traditionally been accredited with foreshadowing her future vocation—revolved around a long and painful stint Clara spent nursing her brother David. Renowned for his agility and physical courage, David had been chosen to affix the rafters to the ridgepole of a newly raised barn. When a timber broke under his weight, he fell on his feet, apparently unharmed, but a persistent headache and slight fever caused the family physician to be called. The doctor prescribed cupping and leeching—the standard remedies available to the early-nineteenth-century medical expert—confident that these would clear the blood and break the fever. Instead the system weakened David and prolonged his infirmity, greatly alarming his family, especially his eleven-year-old sister Clara. She begged to help to nurse him. Her hands “became schooled to handling the great loathsome crawling leeches which were at first so many snakes”; she learned to painlessly dress the angry blisters. As her family “carefully and apprehensively watched the little nurse,” she gained confidence and surprised herself at her own competence and indispensability. At the same time she merged her needs with David’s, refusing to leave his side for nearly two years and acquiescing to his demands that she alone administer his medicine. Finally, after nearly two years of the treatments, when doctors from twenty miles around had thrown up their hands, a young practitioner suggested a “steam cure.” Though the steam worked few miracles on David, this change did in fact effect a cure, largely through its secondary prescriptions of rest, healthful foods, and banishment of the leeches.84
Despite her relief, however, Clara sensed a loss of her own purpose: “I was again free; my occupation gone. Life seemed very strange and idle to me.” Feeling that her own place and position had been removed, she withdrew into herself, afraid that she was “giving trouble” or not contributing to the family. She felt a uselessness, a void, which she sought for the rest of her life to fill. “Instead of feeling that my freedom gave me time for recreation or play,” she remarked in The Story of My Childhood, “it seemed to me like time wasted, and I looked anxiously about for some useful occupation.”85
Clara found it in caring for her sister Sally’s children and helping with the unremitting household chores. For a short time she enthusiastically worked in her brothers’ satinet mill, enjoying the newness of the clattering machinery and mastering the intricacies of warp and woof with alacrity, despite the laughing derision of her family. But after only two weeks the mills burned, and, Clara remembered, “no heart was heavier than mine.” Once again she was without the work that gave scope and value to her life.86
To fill the void she began to look for ways to be of service outside of her family. Consequently she befriended many of North Oxford’s poorer families, tutoring children, helping poor mothers cope with their uncertain lot, and advising her father about which families were most in need of financial assistance. During a smallpox epidemic that occurred in her early teens, she and a neighbor girl nursed several families until she herself came down with the disease. They held the hands of the sick, cooled foreheads with damp cloths, and brought food to families too ill to prepare their own. In one instance Clara “carried a lantern and led the way out in the midnight darkness while [a] Mr. Clemence carried the casket of one of his children and buried it.”87 Her services were so timely, her style so appropriate, that the memory of this early charitable work was treasured throughout life by its recipients. “Clara, don’t you remember coming to our house once when my brother James died?” queried Thomas Lamb in 1876. “You went home with me & staid all night he died when you…was giving him some tea in your arms…do you suppose I forget that—we wer[e] Poor, very poor.”88 As she grew into adolescence, Clara increasingly derived most of her satisfaction from directly alleviating sickness or trouble. She liked situations in which her personal ministrations improved the conditions of others, liked emulating her father’s charitable ways, and enjoyed the role of benefactress.
Clara Barton’s parents encouraged her in these charitable activities. Her fathers own strong interest in helping the poor was reflected here of course, but also they believed it brought her out of herself, at least temporarily. (Perhaps also they felt nursing to be a more appropriate activity for a maturing young woman than the ball throwing and horse racing encouraged by her brothers.89) Yet the Barton family still worried about their introspective daughter, who was so timid in her demands and spent so much time in her room reading Paradise Lost or copying poetry. The years nursing David had retarded her social progress, and, if anything, she had grown more aloof. As she grew older she was still physically immature; in height she had grown only one inch since her ninth year and at thirteen or fourteen “was still a ‘little girl”’ in appearance. She had a troublesome tendency to obesity; to control it she “made long fasts,” which caused a dyspeptic stomach and insomnia. At an uneasy age of self-consciousness about physical development, the already shy girl withdrew even more.90
Trapped once more at home, Clara associated mainly with relatives and childhood chums. Her grandmother, Dorothy Moore Barton, came to live with her son for the last few years of her life. This exposed Clara to the whims and stories of this spunky woman, who had raised twelve children, had lived through the Revolution and two other wars, and had chosen to lead an independent life in North Oxford rather than acquiesce to her husband’s desire to move to the Maine wilderness. Dorothy Barton had precise and demanding ways, and by the time she moved to Stephen Barton’s household she was blind. She needed too much close attention for either Clara or her mother to give, and so another granddaughter, Julia Ann Porter, came to North Oxford from Maine to help care for the old lady.91
Julia, the daughter of Stephen Barton’s sister Pamela, did a good deal to help Clara shed her introspective ways. She was a tall, attractive girl, the youngest of twelve children, with an outgoing personality and headstrong manner. She was a few years older than Clara, and this younger cousin held her somewhat in awe. They became friends, if not close confidantes. Julia shared Clara’s love of horseback riding and indulged in it with her, Elvira Stone, and a neighbor girl. Taking their cue from their grandmother, they galloped happily around the countryside, despite the fact that they were now young ladies. Once they were caught in a storm, which frightened the horses and sent them dashing uncontrollably home. “We must have presented a striking miniature portrait of the veritable Three Furie's on a rampage,” recalled Clara, “[Elvira] and myself each rushing directly past our own homes unobserved in the storm until at length we rounded the curve that brought the flying horse in sight of his own stable.”92 The merry rides bound the girls together, leaving them with pleasant memories of girlhood laughter and narrow escapes. “I don’t believe any two girls…in that town got as much actual fun, out of riding and driving about as we have,” wrote Clara to Julia years later.93
Exposure to cousins, some recreational associations with girls her own age, and even her brief period of work at the mill eventually helped to make Clara more relaxed socially. Moreover, she was exposed to the society of strangers and the stimulation of new ideas, since her father’s reputation for hospitality and a liberal mind made his house a favorite stopping place for lecturers and other travelers. But Clara’s overall termperament remained shy and self-effacing. Her tendency to run to her room weeping when disappointed, rather than tell her family of her needs, continued to concern her parents. Her mother especially became increasingly perplexed about this “difficult” daughter, finally viewing her as “incomprehensible.”94 After one incident involving a teary scene over a pair of worn-out gloves, Sarah Barton poured out her frustration to a sympathetic visiting lecturer.
This confidential conversation was to have a considerable impact on Clara Barton’s life. The visitor was L. N. Fowler, who was gaining a large following from his lectures on phrenology. He and his brother had done much to popularize this pseudoscience, which offered the theory that the different aspects of human behavior were controlled by discrete portions of the brain. The relative power or sensitivity of these areas—the categories included such traits as intellect, amativeness, and courage—could be determined by cranial bumps and the profile of one’s head. Although phrenology was based on a number of wrong assumptions, it fell short of quackery. Indeed in many of its conclusions it was the forerunner of modern psychology,
