First Unitarian Church of Rochester

Unitarian Universalists have a peculiar habit of trying to make history rather than being made by it. Take today for instance - the convergence of Mother's Day, Women and Religion Sunday, Clara Barton and the American Red Cross.

It was Julia Ward Howe, Unitarian, who penned the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" as she watched Union troops march off to war - Howe who pressed for a Mother's Peace Day in 1872 in the wake of our Civil War and the equally brutal Franco Prussian War.

And it was Clara Barton, Universalist, who founded the American Red Cross.

In 1977 our denomination urged churches to set aside Women and Religion Sunday to recognize the long-ignored contributions of women in that cast of characters I call the "prophets of the human spirit."

(Enter Clara) Clarissa Harlowe Barton was a Christmas baby, entering the world in 1821, daughter of Captain Stephen Barton, veteran of the Indian wars, from whom she absorbed an intense patriotism, and Sarah, who early instilled in her the Puritan ethic of hard work. She was the youngest of five children and 10 years younger than the fourth. Living on a farm, she had no playmates.

CLARA: To my family - all interested in other things - I was the baby with six fathers or mothers. I rambled over the farm making friends with the animals and communing with nature. I love the outdoors.

I remember Dorothy. She naturally took care of my book education.

Stephen was the mathematician. He inducted me into the mysteries of figures, multiplication, division and subtraction. Halves, quarters and wholes soon ceased to be a mystery. No toy equaled my little slate.

David loved horses. He was the Buffalo Bill of the surrounding countryside. When I was five he put me on a colt - sprang on another himself and we raced through the pasture - he bidding me cling feet to the mane.

My seat on a saddle became as secure as a rocking chair. I could run as fast as any boy - ride better - I even tried to skate. My father sent me home and called me a tomboy. I never learned to skate. I never learned to dance.

Mother taught me to cook. I remember the pink willoware set of dishes on the table.

My father, Captain Stephen Barton, had served under General (Mad Anthony) Wayne as a non-commissioned officer. I listened breathlessly to his war stories and tales of the western frontier.

RSG: School was divided into two terms of three months each. It was a mile to school, so Stephen often carried her on his shoulders.

CLARA: The first day I was asked to name the letters. I was asked to spell cat and dog. I told him - I spell in the artichoke column - the three syllable list - so I was in the artichoke class.

RSG: Then, as an illustration of how unpredictable experiences can shape our lives, one of her brothers fell from a rafter and was badly injured. At 11 she became his nurse.

CLARA: My brothers bought out and operated my father’s saw mill. David was injured. I became his nurse for two years. I forgot there was an outside world. I left him for only half a day in the two years time.

RSG: She became a teacher at 17, taught in North Oxford for several years, then enrolled in the Female Department of the Universalist Clinton Liberal Institute in New York State, receiving the finest education available for a girl at the time.

Finally she went to Bordentown, New Jersey, looking for a job. She found a dispirited group of boys with no school, and offered to teach. Mr. Suydam, Board of Education President, told her the task was hopeless: "These boys are renegades, many of them more fit for the penitentiary than school; a woman can do nothing with them. They wouldn't go to school if they had the chance, and the parents would never send them to a 'pauper" school. You will have the respectable sentiment of the entire community against you, you could never endure the disgrace that you will meet. A strong man would quail and give way under what he would be compelled to meet, and what could a woman - a young woman - and a stranger, do?" She told him:

CLARA: My only desire was to open and teach a school in Bordentown, to which its outcast children could go and be taught, and I would emphasize that desire by adding that I wished no salary.

RSG: Reluctantly, the Board agreed.

CLARA: We got on well, and at the end of 12 months I stood in a new schoolhouse building which had been built for me at a cost of $4,000, and my six pupils had grown to 600; a bright, loving faithful phalanx among whom never a punishment had been administered.

RSG: She had established the first public school in New Jersey. Then came the ultimate insult.

CLARA: But prejudice is hard to eradicate. It was impossible for anyone to think that such a large institution should be headed by a woman. Against the desire of my pupils, a male principal was appointed for the new school. For a few months I tried to continue, but the man made it difficult for me. I could bear the ingratitude, but not the pettiness and jealousy of this principal under whom I was set to work.

I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay.

RSG: Clara was throughout her life subject to melancholia. After this incident she went into a deep depression which she chronicled in her diary.

CLARA: I have found it extremely hard to restrain the tears today, and would have given almost anything to have been alone and undisturbed. I have seldom felt more friendless, and I believe I ever feel enough so. I see less and less in the world to live for, and in spite of all my resolution and reason and moral courage and everything else, I grow weary and impatient. I know it is wicked and perhaps foolish, but I cannot help it. There is not a living thing but would be just as well off without me....True, I laugh and joke, but could weep that very moment, and be the happier for it....

I grow dull and, l fear, selfish in my feelings and care less what is going on. . . the whole world is false. This brings me to my old question again - what is the use of living in it? I can see no possible satisfaction or benefit rising from my life.

RSG: Fighting through her depression she moved to Washington, D.C., and found work in the Patent Office as a copy-clerk. Though deeply resented by her male counterparts, she received equal pay and was promoted to a position of inspector, finding discrepancies in the work of the very men who most opposed her.

But the Civil War was underway and, going to the train station to meet war weary and wounded troops from Massachusetts, she became convinced she had to get to the front lines to serve those who needed her help. The rest, as they say, is history. She grew larger than life as "angel of the battlefield," a label she earned at the battle at Cedar Mountain. Clara appeared at a field hospital at midnight with a four-mule-team load of supplies. Surgeon Dunn at the time wrote, "I thought that night if heaven ever sent out a holy angel, she must be the one, her assistance was so timely."

At Fredericksburg she tended the Confederate wounded and then, crossing the Rappahannock River on a bridge shaken by artillery fire, went to help a Federal surgeon. A bursting shell tore her clothing. On another occasion as she tended a wounded soldier a bullet tore through her dress, killing him instantly.

CLARA: The point I always tried to make was to succor the wounded until medical aid and supplies could come up - I could run the risk; it made no difference to anyone if I were shot or taken prisoner."

RSG: One day as she was tending wounded soldiers in a field hospital an officer approached her. "Miss Barton, we have orders to move out and I must put you on the last train that's leaving now."

CLARA: But there is so much more for me to do; I can't; the soldiers need me.

RSG: "Well, you can stay a half hour more if you go on the wagons and even longer if you could ride a horse." She assured him she could ride. "But we have no side saddle for a lady."

CLARA: I can ride any horse you give me with a regular army saddle - or without!

RSG: She stayed until nearly all the wounded were cared for. Through all the struggle and discouragement she was emboldened by her father's staunch patriotism and her mother's work ethic.

CLARA: Oh, sometimes I feel I cannot continue, there is so much suffering, so much privation, so much discouragement, but, my loved ones, the one thought which keeps me constant to my job is this - under all lies the life of a nation.

RSG: After the war she sought to locate soldiers missing in action, proposed a national cemetery at Andersonville Prison, and she suggested that the unknown be memorialized, anticipating the honor now symbolized by the Tomb of the Unknown.

But her most famous work lay ahead. Totally exhausted, she went to Switzerland to recuperate. There friends in Geneva introduced her to the idea of an International Red Cross. Even as she thought about the idea, the Franco-Prussian War broke out and she went to the battlefields, fashioning an improvised red ribbon into a cross to pin on her coat.

Between 1876 and 1882, when exhaustion overwhelmed her, she often repaired to a health sanitarium in Dansville, New York: Our Home on the Hillside. In 1881 she was ill with what she called....

CLARA: ....complete prostration of the nervous system...a great letting down of near power and force.

RSG: Friends thought her public career was over, but they underestimated the deep inner power that enabled her to persevere despite everything fate threw in her path. After years of lobbying she secured the passage of the Geneva Treaty and on May 21, 1881, she founded the American Red Cross in Washington. On August 22 of that year she founded the first local chapter in Dansville. Subsequently she spoke about the Red Cross in Rochester. Her good friend Susan B. Anthony, a member of our congregation, moved that those present organize a chapter here, and two days later they did, giving Rochester the second local chapter.

The connection of the two women was strong. In 1867 they attended the World Suffragette conference together. In 1904 they shared a lecture platform. Their relationship is illustrated in one of Clara Barton's most famous speeches, her 1867 women's rights speech to Civil War veterans in a little town in Iowa. Her speech was advertised in words that caused her to take strong exception. At the end of her scheduled speech she said:

CLARA: Soldiers, you have called me here to speak to you of the war we lived together. I have done it. Now I have a word to you. I wish to read to you this paragraph which you have used to help fill your hall:

"We can promise our citizens a rare treat of patriotic eloquence, such as is seldom listened to, and we can assure them that there will be no cause for disappointment; they will not have thrust upon them a lecture about women’s rights after the style of Susan B. Anthony and her clique. Miss Barton does not belong to that class of woman."

That paragraph, my comrades, does worse than misrepresent me as a woman; it maligns my friend. It abuses the highest and bravest work ever done in this land for either you or me. You glorify the women who made their way to the front to reach you in your misery, and nursed you back to life. You called us angels.

Who opened the way for women to go, and made it possible? Who but that detested clique who through years of opposition, toil and pain had openly claimed that women had rights and should have the privilege to exercise them. The right to her own property, her own children, her own home, her just individual claim before the law, to her freedom of action, to her personal liberty.

Upon this, other women claimed the right and took the courage, if only to go to an army camp and drag wounded men out of a trench and try to save them for their families, their country.

And, soldiers, for every woman's hand that ever cooled your fevered brow, stanched your bleeding wounds, gave food to your famishing bodies, or water to your parching lips, and called back life to your perishing bodies, you should bless God for Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frances D. Gage and their followers.

No one has stood so unhelped, unprotected, so maligned as Susan B. Anthony, no one deserves so well; and, soldiers, I would have the first monument that is ever erected to any woman in this country reared to her; and that monument will be reared, and your daughters and boys will help proudly, gratefully help to set its granite blocks like glistening silver, for everlasting. Aye, set it where all may see....Boys, three cheers for Susan B. Anthony!"

RSG: The audience rose to its feet and cheered.

Clara Barton led the Red Cross for 23 years, more by passionate advocacy and devoted action than by administrative acumen. She even worked in Cuba, ministering to both sides in the Spanish-American War. She resigned under an unsubstantiated charge of the mismanagement and misuse of funds. A younger rival, Mabel Boardman, a socialite of "more than medium height and rather slender, with a liking for modish gowns and the details of the business of the Red Cross, led the opposition. Though a key witness failed to appear for a hearing, an embarrassed Clara Barton resigned on May 14, 1904, at age 82.

Her detractors "claim she wrote to make sure that nobody would forget her." Nobody will.

Born on Christmas Day, she died on Good Friday, April 12, 1912, at 91. She leaves a legacy not only of deeds done, but sober reflections on life.

CLARA: Age is no business of ours. We have no control over its beginning and, unless criminally, none over its ending. I have never since a child kept a birthday nor thought of it only as a reminder by others. I have been able to see that persistent marking of dates, and adding one milestone every year, encourages the feeling of helplessness and release from activities which might still be a pleasure to the possessor. Somehow it has come to me to consider strength and activity, aided so far as possible by right habits, as forming a more correct line of limitation than the mere "passing of years."

RSG: Of her religious orientation she wrote, that she was a "well-disposed pagan," though she apparently dabbled with "healing mediums", astrologers and spiritualists, and had seance chats with General Grant, Susan B. Anthony and Abraham Lincoln.

Underneath it all she was a Universalist. Her parents were deeply involved in the founding of the Universalist Church in Oxford, Massachusetts, where she was born and raised. Her minister was Hosea Ballou, author of A Treatise on the Atonement, the 1803 classic which united Unitarianism and Universalism in theology. In response to a letter of inquiry about her religion she wrote:

CLARA: Your belief that I am a Universalist is as correct as your belief in being one yourself: a belief I which all who are privileged to possess it rejoice. In any case it was a great gift, for like Saint Paul, I ‘was born free,’ and saved the pain of reaching it through years of struggle and doubt. My father was a leader in the building of the church in which Hosea Ballou preached his first dedication sermon. Your historic records will show that the old Huguenot town of Oxford, Massachusetts, erected one, if not the first Universalist Church in America.

In this town I was born; in this church I was reared. In all its reconstruction and remodeling I have taken a part; and I look anxiously for a time in the near future when the busy world will let me once more become a living part of its people. Praising God for the advance in the liberal faith of the religious world of today - so much is due to the teaching of this belief.

RSG: On war she wrote,

CLARA: I can never see a poor mutilated wreck, blown to pieces with powder and lead, without wondering if visions of such an end ever floated before his mother’s mind when she washed and dressed her little boy. . . Men have worshipped at VaIkyria's shrine and followed her siren lead until war has cost a million times more than the whole world is worth; poured out the best blood and crushed the finest forms that God has ever created.

RSG: Of discrimination,

CLARA: The courage that faces death on the battlefield, or calmly awaits it in the hospital, is not the courage of race or color. There, side by side with those of fairer hue, lay the tawny hand of Africa, which that night for the first time had been permitted to strike a lawful, organized blow at the fetters which had bound him, body and mind and soul.

RSG: Speaking of her role in the ratification of the Geneva Treaty which paved the way for the Red Cross, she exhibited her customary modesty and introspection.

CLARA: I feel myself nothing, and yet I do suppose I have turned the crank that has set it all in motion. I wonder if I am not a crank myself.

RSG: Clara Barton - crank, Puritan busybody and conscience of a nation - another of those "prophets of the human spirit" who always make us wonder if we as Unitarian Universalists merit the history we have inherited.

(Note: much of the material in this program is derived from "Take Courage from Clara," a program published by the Unitarian Universalist Women's Federation)

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