full of business: calm, methodical, and cheerful.”51
Thin fingers of light were creeping over the eastern sky a few mornings later when an army messenger slipped a paper into her hand. “Harper’s [sic] Ferry—not a moment to be lost” it ran. She read it, then burned it in front of the courier, who told her when her wagons and supplies would be ready. The army that had been so reluctant to accept her services now offered her supplies and the best mules and teamsters, as well as privileged information about anticipated battles.52 Robert E. Lee’s self-assured men had headed toward Maryland in the belief that an invasion of the North would both inflict psychological damage on the already shaken Union and provide new fields to plunder. The Union army followed lamely, unable to prevent wily Stonewall Jackson from capturing the strategic mountain town of Harpers Ferry and taking thirteen thousand prisoners on September 12, and two days later handing them defeat at South Mountain some miles distant.
Only the faithful “Cornie” accompanied Barton, for she no longer felt the need of a female companion to protect her against the barbs of society’s judgment. Although she would later laud the role of women in the Civil War and claim their bravery and competence for a victory over the doubts and superstitions of men, in actuality she scorned the women who surrounded her. She could feel nothing but contempt for the well-meaning ladies who
When the charge is rammed home and the fire belches hot…
never will wait for the answering shot.53
Even Almira Fales had hurried off at the first sign of danger, and though she only “went for stores,” Barton could not forgive her: “I know I should never leave a wounded man there if I knew it, though I were taken prisoner forty times.”54 Women helpers caused Clara more hindrance than help when they were shaken or tired; moreover, they vied with her for recognition and the honor of equaling the men in nobility and courage. She came to agree with Colonel Rucker and the other officers who had tried to keep her from the front for these very reasons. Never again was she accompanied at the battlefield by a woman.55
Barton would test her strength again at the fields of South Mountain. At first her wagons passed the straggling blue-clad soldiers, and she revived them as best she could by passing out chunks of bread from a supply she replenished at each town. Then debris and grotesque forms began to appear along the road. The fighting was barely over when she finally arrived at the battlefield. Almost more dreadful than she could contemplate, the sight merited the only description she would write of a field of war. It was “all blood and carnage,” she wrote with revulsion, “our wagon wheels within six feet of yet unburied dead. A mingled mass of stiffened, blackened men, horses, muskets, bayonets, knapsacks, haversacks, blankets, coats, canteens, broken wheels, and cannon balls which had done this deadly work—the very earth plowed with shot.…It was a fearful way to learn of a battle, a hard page to read.”56 She and Welles, “shocked and sick at heart,” climbed over the hills and ledges to find the last wounded man and see that he got medical attention, then trod through the field to answer screams and whimpers. The last she saw of “that field of death” was the lingering haze of smoke and a “hideous pile of mangled and dismembered bodies.”57
She joined the army then. Her four wagons became part of the ten-mile train, which crawled through Maryland’s western valleys. The golden, peaceful country was beautiful, but Barton knew, as did the dispirited ranks surrounding her, that the incidents at Harpers Ferry and South Mountain amounted to little more than a dress rehearsal for an imminent and terrible clash. Barton was more frustrated than demoralized at this point, however. Her carts and stores, which she believed should be ready the instant there was need, stood at the back of the creeping train, hours, even days, away from the troops destined for battle. The officers and drivers ahead of her refused to let her pass. They would “no more change position than one of the planets,” she remarked.58 Feeling a “terrible sense of oppression” as the armies approached the little community of Sharpsburg, Maryland, she devised a plan to travel all night through the caravan of wagons, which had pulled off the road for a few hours of fitful sleep. By daybreak, as the fetid air of men and beasts began to fill the muggy, somnolent valley, Clara was where she wanted to be: just behind the cannon.59
With the first roar of the artillery, Barton, feeling sorrowful for the men but as exhilarated as any general in anticipating the battle, urged her teams to a gallop, taking them eight miles across the fields to what appeared to be a dressing station on the right. Wading through a field of ripe corn so high that it hid everything from view, she came upon the farm of Joseph Poffenberger, a German immigrant who had fled with his family at the first sign of the armies. To Barton the whole wretched scene in the house already overloaded with the wounded was too familiar. Even the surgeons were those with whom she had previously worked. The first face she saw on reaching the house was that of Dr. James Dunn.60
His round face brightened at the sight of Barton, and his lips formed the praise that made her efforts worthwhile: “The Lord has remembered us; you are here again.”61 Their necessities were terrible, he told her. The house was so close to the field that shells burst among the workers, lighting up the sky in a brilliant display. The worst cases were brought here, those that could neither stay on the field nor endure the long passage to the distant field hospital. Those with entire thighs gone, with faces blown away or abdomens penetrated, were tenderly transported by comrades who believed there was still hope in the surgeon’s small knife and rolls of cotton bandaging. Until Barton's arrival, however, there was little comfort for the agonized. Doctors Dunn and Chaddock had rolled up their sleeves to begin work with nothing but their instruments and a little chloroform they had hastily crammed into their pockets. Not only were the wagon trains as slow as molasses, but a railroad shipment of stores had failed to reach them. Men were bleeding to death from shell wounds, with only green corn leaves to cover, but not stop, the flow. Four tables with patients ready for surgery stood on the porch of the bullet-ridden house. With relief the surgeons accepted Barton’s armfuls of bandages and stimulants and began their awful labor. Barton sized up the situation, drafted twelve loitering soldiers (who, to her delight, were from the Twenty-first Hubbell s) to help locate the wounded, and together with Reverend Welles began to answer the screams which echoed on all sides.62
On this, the “bloodiest day in American history,” nearly forty thousand lives were lost. There were few survivors at the Poffenberger farm, where one of the relief workers estimated fifteen hundred men were crammed into barns, corn cribs, and mangers. Welles told his flock in New York that their work centered largely on “a grateful privilege to bathe their faces and close their eyes for the sake of loved ones at home.”63 Oliver Wendell Holmes, who went to the field at Antietam Creek to find his wounded son, wrote that it was “a pitiable sight, truly pitiable; yet so vast, so far beyond the possibility of relief, that many single sorrows of small dimensions have wrought upon my feelings more than this great caravan of maimed pilgrims.”64 This was how Barton too remembered the battle of Antietam—not as a sea of faces but as the bright image of one or two which appeared through the smoke that blinded and choked and sickened them. She extracted her first bullet at this battle from the face of a youngster who begged her to relieve his pain and let more seriously wounded men be attended to by the surgeons. With her pocketknife she severed for the first time “the nerves and fibers of human flesh,” while a veteran, wounded in the thigh, held the boy’s head. “I do not think a surgeon would have pronounced it a scientific operation,” she said with a quiet pride, “but that it was successful I dared to hope from the gratitude of the patient.” She held another face, offering the man a drink of cool well water, only to hear a soft whir and see his body quiver and lie still: “a bullet sped its full and easy way between us, tearing a hole in my sleeve and found its way into his body.” Still another face that peered anxiously through that sooty haze looked to Clara too soft to be a soldier; the boy was suspiciously hesitant to have his wounded breast dressed. After gentle probing, Barton ascer-tained that the soldier’s name was Mary Galloway. Barton could sympathize with this girl’s spirited defiance
