Significantly, Barton never referred to her sister’s insanity publicly and only rarely did so in private. In her autobiography, The Story of My Childhood, she notes only that her eldest sister was “an invalid.”32
Of Barton’s siblings, the most dominant personality seems to have been Stephen junior. He was fifteen when his youngest sister was born and had already gone through his own maturing trials. He was physically strong and athletically inclined but, like his mother, was excitable and nervous. As a child he found it difficult to settle down to studying—at twelve he was still unable to read.33 He resisted his parents’ admonitions, then suddenly decided for himself that he would like an education. By studying at night after a day of farm chores, Stephen surpassed the rest of the town’s pupils within a year, being especially noted for his “power and quick wits in mathematics.”34 While Clara was still a child he became a teacher. After a few years, however, his father deeded the Barton mills to his sons and they became two of the town’s noted industrialists. He had a keen business sense, and during the years Clara was growing up Stephen was gaining a reputation as a sharp trader, his mathematical ability apparently sometimes overriding the strict morality of his Universalist upbringing.35
If rumors of slightly shady dealings at the S & D Barton Mills were circulating, so was a growing feeling that Captain Barton’s eldest son was destined to be a town leader. Like his father, he sympathized with the area’s poor and took several underprivileged boys to live with him when he established his own household. Between 1825 and 1840 he used his influence to evaluate the school system, design a well-graded and straight road from the village of North Oxford to the depot of the Norwich Railroad, and plan and maintain a new town cemetery. He was elected town assessor in 1834 and 1837, and simultaneously served on two school committees.36 Stephen’s business and civic duties kept him too busy to spend a great deal of time with his sister Clara, but she later recalled his patience in teaching her arithmetic. “Multiplication, division, subtraction, halfs, quarters and wholes, soon ceased to be a mystery,” she recalled, “and no toy equalled my little slate.”37 Although he spent less time with Clara than the other Barton children did, Stephen’s example was constant in the Barton household, where pride in his success as a town leader was coupled with a nagging doubt about the nature of his business transactions.
Stephen’s partner in the mills was David Barton, his junior by two years. David also possessed the manly build and athletic interests of the Barton men. He never became involved in the family’s more intellectual pursuits, though some faded sheets of verse, carefully saved by Clara, show an attempt at composing poetry.38 Instead he was a dashing daredevil, a handsome neighborhood strongman, “the Buffalo Bill of the surrounding countryside.”39 He was fond of horses, and to Clara he became something of a hero, a gentle giant who talked to her about the ways of animals and initiated her into the joys of riding. She saw herself as his “little protege” and constant companion.40 While Clara was still a girl he began seriously working at the mills, seeing them prosper but also gaining with his brother a slightly dishonest reputation. “Has David had an opportunity to toll any more grain for Capt. DeWitt so as to make right the mistake in tolling?” a family friend anxiously asked Clara a few years after David began running the mill. “He took I believe the toll of 4 quarts too much.”41 In Clara’s mind, however, his reputation was never tarnished. She loyally upheld him throughout her life, later remembering that “he had been my ideal from earliest memory.”42
Sally Barton was the sister closest to Clara in age, yet very little of her influence is seen in Clara’s childhood. It is possible that she was absent from home a good deal, for a receipt from the Nicholas Academy shows that Stephen Barton paid for his daughter to attend boarding school for at least one year.43 Sally was, by all accounts, a fair-haired, graceful, and intelligent girl, who grew into a gracious and kind woman; she was “lovely as a summer morning and never so lovely as she was good and womanly,” Clara recalled.44 Like her older sister and her brother Stephen, Sally taught school for a short time, indulging her literary taste in the study of poetry. Clara Barton later believed that her own taste in literature stemmed from this sister’s influence. Together Sally and Clara read the works of Sir Walter Scott, then “all the train of English poetry that a child could take in.” After Dolly’s mental collapse, Sally watched anxiously over Clara, vigilantly protecting her small sister’s interest and welfare in the unsettled atmosphere of the Barton home.45
Throughout her life, Clara Barton showed a great deal of ambivalence about the experience of growing up in this household of matured and unusual personalities. Though she often recalled individual incidents with pleasure and wrote sunny descriptions in her autobiography of horseback riding and playing with cousins in the beautiful countryside, the overall impression of her childhood is one of sadness and a struggle for acceptance. As she sat down in 1907 to begin The Story of My Childhood, she questioned “whether to tell the truth about the little girl,” and once wrote in her diary that she had not “had the happy home life of a little girl that most children have, I knew I had hard days then.”46 Even to the world at large she admitted that “in the earlier years of my life I remember nothing but fear.”47
Fear she felt from the natural terrors of childhood—snakes and thunderstorms and runaway horses—but also from the imposing conflicts that surrounded her. Barton’s ambivalence is also reflective of the sporadic and inconsistent attention she received at home. She wrote that her mother, thinking there were plenty of others to care for her small daughter, “attempted very little,” and that family attitudes toward her wavered between a kind of intense individual instruction and total disregard for her needs and desires.48 At times Clara felt that her very identity was submerged in the priorities of the rest of the grown-up family, that she was little more than a slate to mark with her teachers’ personalities. Her childhood became a series of repeated attempts to express her own needs and proclivities, to shake off dependence, and to overcome the neglect and ridicule she felt were so often her lot.
There was a sense, too, that the others, with their larger experience, had an edge in family discussions that she could not hope to match. Her earnest attempts to be helpful or add to a conversation seemed childish and amusing to even the youngest of the other Barton children. Clara came to feel that the merriment made at her expense went beyond family teasing, and she grew to be selfconscious about her efforts and resentful that she was the brunt of so many jokes. The family watched as Clara dutifully shared candy given to her, carefully counting the number of recipients but forgetting to include herself. The look of bewilderment on her face when she discovered that everyone had a piece but her caused, in Clara’s words, “an amusing bit of sport for the family at my expense as was their wont.” The Barton's similarly joked at her misconceptions of various political figures, setting her up in front of them to give her naive impressions. “To the amusement of the family,” Clara allowed that she believed the president to be the size of the meetinghouse and the vice-president the size of a barn—and green. Their laughter hardly encouraged the young girl to express herself. As she grew older they joked about Clara’s rapid work in her brother’s mill, intimating that a fire there had been caused by friction from her clattering loom—”that joke on me lasted many years.” So bitter did Clara become that she came to mistrust even the family’s motives for sending her to school at an early age, feeling that it probably stemmed from “a touch of mischievous curiosity…to see what my performance at school might be.”49
Clara’s earliest reaction to the dominant personalities at home was to retreat into an acute and painful timidity. Immersed in a situation in which responses to her would be unpredictable at best, she shrank away from contact with strangers and withdrew from scenes in which she would be noticed and possibly made the focus of a joke or argument. The reticence that resulted from her home life was exacerbated by an almost total lack of the physical charms usually meted out to young girls. Short, plump, and homely, she had yet to gain the character that would render her face so interesting. Clara’s mother also neglected the child’s thick and lustrous dark brown hair—her one good feature—by having
