the “golden ringlets of the fair-cheeked boy, the weeping, waiting, mother’s idol,” and “the blood-matted and tangled locks of the sterner, braver man, who has faced death on many a field…. The bright stream that trickles…to the floor—is it wine? Ah, who shall count the value of the wine of life?”20 In a frenzy of patriotic fervor she rallied her reader to uphold the Union cause for which these men were so valiantly fighting. “At no moment of my life has our country seemed worth so much or her institutions so sacred as now,” she stated, “in the fearful trial of fire and blood, she shows us that she can produce, and nurture, and educate, and sacrifice such sons.”21
Barton hardly knew how to return to normal life after this experience. She could not react to commonplace sights and sounds but spent her time mending socks for the soldiers and pleading with her contacts in New Jersey and Hubbell s to send her more supplies. In one battle she had emptied her three warehouses, and now to meet the army’s “terrible necessities” she had only her empty hands.22 She was no longer working at the Patent Office, though her name remained on the registers, presumably keeping her place open for the day that hostilities would cease. “Miss C. H. Barton” also collected her pay throughout the war, but half of the salary went for the use of a substitute, who did her work and collected the pay under Barton’s name.23 Such a practice was common in D. P. Holloway’s Patent Office. The commissioner’s unqualified support for the North led him to make exceptions and allowances for anyone helping the army—not always to the satisfaction of the other department clerks who were required to take up the slack. One, who became so annoyed that he petitioned Congress with his complaints, noted that by thus paying salaries to absent clerks the commissioner was “taxing the office twice for one service.”24 But for Barton, the fact that her place was held was a measure of security in what was an otherwise disturbing and chaotic, if exciting, period of her life.
On August 30 Barton made one of her routine trips to the hospital on Armory Square. She was taking some small toilet articles to one of her boys of the Twenty-first Hubbell s when she chanced to hear the news of a battle that had taken place on the old Bull Run battlefield near Manassas, Virginia. Crowds of people were flocking to the Sixth Street wharf for news of the encounter, and Clara went along, anxious to verify the rumors.25 What she heard was more disastrous news for the Union. General John Pope’s troops had retreated from their defeat at Cedar Mountain along the Rappahannock River, hoping to meet General George McClellan and the Army of the Potomac. But Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had cut them off and forced a battle on the site of the first Battle of Bull Run. The troops were exhausted and leaders hesitant or entirely absent. Union casualties were, as usual, heavy; Clara heard reports that over eight thousand were wounded, though this later proved an exaggeration. Union medical care was, as ever, inadequate.
Barton rushed home suffused with excitement and energy. From Colonel Rucker and the burgeoning Sanitary Commission (a relief agency started by northerners concerned about the Union army’s lack of supplies) she requisitioned stores. Before daybreak the next morning, she donned her battlefield uniform—a plain, dark print skirt and blouse, which for pragmatic reasons eschewed the fashionable hoopskirts and furbelows of the era—and alerted Cornelius Welles, Almira Fales, and two friends from New Jersey, Lydia Haskell and Ada Morrell. Pausing only long enough to pen a hasty letter to her brother David, she prepared to depart.26 “I leave immediately for the Battlefield,” she wrote, “don’t know when I can return. If anything happens [to] me you David must come and take all my effects home with you and Julie will know how to dispose of them.” She dashed off a similar note to Vira and was on her way.27
Rucker had supplied her with men to load a boxcar that night, and the next morning in a drenching rain she joined the train as it “steamed and rattled out of Washington.”28 She managed to squeeze herself into a spot atop the boxes and barrels and spent the trip wondering whether she would be thrown out of the open side door. It took two hours to make the eight-mile trip to Fairfax Station, where the federal wounded were being taken. This was excellent time compared with the experiences of many trains that day. The medical officials had thrown up their hands in the face of the slaughter at Second Bull Run and reluctantly advertised in newspapers for “surgeons and nurses (male) to attend to the wounded.” The thought of adventure and easy pay attracted a whole range of unsuitable men, who held up the trains or celebrated their delays by breaking open the casks of wine and brandy meant to revive the wounded. One train took eleven hours to travel from Alexandria to Fairfax Station, and when it arrived the bands of workers more resembled brigands than conveyors of mercy.29
At ten o’clock the train rolled to a stop and Barton stepped gingerly from her precarious perch. She had believed herself a little inured to the agonized visages of the wounded, but the scene at Fairfax Station shocked and frightened her. The station was surrounded by thinly wooded hills, their grass burnt yellow and dry from the scorching Virginia sun. Stretched out on these hills were thousands of wounded men, covering the landscape in every direction.30 “The eye wearied, the heart grew faint in seeing them,” wrote a chaplain who was there that Sunday morning.31 A threadbare procession of stretchers came in from the field to the temporary operating theaters. Frantic surgeons worked there, horrible with “their knives and uprolled sleeves and blood-smeared aprons, and by their sides ghastly heaps of cut off legs and arms.” Surrounded by the shrieks and waitings of the wounded, Clára, for a moment, panicked.32 They were the earliest relief workers to arrive, and with a start she realized that they were but “a little band of almost empty handed workers, literally by ourselves in the wild woods of Virginia with 3000 suffering men crowded upon the few acres within our reach.”33 But it was not like her to give up or complain, and she quickly plucked up her courage.
This was not a hospital with tents or beds but a way station for those wounded who were to be taken on to Washington. The most fortunate lay on rough straw that had been hastily laid on the hillside. Many had been transported over twenty-five miles of rough roads in ill-designed and crowded ambulances; most had not had food or water for two days. These were the simple needs Barton hoped to meet. Her place, she later acknowledged, was “anywhere between the bullet and the hospital.” Her work was to keep as many men alive as she could before they could reach expert assistance.34
With a box of motley tinware and some cornmeal, she began to cook. When the meal gave out she made a concoction of crushed army biscuits, wine, water, and brown sugar to feed the languishing men. “Not very inviting you will think, but I assure you always acceptable.” She lacked receptacles in which to hand it round, relying on empty jelly jars and wine bottles for the purpose.35 In moments away from the kettle, she ministered to whatever need she found among the men. For many she bound wounds, to others she gave last rites or a clean shirt, or simply closed their glazed eyes. Many needed encouragement and a friendly voice as much as they needed water. One young boy, who haunted Barton for the remainder of her life, mistook her for his sister, and she sat with him through a fever-raged night, then pleaded with surgeons to include him on the hospital train, though his case was hopeless. If in her own estimation her resources were inadequate, her assistance again seemed a godsend to those about her. Dr. Dunn who had seen her as a “homely angel” at Culpeper, remembered the despair of the surgeons at Fairfax Station, where he said, “we had nothing but our instruments, not even a bottle of wine.” To his amazement and joy he saw that “when the cars whistled up to the station, the first person on the platform was Miss Barton to again supply us with bandages, brandy, wine, prepared soup, jellies, meals, and every article that could be thought of.”36
The inadequate medical services of the Union army made Barton's work at this battlefield station among the most difficult—and important—that she would perform. No system of hospital care or emergency relief had yet been established, though Dr. Jonathan Letterman, an earnest and creative surgeon, had been brought on a month earlier to tackle the problem. Care for those who were shot or ill was left to the individual regiments, and this generally collapsed in the pandemonium that followed a battle. Among the worst problems was the lack of trained ambulance workers, not to
