A brief summary of her career will show that an ever-ruling Providence had destined her for a higher and nobler work for mankind than the routine duties—noble as they are—
of a teacher in the public schools.
While in Washington, a friend and distant relative, then in Congress, voluntarily obtained for her an appointment in the Patent Office. There she continued until the fall of 1857. She was employed at first as a copyist and afterwards in the more responsible work of abridging original papers and preparing records for publication, and the large circle of friends made while so employed was not without its influence in determining her military career.
Thus it happened that at the beginning of the Civil War she was in Washington. When news came that the troops, on their way to the Capital, under Mr. Lincoln's first call for volunteers in 1861, had been fired upon, and that wounded men were lying in Baltimore, she volunteered, with others, to go and care for them. Unconsciously she had entered upon what proved to be her life work, for Clara Barton is to the American battlefield what Florence Nightingale was to the English in Crimea. From April, 1861, to the close of the war, Miss Barton was, by authority of President Lincoln and Secretary Stanton, to be found in the hospitals or wherever soldiers were in need of attention, and soon she was recognized as a woman of great ability and discretion, and could pass in and out at will, where others met with constant hindrances and "red tape." So many of her pupils had volunteered in the first years of the war that at the second battle of Bull Run she found seven of them, each of whom had lost an arm or a leg.
She met the wounded from Virginia, she was present at the battles of Cedar Mountain, second Bull Run, Falmouth, Charleston, Fort Wagner, Spottsylvania, Deep Bottom, Antietam and Fredericksburg, and was for eight months at the
