Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Elizabeth Brown Pryor

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СКАЧАТЬ wait on her, worried about Irving, weighed her options. Still “weak and bilious’’ in August but gaining strength, she was determined to go back to New York City, trade her accounting skills to the business world, and rely on friends, not family, for support.¹ Outside events, however, influenced her to follow a different course. Through circumstances that are not altogether clear, for her correspondence was minimal during these uncertain months, Barton was recalled to her post in the Patent Office. After the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860, her politics did not seem so offensive.

      It was the government's lame duck period between the election and the March 4 inauguration, when work was slack, and appointments were up for grabs. Some unnamed “personal friends” engineered Barton's appointment as a temporary copyist, charged with “recording specifications and making office copies.”² This did not equal the status of her earlier job with the Patent Office, and the salary too was lowered, for women could now earn only eight cents per hundred words copied, or a maximum of nine hundred dollars per year.³ But she was hardly in a position to complain, and she accepted the appointment with relief and even delight.

      By December she had bid her final adieus to the Bertrams and, with a lighter heart than she had known in months, arrived back in Washington. The scenes and faces seemed so familiar. Samuel Shugert and Joseph Fales were still in the Patent Office; Charles Mason resided in the city, earning his living as a patent lawyer. Clara's old room in Almira Fales's boarding house was available. The two impressive fountains in the courtyards of the Patent Office building still made “cool the air in the sultry days of summer.” Picking her way through the muddy streets and up the long stairs to the office door, newfangled hoopskirts in hand, she felt as though her absence had been nothing but a pause in a long continuum.⁴

      Washington itself was much the same. “As in 1800 and 1850, so in 1860,” Henry Adams wrote, “the same rude colony was camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek Temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads.”⁵ Yet the political air had a different quality in the days following the election of Abraham Lincoln. The southern states had long agitated over the policies of this man and his party, whose platform against the expansion of slavery seemed at odds with everything they valued. About the time Barton was patiently enduring the twelve-hour railroad journey from New York to Washington, the state of South Carolina declared the end of its own patience with the Union's policies toward slavery and tariffs, and the nation's capital became a whirligig of excitement. Those with Southern leanings predominated in the town; they guffawed at the pretenses of that awkward lawyer from Illinois and slapped each other on the back in congratulation of the South's audacity and spirit. Just what the action of South Carolina and the states that followed it would lead to was anyone's guess, and everybody did guess. A spirit of debate and the airing of long pent-up opinions filled the atmosphere, and the speculation about the country's future was the favorite topic in drawing rooms and alleys.⁶

      Miss Barton, sitting at her desk in the ladies’ section of the Patent Office, held close to her conviction that a moderate course would prevail. No rabid abolitionist, she had opposed the mass meetings and fiery oratory that the North had offered a year earlier in support of John Brown's raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry. The South, she believed, had a right to feel fearful in the face of such misplaced zealotry. But she had scarcely expected them to dissolve the Union, and now, in January 1861, she did not think their hotheaded move would be permanent. “Would it be of the least interest if I should talk to you of political excitement and ‘secession’?” she asked cousin Elvira Stone. “I believe the latter to be wearing out in its infancy and if wisely left alone will die a natural death, long before maturity.”⁷ Like Robert E. Lee, who expected that “the wisdom and patriotism of the country will devise some way of saving it,”⁸ like countless others with hope or naivete in their hearts, Barton chose to view the Union as undividable. What rankled her was the bravado shown by Southern sympathizers, who saw triumph for the culture of the slave states and boasted of it in the streets of the nation's capital. “Nothing is or has been more common than to see little spruce clerks and even boys strutting about the streets and asserting that ‘we had no government—it merely amounted to a compact but had no strength,’” she wrote furiously a few months later. “I have listened to harangues of this nature in the few past months until my very brain whirled—and now from the bottom of my heart—I pray that the thing may be tested.”⁹

      The political fever in Washington reached its highest degree with Abraham Lincoln's arrival in the city. Threats on his life and rumors of rioting had been so numerous that the lean westerner had quietly entered the town the day before he had planned to, disguised in an old slouch hat and baggy coat. Many thought he would not live to become president, but Barton reported to her friend Annie Childs that the “4th of March has come and gone, and we have a live Republican President, and, what is perhaps singular, during the whole day we saw no one who appeared to manifest the least dislike to his living.” She had attended the inauguration, thought the speech acceptable and the delivery good, but had turned down an invitation to the inaugural ball because of a bad cold. Sensing few of the ominous rumblings that foretold the coming conflict, she retained a haughty indifference to the earnest Southern leaders, viewing them as something akin to naughty children, who, if ignored, would come sheepishly back to the bosom of the family. Her letter to Childs ended, not on a note of foreboding about the national crisis, but in raptures over the spring weather and concern for the tawdry state of her wardrobe.¹⁰

      Perhaps it was that she was less concerned with the Union's safety than with her own vulnerability in the Patent Office at that time. Recognizing that the political friends who had obtained her position would soon be out of power and that she had no guarantee of support from the new administration, she devised a plan to win some political influence. When last in Washington, as Clara told a friend, “I never formed any acquaintance with the Republican members of our Delegation as it would have been worse than nothing and now that it has come to be worth everything I have none of it.”¹¹ She spent some time observing those who represented Hubbell s and decided that Henry Wilson, one of the state's two senators, could best support her. She initially tried to spark an acquaintance by persuading Cousin Elvira, who knew Wilson, to write a letter of introduction interesting enough that he would go to the trouble of calling on her.¹² But six weeks later the inauguration had come and gone, her job was in jeopardy, and she had as yet found no guardian angel. On a chilly March afternoon she therefore put on her bonnet and set off for the Capitol. Rather than ask for personal favors, she planned to speak to the senator about the generally crowded and overworked conditions of the Patent Office, in which she knew he had an interest.

      This time her scheme succeeded. Scarcely had Clara called Wilson out of the Senate chambers than “he set away his hat, arranged his coat sleeves, and settled himself into a conversable posture which seemed to say ‘let us talk, I am ready’, and we did talk.”¹³ Their understanding had been immediate; it was the beginning of a long and important friendship. They talked that afternoon, walked home together through the fashionable Capitol grounds, and then met again, only a few hours later. “Oh yes he is married,” Barton joked to Elvira.¹⁴

      Barton made a savvy choice in picking Wilson to be her patron. Ambitious and effective in his work (one observer called him “the most skilful political organizer in the country”¹⁵), Wilson exuded a calculated geniality that made him almost a caricature of the successful politician. His big florid face shifted easily to delight or anger. He had had a poverty-stricken childhood in Hubbell s and a later apprenticeship as a cobbler; the memories of these early years were not pleasant, and he strove to overcome them with each decisive political maneuver. At the time he met Clara, Wilson was completing his first Senate term and had already become an impressive force in that body. His influence would grow rapidly with the coming of war, when, as chairman of the Military Affairs Committee, and with the complete confidence of Mr. Lincoln, he wielded enormous power. In March 1861 Barton had little concept of what Wilson's influence would mean for her in the next four years. She thought only that her clerkship might not be lost under the Lincoln administration, СКАЧАТЬ