Clara Barton's Civil War: Between Bullet and Hospital, Donald C. Pfanz,   248 pp, 30 illustrations, appendices, bibliographic notes, bibliography, Westholme Publishing, 2018,  $28.00 hardcover.

Civil War Librarian: Most other works on Clara Barton's American Civil War service accept and rely upon, at face value, her own tales about herself. Pfanz's reading of Stephen Oates' A Woman on Valor found that Oates' portrayal of Barton as a "heroine of mythical proportions." Checking the Oates' footnotes set off alarm bells for Pfanz and he decided to "dig out the original sources, peel away the self-manufactured legend and determine for myself what she really did during the war.;

While a National Park Service staff historian, he had read "thousands of letter and memoirs written by Union soldiers, and not one of them so much as mentioned Barton. Pfanz asked "How does a historian get at the truth when his subject is so firmly steeped in legend?"  The author reevaluated the source material of Barton's own recollections and the text of her many speeches after the war.

In Clara Barton's Civil War: Between Bullet and Hospital Pfanz offers a more realistic and historically grounded account of Barton's work during the war. Readers will likely be both somewhat surprised and more appreciative Clara Barton's actual accomplishments. Checking primary sources against Barton's own post-war testimony, Pfanz concludes that Barton overstated her the dramatic elements of her accomplishment. But in the course of the book, he provides an accurate account of her service that in the end needed no burnishing.


Clara Barton's Civil War: Between Bullet and Hospital narrative is accessible to both adults and advanced placement middle school and high school students. Pfanz's work also offers a fine introduction to the historian's process of finding the actual event among the recollections of the participants.


From the Publisher:
“I always tried to succor the wounded until medical aid and supplies could come up—I could run the risk; it made no difference to anyone if I were shot or taken prisoner.” So recorded Clara Barton, the most famous woman to emerge from the American Civil War. In an age when few women worked in hospitals, much less at the front, Barton served in at least four Union armies, providing food and assistance to wounded soldiers on battlefields stretching from Maryland to South Carolina.
 
Thousands of soldiers benefited from her actions, and she is unquestionably an American heroine. But how much do we really know about her actual wartime service? Most information about Barton’s activities comes from Barton herself. After the war, she toured the country recounting her wartime experiences to overflowing audiences. In vivid language, she described crossing the Rappahannock River under fire to succor wounded Union soldiers at Fredericksburg, transporting critical supplies to field hospitals at Antietam, and enduring searing heat and brackish water on the sun-scorched beaches of South Carolina.

She willingly braved hardship and danger in order to help the young men under her care, receiving in return their love and respect. Most of Barton’s biographers have accepted her statements at face value, but in doing so, they stand on shaky ground, for Barton was a relentless self-promoter and often embellished her stories in an effort to enhance her accomplishments.
In Clara Barton’s Civil War: Between Bullet and Hospital, distinguished historian Donald Pfanz revisits Barton’s claims, comparing the information in her speeches with contemporary documents, including Barton’s own wartime diary and letters. In doing so, he provides the first balanced and accurate account of her wartime service—a service that in the end needed no exaggeration.

Donald C. Pfanz is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. In his thirty-two-year career with the National Park Service, he worked at Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania County Battlefields Memorial National Military Park, Petersburg National Battlefield, and Fort Sumter National Monument. He is a founding member of the Association for the Preservation of Civil War Sites (now the Civil War Trust) and has written six books about the Civil War, including Richard S. Ewell: A Soldier’s Life and War So Terrible: A Popular History of the Battle of Fredericksburg.

News---Clara Barton's D.C. Office of Missing Soldiers To Be Curated By National Museuem of Civil War Medicine

Civil War Medical Museum To Manage Missing Soldiers Office, National Museum of Civil War Medicine, Press Release.

The National Museum of Civil War Medicine (NMCWM) will open the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum this year at 437 7th St. NW, Washington. The General Services Administration (GSA), which owns the building, chose the Frederick, Md., non-profit museum whose mission is preserving and researching the legacy of Civil War medicine, to operate the museum.

Barton lived in the third-floor rooms during and immediately after the war. Her living quarters and office were there until 1867. During the war supplies for her nursing work were stored in these rooms. In 1865 Barton hired staff and opened the Office of Correspondence with the Friends of the Missing Men of the United States Army.

The office responded to more than 63,000 letters seeking information about soldiers and published lists of missing men. The fate of more than 22,000 soldiers had been learned by the time the office closed in 1867. The doors to the apartment were closed in 1875. The suite of rooms was discovered in 1997 as GSA workers were preparing the building for demolition.

In announcing the new site NMCWM Executive Director George Wunderlich said, “What she did in nursing is incredibly important and we don’t want to diminish that at all. But to say that Clara Barton is a nurse is a gross understatement of her importance. The fact is that she was a relief organizer at a time when women didn’t do that.”

He said, “The story of the rediscovery of the building as well as the story of Barton’s life while she lived there will be the essence of the visitor experience at the museum.” Barton’s words will be used in audio scripts and exhibit labels. Artifacts, images and sounds will enhance the interpretation.

“The overarching theme for the visitor experience will be the sensation of discovering a place, and through the place a remarkable person, and through the person the values that shaped her life and work,” Wunderlich said. The National Museum of Civil War Medicine operates out of a downtown Frederick building with nearly 7,000 square feet of exhibit space.

Its Pry House Field Hospital Museum on the grounds of Antietam National Battlefield, where Dr. Jonathan Letterman devised his system of battlefield medicine, is interpreted as a house museum. Its large bank barn was a field hospital that treated more than 400 men after the battle.

For More Information on Clara Barton see Antietam National Battlefield Park.

For More Information on the National Museum of Civil War Medicine

CWL: The work of NMCWM is an essential resource for enthusiasts and scholars. Its work over the past 15 years has done much to broaden and deepen our understanding of the lives and experiences of American Civil War soldiers. CWL encourages your support of this extraordinary organization, its museums, and its educational efforts.

Words from the Well Known: Clara Barton

"While our soldiers fight, I can stand and feed and nurse them. My place is anywhere between the bullet and the battlefield." A statement made during the Battle of the Wilderness, May 1864.

"General Sherman was right when addressing an assemblage of cadets he told htme that war was Hell!Deck it as you will,it is this, and whoever has looked active war full in the face has caught some glimpses of regions as infernal, as he may ever fear to see."

Men "have always known a great deal too much about it [war]for the good of their kind. They have worshipped at Valkyria's shrine, and followed her siren lead, till it has cost a million times more the the whole world is worth, poured out the best blood and crushed the fairest forms the God God has created."

"If I were to speak of war it would not to show you the glories of conquering armies but of the mischief and misery they strew in their tracks; and how, while they marched on with tread of iron and plumes proudly tossing in the breeze, some one must follow closely in their steps, crouching to the earth, toiling in the rain and darkness, shelterless themselves, with no thought of pride or glory, fame or praise, or reward; hearts breaking with pity, faces bathed in tears and hands in blood. This is the side which history never shows." These quotations from The Oxford Dictionary of Civil War Quotations, John D. Wright, ed, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp. 21-22.

The best biography of Clara Barton is Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War by Stephen B. Oates, The Free Press, maps, illustrations, notes, index, 527 pages, 1995.

Two of the best wwwsites on Clara Barton are http://www.nps.gov/archive/anti/clara.htm and http://www.nps.gov/clba/

Above (R) is a colorized b/w photograph of Clara Barton. Above (L) is a sign recently discovered in a Washington, D.C. attic believed to be over Clara Barton's 1865 and 1866 office of Missing Soldiers. On the (R) is the Clara Barton Memorial on the Antietam Battlefield. The memorial is located about 300 yards south of a farm at which she established a first aid station. This monument is located on the same road on which the Pennsylvania Reserve Division's monuments stand.