Her protests were gen erally ignored; indeed, as James reported, they “only set Joshua on all the more.”36
Another Hightstown swain, Edgar Ely, put in his appearance soon after Clara's arrival in the town. A lawyer and self-taught scholar, Ely impressed her as “one of the most unpretending men I ever met.”37 He patiently accompanied her as she walked to and from school in her tall rubber boots, took her sleigh riding, and invited her to use his extensive library.38 The Nortons liked to rib Barton about his habit of meeting her in the road and abruptly turning around to walk the other way with her.39 Clara showed some initial enthusiasm for this admirer, but after a short time his attentions barely rated a mention in her diary.
Clara was, in fact, preoccupied with an interest of her own. Noted generally in her diary as “JLE,” he was Joshua Ely, a farmer who lived near Philadelphia. How and when Barton met this young man is unclear, but by the time of her removal to Hightstown they were regular correspondents. The frequency of their letters increased during Barton's stay there, as did the anticipation with which she awaited the mail. She became “rather melancholy” when she received no letters; then her feelings soared when the familiar envelopes arrived. “Alone, quite happy,” she wrote in her diary on March 19, 1852; “J's letter was longer than usual and of course pleased me in proportion to its length.”40 This was, however, to be the last such jubilant notation. By March 31 Clara was expressing surprise that she had not heard “from JLE think must be sick or worse but fear to imagine.”41 When a few days later she still had received no letter, she was so agitated that she could not concentrate on work or conversation. Acutely sensitive to the fact that at thirty she had had no serious love affair, she concluded that “there is no such thing as true friendship, at least not for me.” She evidently determined to find the root of Ely's silence, for a fortnight later, having still received no letter, she visited her friend. The details of their meeting are omitted from Barton's diary, but that it dashed her romantic hopes is evident from her entry of April 20: “Have kept no journal for a month or more had nothing to note as I had done nothing but some things have transpired in the time which are registered where they will never be effaced in my lifetime.”42 No further communication with Joshua Ely is recorded after this date.
During this period of turmoil—exacerbated by news of yet another burning at the Barton Mills in North Oxford and squabbles with the parents of a few of her pupils—Barton's mood was characterized by a heightened depression. Amidst the laughing (and ever-present) Nortons she felt alone and under pressure to maintain a cheery countenance. “I have seldom felt more friendless,” she lamented. “True I laugh and joke but could weep that very moment and be the happier for it.”43 The depth of her despair caused her to lose confidence in herself and the world. Even as she struggled to stop her “useless complaints,” she seriously considered suicide.44 “There is not a living thing but would be just as well off without me,” she wrote on March 11; “I contribute to the happiness of not a single object and often to the unhappiness of many and always my own, for I am never happy.”45 The whole world seemed false and brought her to her “old inquiry again, what is the use of living in it.” “I have grown weary of life,” she concluded, “at an age when other people are enjoying it most.”46
It is tempting to view these musings as Barton's earliest struggle with what was to become a lifelong battle against chronic depression. Her words suggest, however, that this low period in the spring of 1852 was simply part of a continuum; Barton's diary entries are the first daily recording of her depression, not evidence of the first instance of it. It was an “old inquiry,” this questioning of life's purpose. She alluded to a long history of such despair when she confidentially told her nephew that she had “lived over years wishing myself dead.…I could feel no other way at home.”47 Moreover, the problems that faced Barton in Hightstown were much the same as those she encountered in the years before she broke “away from the long shackles” and went to Clinton—they were simply heightened by her unfortunate love affair. She had left her home town, with its unhappy associations of dependence and unrewarding work, only to find herself again a member of a domineering family and submerged in the minutiae of a job that held no challenge. Bound by a society that required far less of an educated spinster than she had to give, Barton was haunted by the horrible spectre of an unchanging and unfulfilled life. Thus, as she again contemplated her future in the thin warmth of the March days, Barton saw little reason to be optimistic. “I know how it will be at length,” she surmised. “I shall take a strange sudden start and be off somewhere and all will wonder at and judge and condemn, but like the past I shall survive it all and go on working at some trifling unsatisfactory thing, and half paid at that.”48
The final term at Barton's school ended on April 20. It had been a most pleasant group of children: “I have never been able to find a blemish in them,” she told her nephew.49 With Charlie's help she completed the repugnant task of billing the students, swept the room, and closed the door for the last time. Barton's feelings at term's end were mixed, for she recognized that the school had filled a distinct need in her. “Would scarce know how to pass my time without it,” she admitted. “Should be very lonely I am sure.”50 Yet she was glad that this obligation was fulfilled and that she was now free to leave Hightstown. A few pleasant excursions with the Nortons, a few days of dressmaking, and she suddenly announced, just as she had foretold, her intention of leaving. She had formulated her plans by herself and preferred to reveal as little as possible to the Nortons. As they accompanied her to the Hightstown depot on May 25, her hosts talked excitedly of activities they would share when she came back. “They thought it a visit, and that I would soon return,” Barton remembered. “I knew that I never would.”51
The train on which she embarked carried her only a short ten miles to the town of Bordentown, New Jersey. Barton herself seems not to have known what drew her to this community. Fifty years later she believed it might have been “historical associations.” The town was, in fact, well endowed in this regard, having served as a home for Francis Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and political theorist Thomas Paine. The town's most famous resident, however, was Joseph Bonaparte, the exiled king of Spain and brother of Napoleon I. The stately villa that had served as his residence had burned to the ground years before Clara Barton arrived, but the stories of his life in Bordentown gave the place a prestige and intrigue that she found seductive. The town had first taken her fancy on a trip she made there in January 1852. She had thought the lack of paint on some buildings gave it a shabby aspect, but its spectacular situation on the Delaware River had filled her with wonder. As headquarters for the Camden-Amboy railroad and the Delaware and Raritan Canal, Bordentown was something of a crossroads of transportation in the 1850s, a thriving community of granite buildings and tobacco factories. Bordentown also had a drawing card in the form of Charlie Norton, who had arrived in late April to teach school. On yet another journey with an uncertain future, it comforted Clara to see a familiar face.52
She did not have an exact goal in mind, and her initial efforts at finding a job in Bordentown proved fruitless. After a few days, Barton traveled the short distance to Trenton, where she spoke with the local school trustee about establishing a public school. Their conversation was lengthy and cordial but inconclusive. She jotted a brief and discouraging memo in her diary—”am just where I was this morning as far as employment is concerned”—but she was forming a challenging idea. The lack of free public schools in New Jersey had disturbed Barton, and she had wondered at the antiquated public opinion that forestalled efforts to alleviate the situation. Why not start a free school, which would serve as a model for other communities in the state? With a renewed sense of purpose she contacted several prominent men in Trenton, who addressed her questions sympathetically but showed no signs of acting on her ideas. One gentleman, a Mr. Cunningham, found Miss Barton herself more appealing than her philanthropic notions, and he spent several days escorting her around the city, holding her attention with promises of influence with the state school board. One afternoon while he was driving her to the local orphan asylum, she caught wind of his less honorable intentions. The next day, angered and depressed over having lost valuable
