Clara Barton

Did you know the American Red Cross was founded by a 59 year old nurse?

In 1861, Clara Barton was working as a clerk at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C.

The Civil War had just begun.

Troops were flooding the capital.

So Barton brought food, clothing, and medical supplies to wounded soldiers who had just survived the Baltimore Riots.

She filled her apartment with relief supplies.

She organized donations from the public.

She even read to injured soldiers and sat by their beds as they died.

Then she got herself to the battlefield.

In August 1862, she showed up at a field hospital at midnight after the Battle of Cedar Mountain, her wagon filled with supplies pulled by a four-mule team.

The surgeon on duty called her “heaven-sent.”

After that, she followed the war. Fairfax Station. Chantilly. Fredericksburg. Petersburg.

She was always just behind the cannon fire.

If not ahead of it.

At Antietam, she reached the battlefield before the military medics.

She nursed wounded men with no supplies, once using corn husks as makeshift bandages.

She became known as “The Angel of the Battlefield.”

When the war ended, thousands of families were writing letters, begging for news of missing sons.

So she started answering them.

In four years, she answered 63,000 letters and helped identify over 22,000 men.

Then she collapsed.

Physically and mentally exhausted, she went to Europe.

In Geneva, she learned about a new international relief organization: the Red Cross.

She joined their efforts during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

She helped organize military hospitals, distributed aid in Strasbourg and Paris, and helped the poor restart their lives by organizing workrooms to make clothing.

Then she came back to the U.S. with a new goal: start an American Red Cross.

President Hayes thought the U.S. would never face another war.

President Garfield supported her.

Then he was assassinated.

Finally, under President Chester Arthur, the U.S. signed the Geneva Convention in 1882.

She launched the American Red Cross in 1881, from her D.C. apartment.

She was 59 years old.

For the next 23 years, she ran it.

Disaster after disaster, she mobilized aid faster than local governments or military response teams.

Here’s what she and the American Red Cross handled under her leadership…

1884: Floods on the Ohio River
1888: Tornado in Illinois
1888: Yellow fever epidemic in Florida
1893: Hurricane in the Sea Islands of South Carolina (she stayed for 10 months helping rebuild the Black agricultural economy)
1898: Spanish-American War
And more.

She also lobbied the international community to expand the Geneva Convention to include natural disasters, not just war.

It became known as the “American Amendment.”

At 83, she was pushed out of the Red Cross by a group of men who said her leadership was too emotional and idealistic for the Progressive Era.

So she started another organization: the National First Aid Society.

Clara saved lives until her very last breath in 1912.