text: Clarissa Harlowe Barton (better known as Clara Barton) (December 25, 1821 –April 12, 1912) was a pioneer American teacher, nurse, and humanitarian. She has been described as having had an "indomitable spirit" and is best remembered for organizing the American Red Cross.\nContents\n[show]\n\n    * 1 Youth, education, family nursing\n    * 2 Teaching, organizing, learning bureaucracy, a mission\n    * 3 American Civil War\n    * 4 Barton sees the International Red Cross in action\n    * 5 Organizing the American Red Cross\n    * 6 Religious Beliefs\n    * 7 Later life, heritage\n    * 8 Clara Barton's Birthplace House and Museum\n    * 9 Clara Barton National Historic Site\n    * 10 See also\n    * 11 References and additional reading\n    * 12 External links\n\n[edit]\n\nYouth, education, family nursing\n\nBarton was born to Captain Stephen and Sarah Barton in Oxford, Massachusetts. Barton's father was a loyalist to England, and this led to many confrontations between him and his wife. Her father was a farmer and horse breeder while her mother managed the household. The two later helped found the first Universalist Church in Oxford.\n\nAs a child, she was shy and retiring, the youngest of five siblings. All her brothers and sisters were at least ten years older. Young Clara was home-educated and extremely bright. It is said that her older brothers and sisters were kept busy answering her many questions, and each sibling taught her complementary skills, her older sisters being teachers and her brothers happy to teach her how to ride horses and do other things that, at the time, were thought of as being only appropriate for men. She later spent four years at the Liberal Institute in Clinton, New York. At the age of 11, when her brother became ill, for two years Clara stayed by his side and learned to administer all his medicine, including the "great, loathsome crawling leeches."\n[edit]\n\nTeaching, organizing, learning bureaucracy, a mission\n\nClara became a teacher at age 17, a post that she was to hold for the next 18 years. For ten years, Clara taught in a small Massachusetts town, where her brother owned a factory. After she was invited to teach in a private school in Bordentown, New Jersey, Barton recognized the community's need for free education, and, despite opposition, she set up one of the first free public schools in the state.\n\nIn 1854 she suffered from a serious nervous breakdown probably brought on by overwork. She took a break from teaching (which would be called a sabbatical in modern times) and attended the Clinton Liberal Institute in Clinton, New York, where she studied analytic geometry, calculus, astronomy, mathematics and natural science in addition to French, German, ancient history, philosophy and religion. Afterward, she was appointed to a job as a clerk in the Patent Office in Washington, D.C. where she learned the ins and outs of the federal bureaucracy.\n\nWhen her father was dying, he gave Clara advice that she would always recall:\n\n    "As a patriot, he bade me serve my country with all I had, even with my life if need be; as the daughter of an accepted Mason, he bade me seek and comfort the afflicted everywhere, and as a Christian he charged me to honor God and love mankind."\n\n[edit]\n\nAmerican Civil War\nClara Barton circa 1866.\nEnlarge\nClara Barton circa 1866.\n\nWhen the American Civil War began, Barton resigned her position in the Patent Office to devote herself to the care of wounded soldiers on the field of battle. With the outbreak of war and the cascade of wounded Union soldiers into Washington, she quickly recognized the unpreparedness of the Army Medical Department. In April 1861, after the First Battle of Bull Run, she established an agency to obtain and distribute supplies to wounded soldiers. For nearly a year, she lobbied the U.S. Army bureaucracy in vain to bring her own medical supplies to the battlefields. Finally, in July 1862,