By: Jessie

Clarissa Harlowe Barton was known as the "Angel of the Battlefield". She was born December 25, 1821 in North Oxford, Massachusetts. The youngest of the five children, she found school to be easy, and studied philosophy, chemistry, and Latin.

At age 17, Clara became a teacher in Massachusetts’ District 9. She taught for 6 years in several schools and later began her own school in North Oxford. At the outbreak of the war, She became a copyist in the patent office in Washington and there gained her first experience with the wounded when the casualties from the secessionist attack on the 6^th Massachusetts were brought to the capital from Baltimore. She worked throughout the war independently instead of with any of the relief agencies, bringing supplies to the front lines. Near then end of the war, Abraham Lincoln assigned her the duty of identifying missing soldiers.

The years after the war, she lectured of her war experiences and worked against the suffragist movement. By 1869, she had worked herself into a physical breakdown, and was ordered by doctors to travel to Europe to regain her health. She returned to the United States in 1873, and "began her crusade" of Geneva and the Red Cross.

Although she was not a trained nurse, she founded the American Red Cross in 1881, and remained president of it until 1904. She was then forced to resign as president and for the next 8 years of her life, she lived in her home at Glen Echo, Maryland. Clara Barton died on April 12, 1912 from cold complications. Her life mission can be summed up in one of her famous words, "You must never so much as think whether you like it or not, whether is it bearable or not; you must never think of anything except the need, ad how to meet it".

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