Clara Barton: Antietam's Angel, the Missing Soldiers Office, Red Cross

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Clara Barton was born in Massachusetts in 1821 and was so timid as a child that she stopped eating. At 11 she spent two years nursing her brother David after a fall from a barn roof, giving medicines and applying leeches. A phrenologist advised making her a teacher, and she was certified at 17, controlling unruly boys with confidence learned riding horses with her male cousins. In 1852 she opened the first free public school in New Jersey in Bordentown, which grew past 600 students, until the board hired a male principal over her and she resigned after a breakdown. In 1855 she became a recording clerk at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington at a man's salary, endured harassment and was fired in 1858 for so-called Black Republicanism.

When wounded men of the 6th Massachusetts Militia reached Washington in April 1861, she recognized former students and began collecting supplies through Massachusetts newspapers. In 1862 she won passes and wagons from Quartermaster Daniel Rucker and reached Antietam, where surgeons were packing wounds with corn husks and a bullet passed through her sleeve and killed the man she was tending. After the war her Office of Correspondence answered over 41,000 letters and found more than 22,000 missing men, and at Andersonville she helped identify and rebury about 13,000 dead. She worked with the Red Cross in the Franco-Prussian War, founded the American branch, led relief at the 1889 Johnstown flood, and was forced to resign as president in 1904. She died in Glen Echo, Maryland, in 1912.

• In 1863 she treated Black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts after the assault on Fort Wagner.
• Carpenter Richard Lyons found her sealed office, with tents, clothing and documents, in 1997.
• She received the Prussian Iron Cross for relief work in Paris and Strasbourg.
• She persuaded President Chester Arthur by recasting the Red Cross for floods, fires and earthquakes.
• At 74 she went to Constantinople in 1896 to aid victims of the Armenian massacres.