Clara Barton part 1 from the American Experience Storybook

From the American Experience Storybook Clara Barton 1821-1912 If you chance to feel that the positions I occupied were rough and unseemly for a woman, I can only reply that they were rough and unseemly for men. But under all lay the life of the nation. Quoted by Cora Bacon Foster in Clara Barton's Humanitarian Christmas Day 1821 brought Clara Barton, the angel of the battlefield, into the world. Despite her shy disposition, Clara always stepped forward to help others, from her injured brother David, to the little children she taught as a teenage teacher, to the brave soldiers she saved as an adult. When Clara was almost 40 years old, the Civil War began. True to her style, Clara jumped to help, organizing medical supplies and serving as a nurse on the battlefields. Once a bullet grazed her sleeve as she tended to a soldier. But still, she would march out to help. After the war, she helped to find and reunite missing soldiers with their families. In the early 1870s, Clara visited Europe and worked with the International Red Cross, which inspired her to found the American Red Cross. She returned to the States and did so, becoming the organization's first president. She was a passionate and resolute leader. She never took a salary, but often contributed some of her own money to the organization's projects. The following excerpt is from Heroines of Service by Mary R. Parkman. Chapter Our Lady of the Red Cross A Christmas Baby! Now, isn't that the best kind of a Christmas gift for us all? Cried Captain Stephen Barton, who took the interesting flannel bundle from the nurse's arms and held it out proudly to the assembled family. No long for heir to a waiting kingdom could have received a more royal welcome than did the little girl who appeared at the Barton home in Oxford, Massachusetts, on Christmas Day, 1821. Ten years had passed since the child had come to the comfortable farmhouse, and the four big brothers and sisters were very sure that they could not have had a more precious gift than this Christmas Baby. No one doubted that she deserved a distinguished name, but it was due to Sister Dorothy, who was a young lady of romantic 17 and something of a reader, that she was called Clarissa Harlow, after a well-known heroine of fiction. The name which this heroine of real life actually bore and made famous, however, was Clara Barton. For the Christmas Baby proved to be a gift not only to a little group of loving friends, but also to a great nation and to humanity. The sisters and brothers were teachers rather than playmates for Clara, and her education began so early that she had no recollection of the way they led her toddling steps through the beginnings of book learning. On her first day at school, she announced to the amazed teacher, who tried to put a primer in her hands, that she could spell the artichoke words. The teacher had other surprises besides the discovery that this mite of three was acquainted with three-syllable lore. Brother Stephen, who was a wizard with figures, had made the sums with which he covered her slate seem a fascinating sort of play at a period when most infants are content with counting the fingers of one hand. All other interests, however, paled before the stories that her father told her of great men and their splendid deeds. Captain Barton was amused one day at the discovery that his precocious daughter, who was always eagerly encored by his tales of conquerors and leaders, thought of their greatness in images of quite literal and realistic bigness. A president must, for instance, be as large as a house, and a vice president as spacious as a barn door at the very least. But these somewhat crude conceptions did not put a check on the epic recitals of the retired officer, who, in intervals of active service in plowed fields or in pastures where his thoroughbreds grazed with their meddlesome colts, liked to live over the days when he served under Mad Anthony Wayne in the Revolutionary War, and had a share in the thrilling adventure of the western frontier. Clara was only five years old when Brother David taught her to ride. Learning to ride is just learning a horse, said this daring youth who was the Buffalo Bill of the surrounding country. How can I learn a horse, David? quavered the child, as the high-spirited animals came whinnying to the pasture bars at her brother's call. Catch hold of his mane, Clara, and just feel the horse a part of yourself. The big half for the time being, said David, as he put her on the back of a colt that was broken only to bit and halter, and easily springing on his favorite, held the reins of both in one hand, while he steadied the small sister with the other by seizing hold of one excited foot. They went over the fields at a gallop that first day, and soon little Clara and her mount understood each other so well that her riding feats became almost as far-famed as those of her brother. The time came when her skill and confidence on horseback, her power to feel the animals she rode as part of herself, and kept her place in any sort of saddle through the night-long gallops, meant the saving of many lives. David taught her many other practical things that helped to make her steady and self-reliant in the face of emergencies. She learned, for instance, to drive a nail straight and to tie a knot that would hold. Eye and hand were trained to work together with quick decision that made for readiness and efficiency in dealing with a situation, whether it meant the packing of a box or first-aid measures after an accident on the skating pond. She was always an outdoor child with dogs, horses, and ducks for playfellows. The fuzzy ducklings were the best sort of dolls. Sometimes, when wild ducks visited the pond and all her waddling favorites began to flap their wings excitedly, it seemed that her young heart felt, too, the call of large free spaces. The only real fun is to do things, she used to say. She rode after the cows, helped in the milking and churning, and followed her father about, dropping potatoes in their holes or helping weed the garden. Once, when the house was being painted, she begged to be allowed to assist in the work, even learning to grind the pigments and mix the colors. The family was at first amused and then amazed at the persistency of her application, as day after day she donned her apron and fell to work. They were not less astonished when she wanted to learn the work of the weavers and her brother's satinette mill. At first, her mother refused this extraordinary request. But Stephen, who understood the intensity of her craving to do things, took her part. And at the end of her first week at the flying shuttle, Clara had the satisfaction of finding that her cloth was passed as first quality goods. Her career as a weaver was of short duration, however, owing to a fire which destroyed the mills. The young girl was as enthusiastic in play as at work. Whether it was a canter over the fields on Billy her horse, while her dog Button dashed along at her side, his curly white tail bobbing ecstatically, or a coast down the rolling hills in winter, she entered into the sport of the moment with her whole heart. When there was no outlet for her superabundant energy, she was genuinely unhappy. Then it was that a self-consciousness and morbid sensitiveness became so evident that it was a source of real concern to her friends. People say that I must have been born brave, said Clara Barton. Why, I seem to remember nothing but terrors in my early days. I was a shrinking little bundle of fears. Fears of thunder. Fears of strange faces. Fears of my strange self. It was only when thought and feelings were merged in the zest of some interesting activity that she lost her painful shyness and found herself. When she was 11 years old, she had her first experience as a nurse. A fall which gave David a serious blow on the head, together with the bungling ministrations of doctors, who, when in doubt, had recourse only to the heroic treatment of bleeding and leeches, brought the vigorous young brother to a protracted invalidism. For two years, Clara was his constant and devoted attendant. She schooled herself to remain calm, cheerful, and resourceful in the presence of suffering and exacting demands. When others gave way to fatigue or nerves, her wonderful instinct for action kept her, child though she was, at her post. Her sympathy expressed itself in untiring service. In the years that followed her brother's recovery, Clara became a real problem to herself and her friends. The old blighting sensitiveness made her school days restless and unhappy in spite of her alert mind and many interests. At length, her mother, at her wit's end because of this baffling morbid strain, and her remarkable daughter, was advised by a man of sane judgment and considerable understanding of child nature to throw responsibility upon her and give her a school to teach. It happened, therefore, that when Clara Barton was 15, she put down her skirts and put up her hair and entered upon her successful career as a teacher. She liked the children and believed in them, entering enthusiastically into their concerns and opening the way to new interests. When asked how she managed the discipline of the troublesome ones, she said, The children give no trouble. I never have to discipline at all. Quite unconscious of the fact that her vital influence gave her a control that made assertion of authority unnecessary. When the boys found that I was as strong as they were and could teach them something on the playground, they thought that perhaps we might discover together a few other worthwhile things in school hours, she said. For 18 years, Clara Barton was a teacher, always learning herself while teaching others. She decided in 1852 to enter Clinton Liberal Institute, New York as a pupil for graduation, for there was then no college whose doors was open to women. When she had all the institute could give her, she looked about for new fields for effort. In Bordertown, New Jersey, she found there was a peculiar need for someone who would bring to her task pioneer zeal as well as a passion for teaching. At that time, there were no public schools in the town or indeed in the state. The people who pose as respectable are too proud and too prejudiced to send their boys and girls to a free pauper school. And in the meantime, all the children run wild, Miss Barton was told. We've tried again and again, said a discouraged young pedagogue. It is impossible to do anything in this place. Give me three months and I will teach for free, said Clara Barton. This was just the sort of challenge she loved. There was something to be done. She began with six unpromising gammons in a dilapidated empty building. In a month, her quarters proved too narrow. Each youngster became an enthusiastic and effectual advertisement. As always, her success lay in an understanding of her pupils as individuals and a quickening interest that brought out the latent possibilities of each. The school of six grew in a year to one of 600 and the thoroughly converted citizens built an eight-room schoolhouse where Miss Barton remained as principal and teacher until a breakdown of her voice made a complete rest necessary. The weak throat soon made it evident that her teaching days were over. But she found at the same time in Washington, where she had gone for recuperation, a new work. Living is doing, she said. Even while we say there is nothing we can do, we stumble over the opportunities for service that we are passing by in our tear-blinded self-pity. And I think we'll pause here. It was just a little bit of a long chapter and continue in the next video. Thanks so much for watching. Please reach down, click like and subscribe and leave a comment below. I love you guys. As Tigger says, ta-ta for now.