Clara Barton Fansite

Every saintly figure, regardless of what they do later in their lives, has to start somewhere. For Clara Barton that ’somewhere’ was the American Civil War.

After the first battle of Bull Run in 1862 Barton established an agency dedicated to obtaining supplies for and distributing those supplies to wounded soldiers. At first she was forced to stay behind the lines and service soldiers brought back from the front, going as far as to be allowed to accompany ambulances - however, Barton wasn’t given permission to travel to the lines herself until July 1862, after several petitions to the U.S. Army’s bureaucracy.

By 1864 Barton was named “the lady in charge” of all frontline hospitals of the Army of the James, and in 1865 Abraham Lincoln gave Barton a rather important duty - search for men missing in combat. A young soldier by the name of Dorence Atwater had managed to procure a list of the dead from the south and, using that list, Atwater and Barton went to Andersonville after the war with 42 carvers, all of whom worked together to erect the necessary tombstones to the dead soldiers. This worked earned them all the nicknames of the “Angels of Andersonville”.

Barton would later travel the country speaking of her experiences during the way, giving public lectures to anybody who would listen (and there were lots).