by the overwork and disappointment she had met in Bordentown. She and Fanny Childs took rooms near the Capitol in one of the city's innumerable boarding houses. While her friend looked for a new school in which to teach, Barton settled in to the “dim quiet of the alcoves” and arranged an ambitious course of reading for herself. Still eager to make up for her “lost 10 years” of teaching, she sped through books until, even as her throat grew better, her eyes suffered from the strain. “I enjoyed my quiet, almost friendless and unknown life,” Barton wrote.3 Her belief that she had done the right thing in escaping the situation in Bordentown was reinforced when the news reached her from New Jersey that the town had lost faith in the schools and had dismissed the principal and several teachers. “We have…all come to the conclusion that you took a prudent course with the Bordentown school and left it at just the right time,” wrote Stephen in May 1854. “I think it will be a long time before they can have a peaceable publick school and they had better have none than to have any other.”4
Barton's life was “almost friendless,” but not completely so. Among her first acquaintances in Washington was Alexander DeWitt, congressman from her home district. A tall, congenial man and a distant cousin, he made it his business to offer Clara hospitality and to act as an influential “sympathizer and benefactor.”5 Through DeWitt, Barton met another early friend and patron: Charles Mason, the commissioner of patents. Calm, self-effacing, and with an imposing intellectual curiosity, Mason proved to be a stimulating companion. Moreover, he shared many of Barton's views about public-spirited philanthropy and impressed her with his earnest efforts to conduct Patent Office business in an atmosphere of scrupulous fairness. For his part, Mason found Barton to be an excellent conversationalist and an astute political observer.6
Impressed with Barton's motivation and credentials, Mason asked her to become governess to his twelve-year-old daughter, Mary.7 Before the arrangements could be settled, however, DeWitt used his influence to persuade Mason that she would be much more suited to work as a clerk in the Patent Office. To her surprise she was requested to attend a formal interview, and the commissioner went so far as to send his private carriage to pick her up.8 At the interview Mason offered her a job as a clerk, copying patent applications, caveats, and regulations at the very respectable salary of fourteen hundred dollars a year. By July 1854, she had put her reading aside and had taken on the new role of office worker.9
Barton had a naturally inquisitive mind, and the Patent Office must have seemed an especially stimulating atmosphere. Her working life had been dominated before by children, among whom she had neither peers nor competition. Now she was challenged and amused by a whole office of fellow workers. Moreover, the work of the office encompassed an enticing range of pursuits—not only the regulation and granting of patents but many types of scientific research and acquistion. Although the office was under the auspices of the Department of the Interior, it carried out many of the functions of the later Department of Agriculture, Smithsonian Institution, and Weather Bureau. It sponsored scientific expeditions around the world and had amassed a large collection of specimens, many relating to the natural history of North America and the background and inventiveness of its people. Charles Mason believed these articles were too valuable and too interesting to sit in the cellar in which he had discovered them. After he cajoled Congress into appropriating money to construct a large addition to the already imposing Greek Revival building, the Patent Office took on some aspects of a museum. A march up the high steps and along its arched and marbelized corridors became a necessary stop for visitors to the capital. “It contains many of the rarest curiosities in the United States,” Clara wrote enthusiastically to a former pupil, including “Jackson's dress worn at the battle of New Orleans, and scores of relics too numerous to mention.” Like other branches of the government, the Patent Office had its spindles of red tape, petty spoils, and wasteful paper shuffle, but with its emphasis on innovation, it kept its reputation as one of the more dynamic places to work in Washington.10
The office employed lawyers, patent examiners, and clerks, whose number was strictly regulated by law. The commissioner had the option of hiring temporary clerks when the rush of business required it, however. Mason had chosen to use a very liberal interpretation of the patent laws, for he believed that promotion of technological progress was the most effective way of developing the country. The results of his policy showed themselves in simpler procedures and more open competition for the securing of patents—and a consequent flood of applications. The commissioner was therefore forced to be equally liberal in the number of temporary clerks he hired. It was as one of these impermanent workers that Barton was first employed.11
Barton's position, though insecure, was nonetheless an unusual one for a woman. The government had very few women in its employ in 1854, and those who were hired were chiefly the widows or daughters of former employees, who kept the job in the deceased man's name. Few officials felt comfortable with the presence of women in the offices, but no firm policy had been established. Barton knew of only four other female clerks in Washington at the time of her appointment, though a year later there were at least that number working in the Patent Office alone. Her position was all the more unusual in that she was receiving a salary equal to that of the office's male clerks. Even in this favor-oriented metropolis, her job was precarious, and Mason took care to keep the situation unadvertised. During the six years she was in government service, not once was she included in the official roll sent annually to Congress.12
From nine o’clock in the morning until three in the afternoon, Barton labored with the other clerks. Her exquisitely formed and highly legible handwriting made her valuable to the office, as did her trustworthiness in confidential matters. In these first months of her employment she relished the novelty and responsibility of her position. “My situation is delightfully pleasant,” she wrote in October 1854. “There is nothing in the world connected with it to trouble me and not a single disagreeable thing to do, and no one to complain of me.”13 Her status and pay were far beyond any she had known as a schoolteacher. Following on the heels of her inequitable treatment by the Bordentown school board, the compensations of this job must have been especially gratifying.
She was easing, too, into Washington society, enjoying its personalities and eccentric social life. After walking in the golden autumn weather she wrote to her friends of the quiet confidence she felt.14 She took every opportunity to visit the Senate debates, where, from the gallery of the new red and gold Senate chamber, she came to know the faces and style of the era's great politicians: Sam Houston, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and Charles Sumner were among those who particularly impressed her. She was surprised, like other young clerks, to find herself invited to numerous parties, and her early friendless condition rapidly changed. “I should be happy to see your nice collection of choise [sic] friends,” her brother told her, adding, “I think I can conceive the value you set on them for you and I value friends about alike.”15
Barton was boarding now with Joseph Fales, a fellow Patent Office worker, and his thin, jolly wife, Almira. Their companionship was light-hearted and added laughter to the satisfaction of hard work. Almira, whose exuberance especially impressed Clara, was a tall, plainly dressed woman with, as one friend noted, “few of the fashionable and stereotyped graces of manner.” She was a storyteller, a devotee of the jovial manner, gangly, abrupt, and disconcerting. Almira Fales believed strongly in the necessities of charity and pursued her private projects with a drive that matched Barton's own. Her enthusiasm and passionate devotion to her northern background would cause her to wholeheartedly embrace relief work during the Civil War—work that was to have a direct effect on Barton's own role in that conflict. But in 1854 Almira was for the most part simply an amusing personality in Barton's gallery of friends and acquaintances, providing a nice contrast to the more sophisticated and serious society of Alexander DeWitt and the Masons.16
Clara worked in this contented and ambitious spirit for nearly a year. Then, to her dismay, her “valuable ally,” Commissioner Mason, decided to resign his position and return to his home in Iowa. A difference of opinion with the secretary of the interior over internal administrative affairs was the immediate
