More and more, I am obsessed with my neighbor across the street. (The single guy who lives next door is also, though for him the allure is the "green polyester hotness'' of the uniforms the female park rangers who work over there have to wear.) When we moved in across from the Clara Barton National Historical Site a few years ago, all I really knew about Clara was that she was some kind of Civil War nurse who had founded the American Red Cross. But she was also the Arianna of her day; the woman did not need Nike to tell her, "Just Do It," and -- this part is going to amaze you -- she made a couple of enemies along the way.
Clara was one of the first women employed by the federal government, and she was working in Washington when fighting broke out across the Potomac. After she saw that the surgeons tending wounded Union soldiers in field hospitals there had next to nothing that they needed, she networked with every woman she had ever passed on the street and got them to send her everything from bandages to whiskey. Then she found her way to the battlefields, passed around these supplies herself -- and sent a staggering number of thank-you notes to donors, telling who got what and how much it helped. Before long, her operation grew to the point that she had to rent a warehouse back in Washington. And somehow, she talked her boss at the U.S. Patent Office into paying her while she carried on this way throughout the war. She made a few important friends in Congress and the military, too, and charmed, shamed, and generally wore them down until they granted her semi-official status, though in fact she always flew solo.
Clara saw herself as a foot soldier, but she also seems to have been the Zelig of the Civil War; even when the all-black Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry charged Battery Wagner, she was there on the beach on Morris Island, and not only saw Robert Gould Shaw fall but watched her married lover shot off his horse. (She crawled to him through the sand and eventually nursed him back to full strength, then apparently wearied of him; as one of her biographers, Stephen B. Oates, notes in A Woman of Valor, "She made no diary entries that fall about Elwell's brilliance and charm, and rarely sent him a note.")
What interests me most about Clara's story, though, is that she did not start out big and brave. She had what today we would call a toxic mother, and was painfully shy and fearful as a child. But as she was at her best in a crisis, she made that her life's work. And though she never fully overcame her deficits -- she was restless between battles, and suffered from depression throughout her life -- she wrung so much good out of them. So that even now, as I'm puttering around in my yard, I love imagining her gardening up into her eighties just across the way, all decked out in every medal she'd ever been awarded, vain until the end, and rightly so.
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