by upholding him in her mind and continuing to rely on him as her principal advisor. During the long years of her fame, when biographers were anxious for any detail of her family life, she effectively shielded this and other questionable activities from the public view. The extent to which this outward loyalty was inwardly felt is difficult to tell. Surely her brother's indictment and trial shook the very roots of her admiration for the energy and honor of her family. It probably contributed to her shy and aloof manner, for in attracting attention to herself, she might possibly attract attention to her brother's troubles.
Clara had barely recovered from this tragedy when she received more news of family sorrows. In early July she opened a letter from her brother that began: “Our excelent [sic] mother is no more. She died this afternoon at a quarter after five o’clock her last end was without a struggle and apparently easy.”33 Clara knew that Sarah Barton had been ill for several months and that she had not expected to live much longer, but like the indictment of her brother, this death flung her away from the anchors of the past, pressing her to rely more on herself. Helplessness overwhelmed her. She could not even attend the funeral, for her mother had already been buried in the new cemetery in Oxford by the time the news reached her. She locked herself in for nearly a week in order to be alone with her grief, telling no one of her sorrow.34 Her brother, sensing her isolation, tried to comfort her as best he could. “Dear Clara how much I think of you and what your feelings must be when this sad news reaches you,” he wrote. “I think of you as far away from connections and acquaintances in a strange country and among strangers and none to comfort and sympathize with you in this stroke of affliction. Yet I trust and hope that you will bear it meekly and with fortitude.”35 At last Louise Barker, hearing of the loss, sent for her; by pulling her out of her deep introspection she helped Clara to make the first small steps toward overcoming her loss.36
At the end of her term at the Clinton Liberal Institute, Barton had accomplished her goal of increasing her academic expertise, yet she had no idea how to shape a career or what direction her life should now take. Teaching, factory work, and domestic service were the only respectable choices widely available to women. Of these, teaching was by far the most prestigious. But to return to Oxford, to the same round of one-room schools and unruly boys, to the thorough familiarity of countryside and citizens, seemed a backward step, lacking in either challenge or productivity. Determined that she should not dry up in the static atmosphere of Oxford schools, Barton elected to avoid her old home town altogether while she debated her future. She boarded a train for New England Village, a neighboring community and the home of her adventurous cousin Jerry Learned.37
four
Clara's visit to the Learneds lasted only a few months. In the hazy days of late summer 1851 she returned to her family at North Oxford, still without plans and in a depressed state of mind. Despite her fine scholarship in Clinton, she had been forced to leave before completing the entire course, and for the remainder of her life she considered her education lacking. Though others would view her as learned and erudite, Barton felt that her formal instruction had been rather haphazardly won. She would fill every little gap between jobs or while ill with study. When well into her eighties she embarked on the study of Thucydides and Xenophon because she felt “ignorant” without the benefit of their insight.
Barton's arrival at her home was unceremonious, and she experienced a distressing feeling of never having left. The hills and wooded streams surrounding North Oxford looked pleasantly familiar, but nothing compelled her to stay in the town. She had left because she saw that her talents were under-used and her time wasted there. If she stayed now, her bold escape to Clinton would be meaningless, and she could look forward to little beyond simple teaching and family association.1
Back once more in the scenes of her childhood and the ten years of teaching, which she later wrote “always haunted me as lost,” Barton felt again the old agonies of uselessness and dependence.2 Her brothers were busily rebuilding their mills; the school she founded for the laborers was thriving without her assistance; sister Sally was thoroughly preoccupied with raising her two sons. Her mother's recent death had broken up the household, and Clara wrote sadly that she felt she was returning to a “home that was still a home, and yet not all a home.”3 Barton wished her father would remarry and keep the old farm going.4 Realizing, however, that he was over seventy, “still hale” but comfortably established at brother David's house, she knew there was little she could do to further influence or help him.5 Gradually she reached the uncomfortable conclusion that everything was thriving without her and that to remain in North Oxford would be to eat again the bread of dependence. “I know too well how bitter it is,” Barton lamented.6 Forty years later she could still recall the discomfort of that time and summed up her reasons for leaving in a single forceful phrase: “I was not needed.”7
Throughout August and the lingering brightness of Indian summer she pondered her future. Distracted and more self-contained than ever, she spent the time riding horseback. One fellow townsman later recalled how “stately and noble” she appeared to him at this time. Preoccupation with her immediate plans probably kept Barton from noticing that it shocked several people when she chose not to dress in mourning for her mother. (It startled them further to hear her declare that she did not grieve and that it would thus be insincere for her to wear the traditional black.8) She made some effort to socialize by enjoying the opportunity to renew acquaintances with Elvira Stone, Annie and Frances Childs, and her nephew Bernard Vassall. But behind her ready humor and easy conversation was a nagging doubt about the future. “I could feel no other way at home,” Barton wrote a few months later, admitting that she was preoccupied with plans to get away. She knew that she must leave; deciding how to go was the only rub. “I had no where to go no one to go [to] nothing to go with and no way of earning my living if I did go anywhere, at least I had no employment or situation in view.”9
In this frame of mind Barton was eager to seize an opportunity that presented itself in the early fall. Charles and Mary Norton had remained favorites among her acquaintances at the Clinton Liberal Institute. Anxious to retain the friendship, they wrote to Clara, asking her to visit them in Hightstown, New Jersey. Mary was a mature and deeply religious girl of sixteen; in Clinton she had looked to her friend Clara for guidance and viewed her with a young girl's idolizing eyes. Both Clara and Mary had enjoyed the relationship and had used the mentor and protege roles to help bridge their fourteen-year age gap. And of course there was Charlie, now a handsome and ebullient twenty-one-year-old, with whom she felt a strong intellectual tie. When her friends’ parents wrote to underscore the invitation, Barton accepted readily. In mid-October she set off, with no knowledge of the future but grateful to escape the stifling atmosphere of home.10
Traveling by train and steamer, Barton arrived in Hightstown, where she was met by “the familiar contours of my old friend Charlie Norton.”11 He drove her through the village—a simple community consisting of a railroad depot, general store, and post office, and Universalist and Baptist churches—to the Nortons’ farm three miles away. It was a prosperous place, containing 178 acres of level, fertile land on which the Nortons grew wheat, corn, and fruits, and raised sheep, cattle, and dairy cows. The mixed farming, aiming as it did at self-sufficiency, must have pleased Clara, reminding her of the similar farms on which she had grown up.12 The house too was inviting. She would remember it as “a commodious country house,” with a sitting room geared to family activities. Books and papers covered a center table, a piano stood in the corner, and a settee and potted plants gave a cozy and comfortable air to the room.13
She soon found that the Nortons were “the XYZ in Hightstown,” dominating local activities and commanding unparalleled respect.14 Richard Norton, the family patriarch, had been raised a Quaker but converted to Universalism as a young man, much as Barton's own father had. Once convinced of the truth of Universalist doctrines, Richard Norton enthusiastically espoused them to his neighbors and relatives. His own position in the community had been consolidated by locally prestigious family connections. His wife, who was
