Electrical Aptitude Practice Test 13

Clara Barton: From the Classroom to the Red Cross

¹Clara Barton was born on December 25, 1821, in Oxford, Massachusetts. She began teaching in 1838, and in 1852 she opened a free school in Bordentown, New Jersey. Within a year she had hired a second teacher and was teaching more than 600 students, and the town raised money for a new building. When it was finished, however, the school board named a man as principal and made Barton his "female assistant," and she soon left. In 1855 she became a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, one of the first women to hold such a federal post at a salary equal to a man's.

²When the Civil War began, Barton turned to caring for soldiers. After the Baltimore Riot of April 1861, she nursed wounded Massachusetts soldiers at a Washington railroad station. She later brought supplies and care to field hospitals near the front lines, including at the Battle of Antietam. She earned the nickname "Angel of the Battlefield" after helping an overwhelmed surgeon following the Battle of Cedar Mountain in August 1862.

³After the war, Barton ran the Office of Missing Soldiers, which wrote 41,855 replies to inquiries and helped locate more than 22,000 missing men. In the summer of 1865 she also helped find, identify, and bury about 13,000 people who had died at the Andersonville prison camp in Georgia.

⁴Barton later traveled to Europe. In Geneva in 1869 she was introduced to the Red Cross, and she aided military hospitals during the Franco-Prussian War. Back home, she campaigned from 1873 onward for the United States to support the international Red Cross. She argued that a Red Cross society could serve in natural disasters as well as in war. The American Red Cross held its first official meeting in her Washington apartment on May 21, 1881, and the first local chapter was founded that August in Dansville, New York. The United States ratified the Geneva Convention in 1882, under President Chester A. Arthur. After the Johnstown Flood of 1889, Barton led a team of 50 doctors and nurses and stayed for five months. She resigned as president of the Red Cross in 1904 and died at her home in Glen Echo, Maryland, on April 12, 1912.