Conducting research on Miss Barton revealed she had the best of friends in the highest of places.  I have already covered arguably her top patron, VP Henry Wilson.  Wilson was not her first friend in Washington.  While Barton used her Congressman, Colonel Alexander DeWitt, to introduce her to Washington society, Charles Mason […]

One would think Clara Barton was a staunch liberal in her day.  Fremont was her man in politics, she admitted wholeheartedly believing in the policies of the Republican Party, all before Lincoln won election in 1860. Certainly, her views about helping others seem to cement her on what we would consider the left politically.  She […]

Clara Barton’s boarding house was not the first place she opened the Missing Soldiers Office.  The first place, in fact, was an office in Annapolis, MD, where Barton first proposed to locate missing soldiers for their families at Camp Parole.  The camp, opened in June 1862, it was one of the ideal places […]

Clara Barton couldn’t have made the impact she did without friends. Her friends supported her, motivated her and (constructively) criticized her. One man who made an indelible difference in her life was the Honorable Henry Wilson. It is not clear when they became friends, but by the end of the Civil War […]

Hammond’s Secret Weapon Thirty-three year old newly appointed Surgeon General of the Army, William A. Hammond inherited a seemingly insurmountable issue. The timely delivery to the battlefield of desperately needed medical supplies. A large part of the problem seemed to be inherent in how the military logistics system worked in 1861. Logistics, […]

As most of you know, my Museum, the National Museum of Civil War Medicine is participating in a National Trust contest for funding to restore and reinstall the original windows in Clara Barton’s Missing Soldiers Office, our almost-open Museum in Washington D.C. The contest pits 24 historic sites in the Washington DC […]