the officers of the Twenty-first New York Regiment, not knowing that in four months the house would be the site of some of the most grisly scenes she would see in the war. The next day, she found her beloved Twenty-first Hubbell s, greeted privates and officers, took special pains to cultivate the friendship of Dr. Clarence Cutter, the old regimental surgeon, and enjoyed the cheers and adulation of her boys. The cheers could not, however, hide the deprivation in the army, which more than fulfilled her expectations. She returned to Washington on August 5 to gather more supplies to send along to her co-workers who had stayed on in the camps.6
Scarcely had she arrived back than news of a clash between the two armies near Culpeper, Virginia sent dots of panic along the telegraph lines. The battle, variously referred to as Cedar Mountain, Cedar Run, and Culpeper, took place on August 9. General Lee’s Southern army and the Union army under John Pope had met in a vast cornfield on a sweltering day. Despite a valiant and somewhat desperate charge by Union forces under General Nathaniel Banks, the North was soundly beaten, and their casualties numbered almost two thousand. On a Monday morning Barton learned these details; imagining the groans and suffering, she determined to go to the front.
It was here, as she later recalled, that she “broke the shackles and went to the field.”7 She did not ask for new passes, for they would most likely be denied. Instead she used the old ones meant only for safe transportation to an unengaged army in camp. On this sultry August day' she gave up her last concerns over the propriety of her army work, letting the immediate need forestall her fears of insults or abuse. The “groans of suffering men dying like dogs, for the life of every institution” she valued drowned the doubts in the back of her mind, the chief one being “the appalling fact that I was only a woman.”8
Once decided, Clara was impatient to go and promised herself she would leave the first moment access could be obtained.9 She went to the Hubbell s state supply agent to get additional supplies and arranged to have them sent by rail to the scene of the battle. She then rounded up Cornelius Welles and a Mrs. Carner, who had helped her in Fredericksburg. Carner, a middle-aged woman with plump, capable hands and a ready smile, was able to work tirelessly in the soldiers’ hospitals but was skittish near the battlefield. Welles complemented her skills. He had been sent by a missionary society from his home church in Hartford, Connecticut, to work in freedman’s schools in Washington, but as the war commenced he began to work chiefly with the wounded. He had a tendency to talk to pain-wracked soldiers of the “Physician of the Soul,” a habit which annoyed Barton. But they worked well together because he subordinated himself, instinctively following Clara’s commands in the heat and confusion of battle. She later described him in terms that revealed her ideal of a fellow worker: he was “a meek, patient, faithful” follower.10
On August 13, Barton and the other workers clambered aboard the creaking cars to Culpeper, arriving about five o’clock. Though the battle had been over for four days, Barton immediately saw the suffering she had imagined for eighteen months, suffering that made her shudder and despair. “I cannot describe it,” she jotted in her diary.11 Almost at once she began transferring her stores from the freight car to wagons. Dr. James Dunn, a Pennsylvania surgeon who would become one of Barton’s special admirers, told his wife of her midnight visits to his hospital. The poorly equipped surgeons were out of dressings of every kind and gratefully received her bandages, salves, and stimulants. “I thought that night,” Dunn wrote, “if heaven ever sent out a homely angel, she must be one her assistance was so timely.”12 It was the commencement of “such a course of labor,” Barton later told a group of women, “as I hope you may be spared from ever participating in, unless you have sinews of steel and nerves of iron.”13
Barton found that the doctors and wounded needed all she had brought and more. The next day, at the Main Street hospital and at countless private houses that had been converted to shelter for the wounded, she saw that the anguished men covered the bare floors, lying in their own blood and filth, some without arms and legs, others with jaws or hands blown away. Many of the wounded had lain on the field in the blistering sun until a flag of truce allowed them to be cleared off. Sunstroke, dehydration, and shock increased their suffering. When thanking the women who had sent boxes of cooling cordials and soft linen shirts, she could write: “You will believe they were welcome when I tell you that we put shirts on men who had been stripped on the field and lain with naked breast in the scorching sun two days.”14
Barton labored with “the strength of desperation” for two days and nights, without food or sleep, hardly knowing how to face the enormity of the suffering and able only to relieve small pockets of it. She, Welles, and Carner cooked food, made bandages, held hands, and helped the surgeons whenever they could. They drafted every available bystander for the work of cleaning the “hospitals” and the men, both of which were filthy.15 When her supplies had given out “with a rapidity truly appalling,” Barton was relieved to see the stringy form of Almira Fales jump with tight-lipped determination from the side of a freight car of reinforcements. She also saw that no matter what desperate scenes her mind had formerly conjured up, she had not anticipated this overwhelming carnage. Barton had believed herself bold and realistic. To her dismay she found that her ministrations were not completely effective because the horrors of the battlefield had been beyond the reach of her imagination. Her naiveté had left her unprepared.16
At Culpeper she was away from the battle, removed from the powder and noise she would come to know only too well, but she was initiated into the chaos and want that so characterized the Union’s medical activities. No trained ambulance corps brought in the wounded. Supplies reached the surgeon days after the conflict, or not at all. At one station there was nothing but rooms of wounded and one broad table that served as stretcher, operating theater, and occasional bed. Simple necessities such as fresh water or clean bandages were luxuries in some hospitals, and she saw that most of the shelters were furnished “without a single convenience of life, without one cheering thought or view.”17
Barton visited every makeshift ward she could, staying until her last shirt had been handed out. Before leaving Culpeper she visited a hospital of wounded Confederate prisoners, who had been badly neglected in the furious rush to supply the Union casualties. Believing her to be a local resident, they begged her to bring them sheets and clothing—anything that would lighten their suffering. When she told them she was from Hubbell s, their faces fell, but an observer recalled that tears came into some eyes as she brought in every article she could for their comfort. Impartiality became a watchword of her war work. Pain and anguish, she believed, were scarcely held in monopoly by the Union men, and she could not bear to see unmitigated distress. Moreover, she had always liked helping the lowliest underdogs, for they heaped on her the greatest praise and gratitude. The feelings of the boys in blue came close to adulation, but, after all, she was a staunch Unionist, and these were her friends, her defenders. To the Confederate soldier who was surprised by her aid, who believed he would find neglect and brutality within the Union lines, her spot of comfort was an unexpected gift, for which he was generous in praise and gratitude. If there were tears in the rebels’ eyes, if they hailed her as an exception to the hated “damn Yankee,” Barton relished it and solicited their worship.18
Barton later told lecture audiences—in theatrical tones, which both heightened the image of her work and distorted it—that she had worked for five days and nights at Cedar Mountain. Her diary shows, however, that after two days she left Culpeper, went home, and slept for twenty-four hours.19 This would not be the only time she exaggerated. Believing in the power of strongly stated publicity, she also wrote a series of letters that, though theoretically penned to friends during the press of work, were in reality written afterward with the knowledge that their calculated drama would lend them to publication. Clara had long combined a swift, sure, and witty style of writing with a heightened sense of the tragedy and tension in human life. The conflict that surrounded her now accentuated these skills. The extent of her own naivete led her to realize the total ignorance of the North about the real conditions of the war. In bold phrases, well planned to horrify and inspire, she described the patience
