. Yet the discipline to study did not always come easily. “It is hard work to sit and study all day,” she commiserated with a nephew who was complaining of school. But she rationalized the effort on the grounds of “future benefit,” not “present happiness,” and so admonished him: “let us bear it cheerfully.” So dogged was she that even her vacations were spent in study. Concerned that Barton would overtax herself and thus lose all she had worked so hard to gain, Louise Barker encouraged her to ride in the countryside and even resorted to employing Samuel Ramsey to lure her out of the library.24
It was an effective technique. Barton still relished outdoor exercise and enjoyed displaying her considerable equestrian skills. When a gentleman alighted from his horse she could, to the amazement of the other girls, “spring upon his horse and ride, to the astonishment of all, without change of saddle.”25 She liked to explore the countryside, so very different from that of Hubbell s. Dashing across the broad, level acres, Barton wondered at the immensity of these western farms and sensed her own provinciality when she realized how narrow her expectations of even the physical world had been. Everything in New York, she told a favorite nephew, was on a larger scale than she had come to expect in Hubbell s. “What we are accustomed to call rivers become brooks and creeks in New York and what we call ponds they don’t think worth calling at all, but what they call lakes we cannot call for we have nothing like them.” She was intrigued, too, by the Erie Canal, with its long, flat boats, the chant of the boatmen, and its strings of mules.26 As much as her studies broadened her intellectual world, so did this close examination of a different landscape broaden her outlook. She never again faced a journey to unknown parts with trepidation. Rather, she welcomed travel with its new vistas, its risk, and its element of surprise.
The kindness of Louise Barker, the close friendship of a few girls, and admiring glances of several young men eased Barton's stay in Clinton, but overall the year was a difficult one for her. She felt divorced from her family, on whom she had always relied for support, and longed, as she told a cousin, to “be situated near each other again so as to enable us to speak our thoughts and feelings to each other.”27 She never completely relinquished the feeling that she did not quite belong with the younger students, but she masked it by a show of aloofness. Rather than attempt to be a part of the student community, she simply withdrew and followed her own inclinations in study, dress, and recreation. When a classmate fell sick she volunteered to nurse her and responsibly accompanied the girl home, much to the admiration of the younger girls.28 But her classmates felt more awe than fellowship with her. As one recalled, “she was treated with…deference by her associates who always seemed to concede to her the right of doing just as she pleased.”29
Barton also faced financial difficulties during the year. It was with a start that she realized that her carefully saved earnings were barely going to keep her through the three terms of school. Barton therefore eschewed many of the frivolities of the more affluent students, spending increasing amounts of her leisure time in study. Monetary considerations also prevented her from leaving Clinton during the school holidays in spring and summer, and she spent this time alone in a hotel in town.30 Despite her economies, however, her worst fears materialized: before the final term had ended she was out of funds. Barton did not write to her immediate family—perhaps for reasons of pride—but instead called upon her old childhood playmate, Jerry Learned. He bailed her out, saw to it that she was comfortably situated for the remainder of the year, and paid her expenses home.31
Clara's reluctance to mingle too much with other students may also have been heightened by shocking news she received in May 1851. Her brother Stephen, whom she had always revered and even emulated, was indicted on charges of bank robbery in Otsego County, New York. The Learneds, who had been under surveillance for some time for less than honest business practices, were also implicated. An article in the Boston Courier stated that “the people of Oxford did not believe Barton had any connection” with the robbery, but a credit agent found that this was not really the case. Many Oxford citizens had long been suspicious of the ways in which the Barton brothers had found the funds to acquire such extensive real estate. Stephen Barton's immediate problem became the loss of faith by his creditors, who began calling in his debts. “His Cr has received a shock difficult to get over,” wrote an agent of R. G. Dun and Company, “his large R[eal] E[state] is under allocat[ion], & will not be enough in all prob. to pay his Cr's.” Not only was his financial position in peril, but his reputation of town leader, cherished for so long, was now irrevocably tarnished. As one observer wrote, “it will be extremely difficult for him to remove the unfavorable impression.”32
Stephen Barton was not convicted of the robbery, though many circumstances connected him with it. Clara has left no impression of the event or of the grief it must have caused her to learn of it. Otsego County was a jurisdiction bordering on the county in which she was attending school, and her brother may have been in the vicinity in connection with a visit to her. Clara appears never to have
