than books, and the chapters opened pleasantly.” Like her pupils in Hightstown, she found Bordentown students lacking in sound educational background but exceptionally well behaved.63
The students, bored with their previous enforced idleness and anxious to make up for lost time, were such eager learners that they surprised even their teacher. “I have two hours intermission…it yet lacks twenty minutes of that time and here they have all set studying as if their lives depended on it,” Barton wrote to Mary Norton soon after the school opened, “for the last 3/4 of an hour, I have invited them to play instead but they don’t want to, I think they are so queer, don’t you?”64 She set them to work learning to do sums, teaching arithmetic as a game—much as her brother Stephen had taught it to her—until they begged her to let them do more. While the fundamental branches of knowledge were honored, she let the advanced students experiment with the studies that interested them most. When she herself read the newly published Uncle Tom's Cabin and found it to be “excellent,” she gave it to the older boys. “My school boys…are reading and crying over it and wishing all sorts of good luck to Uncle Tom and the contrary to his oppressors,” she told a friend.65 As her reputation for academic excellence and discipline grew she found some girls anxious to join the classes. Although she had vowed to take no more pupils into the over-crowded room and each morning found boys crying to get in, she could not turn these girls away. “The large boys met the emergency by smuggling in a little boy beside each,” she noted proudly, “and my timid gentle girls found place.”66
So many pupils, and such crowded quarters taxed even Barton's considerable disciplinary talent. She discovered that it took “the best powers of thought and invention” to control the school. Her solution was to relate the rules of selfgovernment, which her classes in United States history were studying, to the school situation. Consulting the class in the matter, she asked their opinion—and approval—of a code of laws under which each pupil would be responsible for his or her own behavior. Although the students responded favorably to these proposals, the school board became alarmed when the news inevitably reached them. Their confidence in Barton's ability, which had risen so rapidly as the school flourished, sank, and they feared the experiment would end in defeat and mortification. Summoning the entire force of her personality and once again eschewing bombast for the art of persuasion, Barton secured a trial period for her disciplinary system. Promising that she would inform the board if the children became uncontrollable, she returned to the school and laid the case before the pupils themselves. “Now boys,” she said, “you see by this the reputation you bear among the best people of the town—how you are regarded by them…. You must either remain as you are or redeem yourselves.” As she had hoped, her students succeeded in proving the school board wrong.67
Like their counterparts in Charlton, Oxford, and Hightstown, the Bordentown pupils became Barton's devoted admirers. George Ferguson, a member of the group that Barton had encountered on the first day, treasured the memory of this teacher who had recognized and made the boys feel important both inside and outside of the classroom. Writing to Barton more than twenty years later, he gratefully recalled that “you was never ashamed to speak to one of your scholars in school or out it mattered not how our toilets were, ragged or dirty, we always received a kind word and smile of recognition.”68 Another observer also commented on the children's devotion: “I was often with her on little walks about town; and the girls and boys seemed to vie with each other in forestalling any wish of hers. Their affection and chivalry was received so graciously and naturally that it was a pleasure to witness.”69
Before the end of the term the number of children clamoring to get into the school had reached such proportions that Barton wrote to her brother for advice about alleviating the situation. Stephen recommended opening a second school, a project that was endorsed by the school board. In the fall of 1852, an additional classroom, located above a tailor's shop, was outfitted. On Barton's recommendation, the board hired Frances Childs to teach the younger grades. Clara must have carried great weight with the school committee by this time, for she persuaded them to retain Childs—her old friend from North Oxford—over any of the local candidates. The two schools coexisted amicably, but even doubling the size failed to provide enough room for the children who wished to attend. When the citizens finally realized that nearly four hundred children still needed accommodation, they began talking seriously of erecting a larger building.70
It was an unusually rewarding and happy time for Barton. The unqualified success of her school provided her with the dignity and confidence she had felt so lacking in Hightstown. Remembrances of the tangled and pained romances of the previous spring were ebbing slowly away, and she relished outings with Charlie Norton and a visit from Oliver Williams with a renewed detachment.71 If she missed the thrill of passion her letters do not show it. Fanny Childs also brought an enjoyable companionship to her life. Together they shared rooms in a boarding house run by Peter Jacques and his wife. The Jacques were amiable, Maria Jacques was an excellent cook, and the other boarders, who included Peter Suydam, were equally congenial. Indeed Fanny Childs remembered it chiefly as a time of laughter. Suydam, she noted, “frequently commented on the fact that when Clara and I were in our room together, we were always talking and laughing. It was a constant wonder to him. He could not understand how we found so much to laugh at.”72 By now Barton was something of a heroine in the town and, far from being socially ostracized, found herself a coveted guest. Underscoring Clara's pleasure was the great accomplishment she felt in having escaped the untenable situation in Hightstown by fearlessly moving on without friends or certain job to act as a safety net. She had come to trust her self-reliance, and this had renewed her faith in the world. Boldly she told a friend, “I have learned to think I have as good a right to live as any body and I will in spite of them.”73
Throughout the winter term of 1853, Barton and Childs taught while admiration of their work grew. They were pressed to accept salaries of $250 per year and were greatly encouraged by the now almost universal support for free public education in the city.74 With pride the Bordentown school board informed the state superintendent that “during the past year great advances have been made in…the cause of education…. We have an advance in the character of our teachers, an advance in the attendance of children, an advance in system and order within school, and an advance in the public interest felt in schools.”75 Once convinced of the advantages of public schools, the town had no desire to keep the children not accommodated in the two schools on the streets. As a result, at a public meeting the townspeople enthusiastically approved a plan to raise four thousand dollars to build a new public schoolhouse, large enough to house all six hundred school-age children.76
In March 1853, at the height of this triumph, Barton returned home for a visit. Ever mindful of her students, she required them to write to her as an exercise in letter writing; one pupil remembered with a certain amount of awe that she answered all with a personal note. She was not, however, completely preoccupied by her students. It had been eighteen months since she had been home, and she relished the thought of meeting the “kind friends waiting there.” Now, independent and successful, she could come home without apology to anyone. The pleasures of a triumphal visit were cut short, however, by a serious groin infection, which she recalled years later as one of the most uncomfortable illnesses of her life. Recovery was slow, but by late spring she was again in Bordentown supervising the erection of the enlarged school.77
The handsome new school building of plastered brick was a teacher's dream, with new desks, maps, and equipment of every sort. Two stories high, it contained eight classrooms, with the distinct advantages of graded classes. The rooms gave a great deal of privacy, yet enough proximity to promote healthy competition between teachers. The town looked with pride on the rapid completion of Schoolhouse Number 1, and the opening of the school in the fall of 1853 was the “event of the season.”78
Beneath the freshly plastered facade, however, were cracks of discontent and disappointment, especially for Barton. She was distressed to find several religious groups clamoring for state funds for their sectarian schools. Under
