encountered the rows of men who spat upon her each morning, she was, in a sense, facing the judgment of contemporary society, which could not quite believe that it was “nice” for a woman to earn her living or strive for occupational fulfillment. It was for these reasons more than personal habits or proclivities that women who were pioneers in government service often gained a tainted reputation, despite the fact that most of them came from respectable middle-class backgrounds and conducted themselves with self-conscious decorum. There was a rumor that the early clerks “painted” themselves and used indelicate language, but few specific examples could be given.
Similarly, Barton's own reputation for lax sexual conduct during this period was probably based more on the boldness of her employment than any real promiscuity. Reports that she arrived in Washington in the company of Samuel Ramsey, her friend from Clinton, and that her talk of free love and unwillingness to live apart from the professor caused her sister to shun her company are thus suspect, as are later stories of a similar nature about Barton and Senator Henry Wilson. Although Clara may well have been an advocate of free love, neither Sally Barton Vassall nor Ramsey lived in Washington at the time of her early Patent Office employment; the latter story, which featured the birth of two illegitimate children with Negroid features, seems equally unlikely. It is doubtful that men of the stature of Alexander DeWitt or Charles Mason would continue to keep company with a woman who this blatantly breached society's rules. Because she enjoyed and sought the company of men and was adept at their amusements and repartee, Barton was always open to criticism of her feminine conduct. (In later life she would diminish it by modest dress, a low, soft voice, and by actively avoiding confrontation.) Given in addition her persistent drive to work and her air of superiority, there was a rich field for those who wished to gossip or who felt threatened by her unwillingness to abide by a smug society's standards. For the rest of her life Barton would be prey to those who could not or would not understand her motives. There were those who would point to her even at the age of seventy-eight with accusations of lax morality or loose living.36
Employee relations at the Patent Office were strained enough, but the work of the office had also reached a fever pitch. An examiner complained that he had to get to the office at 5:00 A.M. to make any headway in his workload. Barton was copying over a thousand pages a month of “dry lawyer writing” into a ledger too heavy for her to lift. “My arm is tired,” she told her sister-in-law, Julia Barton, “and my poor thumb is all calloused holding my pen.”37 She began to feel that the efforts were not worth the rewards of the job. “We are tired as a dog and almost sick,” she complained in half jest to Bernard, “and it wouldn’t much matter if we were turned out to grass.” Whatever pressures emanated from the office were multiplied by Barton's own compulsion to drive herself, inability to relax, and tendency to set unattainable standards. After taking a few days off to visit Jamestown with a friend, she copied at a frightful pace to make up her work.38 Despite intermittent bouts of malaria, she continued on the job, frequently working until late at night. She took a guilty view of her own foibles and rarely indulged herself either materially or mentally. Once when she misplaced a parasol, she would not buy another of good quality, forcing herself instead to carry a cheap one. In a strangely proud confession of this self-denial, she told Julia that “it was the best I have had all summer, and I walked to church under it today, so much to pay for carelessness.”39
She was tired, her fingers were sore, yet she managed to maintain the intense correspondence with friends, former pupils, and relatives that was so important to her. Barton rarely spoke of her troubles in these letters; even brother Stephen had to plead with her not to bottle up her feelings.40 Her sense of humor was particularly keen at this point in her life, and she joked about many of the rougher aspects of Washington life. Complaining in a light vein of the beastly summer weather, she wrote, “I have no idea where the thermometer stands, if indeed it stands at all, it does better than most people can.”41 And she told Julia, with regard to a current scandal that involved the shooting of a Pension Department worker by a jealous fellow employee, “We are at our same old tricks yet here in the capitol [sic], i.e. killing off everybody who doesn’t just happen to suit us or our peculiar humor at the moment.”42 Barton wrote of politics and her view of the South, which, like that of many New Englanders, tended to be one of both fascination and disdain. Southerners peppered their food—and their arguments—too much for her taste. She had a gift for letter writing, an ability to make the most mundane actions seem fresh and interesting. The enthusiasm she had in the small pleasures of her life was infectious, and the demands her correspondents made for letters almost smothered her in an embarrassment of popularity.
Barton was pleased, too, in these days, with the strength of her finances, which allowed her to buy presents for her father and Bernard, save extensively, and even purchase some valuable prairie land in Iowa, perhaps at the instigation of Charles Mason.43 “We are in fact in a state of prosperity,” she told a friend, obviously tickled.44 Free from monetary worries, she could enjoy the company of a fellow boarder, Mr. Harbour, a bricklayer from Iowa whose sense of humor matched her own: “We have laughed since he has been here until we are sore.”45 Even merrier was the first of a number of extended visits of sister Sally and her younger son Irving Vassall to Washington. Clara escorted them to the city's important sites, talking enthusiastically of the local politics and gossip. With the unjaded eye of a sixteen-year-old, Irving surveyed the self-conscious Washington scene and found it wanting. Far from adulating the heroic statesmen of the age, he found their peccadillos a source of amusement. James Buchanan, the newly elected president, had hair “combed so as to stick up exactly straight something in the fashion of an Indian. He tips his head to one side and squints with one eye horribly.” Old General Cass, long a respected member of the Senate, was ridiculed because he did little except frequently move for an adjournment. “He has a funny way of smacking his lips every few moments,” Irving told his grandfather, “so loud that it can be heard distinctly all over the Senate chamber.”46
Irving's Aunt Clara laughed at his irreverence but overall viewed the Washington circus a bit more seriously. She took advantage of every opportunity to watch the proceedings of the Senate and House, whose debates now centered upon the fiery question of slavery. One evening in 1856 she sat spellbound in the Senate gallery while Hubbell s senator Charles Sumner delivered an impassioned speech against expanding slavery into the territories. So vehement were his arguments in this speech, entitled “The Crimes Against Kansas,” that the next day he was struck down and beaten by Congressman Pierce Butler from South Carolina. Dour Charles Sumner with his staid speech and imperious ways was not a man to inspire adulation, but the assault on him caused a flurry of emotion both North and South. This scene, more than anything else she had witnessed in Washington, sobered Barton to the terrible divisions within the country. “I have often said that that night war began!” she told a friend years later. “It began not at Sumter, but at Sumner.”47
She was beginning to realize, too, that her own political star was descending. The men who had sponsored her were, one by one, leaving Washington. Much to her regret, Colonel Alexander DeWitt was not reelected in Clara's home district, and he returned to Hubbell s in March 1857. “I would attempt to tell you something of how sorry I am that the Colonel is going home to return to us no more,” Barton confided to Julia, “but if I wrote all night I should not have half expressed it.”48 Barton herself was out of step with the new Buchanan administration, which advocated unconditional political allegiance as a prerequisite to government jobs. Buchanan, like all presidents, sought to reward his own followers, but he also hoped to avoid the strife and delay caused by factions within the government. Though she could not vote, Barton's liberal views had made her sympathetic to the supporters of Buchanan's rival, the antislavery candidate John C. Fremont, and she realized her position was in jeopardy. When she joked about it at a political levee, a fellow office worker tried to smooth over the incident, saying that she was not responsible for anything she “might say on the present occasion, as the coffee was exceedingly strong.”49 Charles Mason was also worried. On June 27, 1857, he noted in his diary that the secretary of the interior had that day “asked me what I thought of the policy of removals in the patent
