Page "Clara Barton" Paragraph 5

On April 21, 1861, American Civil War, a trainload of Union soldiers was mobbed by Confederate sympathizers in Baltimore, MD and arrived in Washington DC full of dead and wounded with no baggage or supplies.

Barton tended to wounded soldiers ( some from Massachusetts ) quartered in the U. S. Senate chamber in Washington.

Then after the First Battle of Bull Run, July 21, Barton established the main agency to obtain and distribute supplies to wounded soldiers.

She was given a pass by General William Hammond to ride in army ambulances to provide comfort to the soldiers and nurse them back to health and lobbied the U. S. Army bureaucracy, at first without success, to bring her own medical supplies to the battlefields.

Finally, on August 3, 1862, she obtained permission to travel to the front lines, eventually reaching some of the grimmest battlefields of the war and serving during the Siege of Petersburg and Richmond, Virginia.

In 1864 she was appointed by Union General Benjamin Butler as the " lady in charge " of the hospitals at the front of the Army of the James.

Among her more harrowing experiences was an incident in which a bullet tore through the sleeve of her dress without striking her and killed a man to whom she was tending.

She is known as the " Angel of the Battlefield.