she appeared to Clara to be “slight, active, orderly, busy” and to possess “nervous hands and, clear blue eyes full of capacity and care.” The family further consisted of the Nortons’ six children, four of whom still lived at home. Besides Mary—the youngest and the only girl—and Charlie, there were James and Joshua, who were in their late twenties when Barton arrived. A housekeeper, Margaret Haskins, completed the household.15
The Nortons embraced Clara wholeheartedly, and her early days in New Jersey were filled with pleasure in the company of this merry group. “A sterling family it is,” she told her nephew, “good as gold and true as the sun, every one of them.”16 They included her in church activities and weddings, barn raisings and nut-gathering expeditions. She especially enjoyed Charlie's company. Together they explored neighboring towns or sat in the Nortons’ drawing room writing letters on a shared lap desk.17 The evenings of teasing and piano music, of the boys’ antics as they “telegraphed” secret messages to her through the wall, gave her a strong sense of fellowship, which the Nortons shared.18 “I have learned a Quaker welcome and a warm hearty one it is too,” she reported.19 When, after two weeks, she talked of returning to Hubbell s, the family refused to listen.
The Nortons sensed, however, that Barton could not long remain comfortable without an occupation. Soon after her arrival, Richard Norton asked her if she thought she would be able to teach school. She had chosen not to reveal her past history in Clinton and had kept the policy—”it is my way you know”—in Hightstown.20 Thus it was with skepticism that Norton approached her, and with hesitancy that she replied. The position that was offered was at the nearby Cedarville School, renowned for its rough gang of boys, who were especially fearsome during the winter term. The troubles outlined to her at the school must have seemed an old familiar story by now, but she told the Nortons only that she would try, if they would send Mary along to help her.21
“Commenced school,” Clara noted in her diary on October 23, 1851. Her practiced eye must have noticed, with mingled pleasure and frustration, the similarities between this country school and those over which she had presided for the past ten years. The building itself was woefully like the ramshackle structures she had fought to improve in North Oxford, and the expressions that showed on the faces of her pupils were also familiar. She read expectation and timidity on the countenances of the younger children, but among the older boys the looks were challenging and defiant.22
Clara Barton was in her element in these simple surroundings. She let Mary introduce the children to her one by one, and when she came to one large boy, Hart Bodine, she startled him by stating that she knew him to have “the reputation of a great rogue in school” but expected him to behave now. She further abashed the boy by asking him to help her remove the switches that had been used by the previous teacher. “When she had him carry them all outdoors and break them into small bits,” the boy's mother recalled, “and tenderly took him by the hand, assuring him she would never need them, for he was one of her big boys and she could depend on him to help keep order in the school, he was simply overwhelmed.” Barton saw that the students had come to expect chastisement and received it almost as recreation. When she told them there would be no punishment, the game was over.23
She also won over her pupils by her “entire want of all formality” and her habit of “taking the pupils into her confidence.”24 One student noted that she rarely sat at her desk, preferring to walk among the children or to stand at the stove “with one foot crossed in somewhat masculine fashion and resting on the hearth.”25 At recess she played ball with the boys or talked with them of philosophy. “Button” was the favorite game on nasty days, and she sometimes joined in the fun. “Then they are so overwhelmed they can find no means of expressing this gratitude but by giving me the button every time they go ‘round,” she told Bernard.26 By setting herself with the pupils instead of against them, and by establishing clear standards at the outset, she kept discipline by simply expecting them to conform to her behavioral norms. By the end of November, her reputation was so well established that she had eight or ten pupils from other districts in the school and at one time crowded sixty pupils under the leaky roof.27 “To all who remember Clara Barton as a teacher at Cedarville,” wrote one Hightstown resident, “her success is still a tale of wonder.”28
At the time Barton wrote that it was “the most pleasant school thus far that I ever had.”29 Nevertheless, there were elements of the job that disturbed her. The children had been poorly trained academically; they had been exposed only to spelling and simple arithmetic, a shocking state of affairs for pupils in their teens. The students were anxious to learn, however, and Barton instituted classes in geography, American history, and natural philosophy. More bothersome to Barton was her discovery that the school was not free. Each student paid two dollars per term for basic studies and an additional dollar for higher branches of learning. The proceeds went to the teacher and constituted her pay. Imbued with the long and sacred traditions of free public education in Hubbell s, Barton found it a difficult situation to accept. She acknowledged that teaching here was more profitable than in New England, but it dismayed her to bill the students at term's end, and she relieved herself of this burden by soliciting the aid of Mary and Charles during the accounting process. “I had kept time for grown men,” Clara remarked, “but never for little children.”30 Although she quietly sought aid from the state, she received only $19.10 for the term, barely enough to keep the schoolhouse repaired.31 After considering starting a campaign to rid the area of subscription schools, Clara decided against it. “I was in a different social atmosphere, and realizing in a way the value of discretion, I kept my reflections to myself.”32
Barton's school was going well, but troubles appeared in other areas of her life. Chief among these was the lack of privacy she felt in the Norton household. What had begun as a pleasant feeling of inclusion in the family's activities had become a social burden. By January 1852 she had grown tired of the entertainments, which consisted “chiefly in the attempt to have as many kinds of cake as possible on one's table.”33 Used to interspersing companionship with solitude, Clara found tedious the expectation that even letter writing would take place in the family drawing room amidst the distractions of piano playing and conversation. Worse yet, her presence was required on every family outing. The situation became absurd one Sunday morning when Barton decided not to accompany the Nortons to church. “I…thought that need make no difference with the rest of them,” she wrote in exasperation to Bernard Vassall, “but not an inch would one of them go…. I offered to go when I see [sic] the effect I was producing but they would not allow it on any consideration.”34 To avoid the confusion, she resorted to writing her diary and correspondence in the schoolroom while her pupils studied, and privately sought a way to remedy the problem. Spring found Barton still complaining to her diary of her inability to determine her own activities, however. She had just begun writing a letter to her brother when “a wild set of company came from church and everything must be laid aside—pass a foolish and unsatisfactory day with which I am morally sure no one could have been much pleased.”35
At this time, too, a set of romantic entanglements left her confused and alternately exhilarated or depressed. It was a period when Clara indulged in flirtation and several young men seriously courted her. Charlie Norton was still among the suitors, and she was as attracted to his fine intellect, genial nature, and good looks as ever. Together they visited Trenton and Philadelphia, went sleigh riding, and roamed the woods. When he returned to Clinton she missed him and anxiously awaited his arrival home. But Charlie was her junior by nearly a decade. Whether he knew of the age difference or not—for, as she wrote, the good citizens of Hightstown had no idea of her past, and she might “have been taken for any age from 15 to 25”—there was a difference in experience that gave a certain adulation to his view of her. Barton found this flattering, but, as with Oliver Williams and others she would relate to in this way, it fostered on her part a sense of superiority that precluded a response to Charlie's affectionate gestures. The situation was further complicated by the flirtation of Charlie's brothers,
