Clara Barton: In the Service of Humanity (review)

I46CIVIL WAR HISTORY intimacy abounded. Trefousse discreetly limits his discussion of the matter to what clearly can be discerned from the evidence: Stevens and Mrs. Smith lived as domestic partners and Stevens provided well for her in his will. Stevens's political power reached its zenith during his tenure as chairman of the House Committee on Ways and Means, a position that he attained in 1 86 1 , at the age of sixty-nine. Trefousse insists that Stevens's outspokenness on emancipation enabled Lincoln "to continue his onward march toward freedom for the slave" (116). On issues of reconstruction, however, Trefousse grudgingly admits that differences between Stevens and Lincoln were fundamental and probably irreconcilable. Lincoln argued thatthe southern states remained within thejurisdiction of the Constitution. Stevens maintained that the act of rebellion invoked the laws of war and rendered the southern states conquered territories. Lincoln's reconstruction policies were limited by the Constitution; Stevens's were not. Stevens would "Strip a proud nobility of their bloated estates, reduce them to a level with plain republicans; send them forth to labor, and teach their children to enter the workshop or handle the plough." He would thus "humble the proud traitors" (172). On this issue Stevens had few followers. "His legacy was one of pointing the way," Trefousse concludes. "It was never one of domination " (238). Louis S. Gerteis University of Missouri-St. Louis Clara Barton: In the Service ofHumanity. By David Burton. (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995. Pp. 192. $49.95.) Clara Barton was a very fortunate woman. Gifted with intelligence, industry, and resourcefulness, Barton nevertheless confronted a dilemma which troubled many bright, energeticAmerican women in the nineteenth century: how to make a place in society for a woman of exceptional talent. Barton's good fortune was to find herself repeatedly in situations where her unique talents were desperately needed, and thus to be hailed as a heroine rather than denounced as a meddlesome creature whose insistence on a public career unsexed her. Celebrated as the "Angel of the Battlefield," during and after the Civil War, more than a few commanders and politicians probably did regard her as meddlesome and worse, but they learned to do so privately because Barton's success in organizing and bringing aid and succor to wounded and dying Union soldiers earned her enormous public approval. Independent, determined and incapable of taking "no" for an answer, once she undertook a cause Barton refused to be sidetracked . Irritating though these qualities may have been to some, they were exactly the qualities which enabled her to be so effective on the battlefields of Civil War Virginia and of the Franco-Prussian War. Similarly, in flood-ravaged Johnstown and hurricane-battered Galveston Barton drew on these same qualities to lay the foundations for the American Red Cross. BOOK REVIEWS147 David Burton's succinct account provides readers with a clear and perceptive record of Barton's career. Barton experienced the Civil War as few other women did and her efforts made an enormous difference in the lives of the soldiers with whom she came in contact. Similarly, it is hard to imagine how the Red Cross could have been established in the United States without her reputation and agency. Nor does Burton hide the more trying aspects of his subject's character. Barton's anti-institutional streak which made her so effective in cutting through red tape during the Civil War was, as Burton deftly points out, exactly the quality that made her constitutionally incapable of participating in the bureaucratic transformation the fledgling American Red Cross badly needed if it was to survive and grow in the twentieth century. As an introduction to Barton's Ufe and work, this is a useful survey. However, its brevity will leave those seeking a more probing exploration unsatisfied. Burton has admirably digested the large body of Barton's personal papers to generate a clear and concise record of her accomplishments. However, little attempt has been made to ground this study in the literature on the history of nursing, the history ofAmerican women, or military history. Barton herselfobserved that at the end of the Civil War, "woman was at least fifty years in advance of...