Readers: For a time, I will be blogging about people to be featured in my soon-to-be-published book, When People Were Things: Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, and the Emancipation Proclamation. Today Clara Barton, Civil War Nurse, is featured. I promise not to include book spoilers!
Clara Barton, ca. 1850
After a decade of teaching in Massachusetts, Clara Barton moved to New York for a year to study at the Clinton Liberal Institute. In 1851, she took a teaching job in Hightstown, New Jersey, at Cedarville School, where her pay was $2 per student for each eleven-week session. New Jersey offered no public education.
Clara began campaigning for public education in New Jersey. She successfully lobbied the Trenton officials and obtained a building and the funds to run a public school in Bordentown as a pilot project. In one year, the program proved to be such a success that local leaders looked to hiring a principal. Instead of hiring Clara, though, they appointed a man who had came from another place.
Clara Barton’s public school in Bordentown, New Jersey.
In 1854, Clara resigned. She became so distressed at having been passed over for the principalship that she became very ill and was unable to speak or to work. Finally, Clara and another teacher left New Jersey and boarded a train to Washington to find work as governesses.
Clara networked. She met with her Massachusetts congressman, Alexander De Witt, who was also a distant cousin. De Witt then introduced her to Charles Mason, the Commissioner of Patents. Mason wanted to hire Clara to go to Iowa to be the governess to his daughter. But De Witt saw enormous potential in Clara and urged Mason to hire Clara to work in the Patent office as a recording clerk. She was hired. Clara then became one of the first women to work for the federal government.
The Patent Office, Washington, D.C. c. 1855, Edward Sachse & Co. chromolithograph. From the original in the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. Halfway situated between the Capitol and the White House, the Patent Office, built in the Greek Revival Style, took 31 years to build. U.S. Patent law required inventors to submit scale models of their inventions, which were retained by the Patent Office and required housing. Before the Civil War, the Patent Office was a popular tourist destination.
Clara’s job at the Patent Office meant copying volumes of technical legal text with pen and ink. She had beautiful penmanship and a strong work ethic so she was up to the task. As if this work was not tedious enough, she had to contend with some male colleagues who resented what they perceived as her intrusion into their masculine domain. As she walked to and from her desk, they would spit tobacco juice at her and her skirts, make lewd remarks, and puff cigar smoke in her face. Nevertheless, Clara soldiered on.
Examiners working at the Patent Office.
Despite her fortitude, these men succeeded in forcing her from the workplace. She was reassigned to work from her boardinghouse room, by candlelight, at lesser pay. In 1857, President Buchanan was inaugurated and she lost her clerkship, but, for a time, she had made the same yearly salary as the men.
She returned to Massachusetts for three years. But she was not done with Washington, D.C.
Readers: Stay tuned to this space. My new book, When People Were Things will be available for purchase later this spring. Please read it.
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