Clara Barton: Who Is She Really?

The desire to help people was always a part of Clara Barton’s life. Even at the age of eleven, she demonstrated that when she took care of her brother when he became ill. Seven years later, Barton opened a free school where she was a teacher who taught all the young children who would not otherwise have had the chance for a better education. When the school did not offer her the higher paying position to head the school, she resigned. She became busy once the Civil War started, volunteering her time and effort to help the wounded soldiers by advertising for supplies and nursing the injured. This was just the beginning of the foundation of the Red Cross, and later Barton did all that she could do to help expand the Red Cross throughout the United States. In three biography excerpts, from Clara Barton: Professional Angel by Elizabeth Pryor, Angel of the Battlefield: The Life of Clara Barton by Ishbel Ross, and Clara Barton: In the Service of Humanity by David Burton, the authors present to us insights about who Clara Barton really is. Biographers do not always give a full acco

Finally, each writer brings his or her own writing techniques to their biographies. Ross uses a narrative approach to get her views across. For example, her sentences are extremely descriptive, which makes Angel of the Battlefield an interesting story to read. For instance, she writes, “small homes on stilts sailed off from their moorings as wind and water battered them” (Ross 184). To Ross, the story is not just about facts, but it is a story written in a way that will interest the reader to continue to read. When Ross mentions the way Barton visited the local stores that survived, following “the battered railroad tracks with a drove of dogs at her heels,” she paints a vivid description of what is going on. Even the thought of dogs following at her heels shows that Barton was thought highly of. There are also excerpts from her diary to show us more about Barton. For example, Ross adds excerpts from her diary that tells her own story and reveals to us more about Barton: “Julia Glover specially asks for seeds. She is a survivor of seventeen drowned at one place” (186). Generally, Ross portrays Barton as a person who took her time to get to know and care for the people. Barton made sure they had everything they needed. In addition, the piece has a kind of fairy-tale ending in which everyone lived happily ever after.

unt of a subject but rather give us what they want us to believe about the person, they influence the way we think about a person. None of the three biographies speak badly of Barton for what she has done, but instead praise her work and show her importance. Still, while Ross and Pryor represent Barton as an angel, Burton reveals the more human side of Barton.

Secondly, each writer draws slightly different conclusions about Barton’s character. Ross tells us that Barton was an extraordinary woman who could do anything. There is nothing negative about her in the passage. For example, we hear that babies were named after her, and when the time came for her to leave, they offered her flowers and vegetables from their garden (Ross 189). Not once in the passage was the Red Cross mentioned, and only Barton was given credit for the restoration of the islands. However, in Pryor’s passage, Barton is presented as a martyr who felt that all the responsibility was on her shoulders. She thought that she was the only one who was working, becoming overly meticulous and making people resentful of her. Pryor writes, for example, as “one assistant recalls bitterly ‘sitting round all day and then at night stand wit

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