The living tradition which we share draws from many sources, including the words 
and deeds of prophetic women and men, which challenge us to confront the powers 
and structures of evil with justice, compassion and the transforming power of 
love.  Clara Barton was a prophetic woman, whose words speak to us today.

Clarissa Harlowe Barton was born on Christmas Day 1821 in Oxford, Mass.  In her 
long career of public service, she was successively a teacher, a battlefield 
nurse, a lecturer and finally organizer and president of the American Red Cross.

She was a Universalist.  Her parents were deeply involved in the founding of the 
church in Oxford, where she was born and raised.  Her minister was Hosea 
Ballou.  Those of you who were paying attention last week may recognize that 
name.  He was the mentor and later nemesis of Adin Ballou, because Hosea Ballou 
was an Ultra-Universalist, believing that absolutely there would be no hell, no 
punishment, after death.

Someone asked Clara Barton about her religion.  In response, she wrote:  “Your 
belief that I am a Universalist is as correct as your belief in being one 
yourself, a belief which all who are privileged to possess it rejoice.  In any 
case, it was a great gift, for like Saint Paul, I ‘was born free,’ and saved the 
pain of reaching it through years of struggle and doubt.  My father was a leader 
in building the church in which Hosea Ballou preached his first sermon.  Your 
historic records will show that the old Huguenot town of Oxford, Mass., erected 
one of the first Universalist churches in America. – if not the first.

“In this town I was born; in this church I was reared.  In all its 
reconstruction and remodeling I have taken a part; and I look anxiously for a 
time in the near future when the busy world will let me once more become a 
living part of its people, praising God for the advance in the liberal faith of 
the religious world of today – so much is due to the teaching of this belief.”  
The belief she speaks of is Universalism.

As a child, Clara played nurse, taking care of pets that were sick or injured.  
When she was eleven, her brother fell from a barn roof.  Clara was his nurse 
throughout his two years of convalescence.  She became a teacher at seventeen, 
taught in North Oxford for several years, then enrolled in the Female Department 
of the Universalist Clinton Liberal Institute in New York state, receiving the 
finest education available to a woman at the time.

Finally she went to Bordentown, New Jersey, looking for a job. She found a 
dispirited group of boys with no school, and offered to teach.  The president of 
the board of education told her the task was hopeless:  “These boys are 
renegades,” he said, “many of them more fit for the penitentiary than school.  A 
woman can do nothing with them.  They wouldn’t go to school if they had the 
chance, and the parents would never send them to a ‘pauper’ school.  You will 
have the respectable sentiment of the entire community against you.  You could 
never endure the disgrace that you will meet.  A strong man would quail and give 
way under what he would be compelled to meet.  And what could a woman – a young 
woman – and a stranger do!”

She told him, “My only desire was to open and teach a school in Bordentown, to 
which its outcast children could go and be taught. I would emphasize that desire 
by adding that I wished no salary.”  Reluctantly, the board agreed.

She got on well, and at the end of twelve months she stood in a new schoolhouse 
building, which had been built at a cost of $4,000.  And her six pupils had 
grown to 600, “a bright, loving, faithful phalanx, among whom never a punishment 
had been administered.”  She had established the first public school in New Jersey.

Then came the ultimate insult:  “It was impossible for anyone to think that such 
a large institution should be headed by a woman.  Against the desire of the 
pupils, a male principal was appointed for the new school.  For a few months I 
tried to continue, but the man made it difficult for me.  I could bear the 
ingratitude, but not the pettiness and jealousy of this principal under whom I 
was set to work.

“I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall 
nevere do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay.”

But she went to Washington, D.C., to work at the Patent Office.  But the Civil 
War was under way and, going to the train station to meet war-weary and wounded 
troops from Massachusetts, she became convinced that she had to get to the front 
lines to serve those who needed her help.  The rest, as they say, is history.

She grew larger than life as the “angel of the battlefield,” a label she earned 
at the Battle of Cedar Mountain.  Clara appeared at a field hospital at midnight 
with a four-mule team load of supplies.  Surgeon Dunn wrote at the time, “I thought that night if heaven ever sent out a holy angel, she must be the one, her assistance was so timely.”

At Fredericksburg she tended the Confederate wounded and then, crossing the 
Rappahannock River on a bridge shaken by artillery fire, went to help a Federal 
surgeon.  A bursting shell tore her clothing.  On another occasion, as she tended a wounded soldier, a bullet tore through her dress, killing him instantly.

After the war, she volunteered for the International Red Cross while on a trip 
to Europe in 1870.  She helped refugees of the Franco-Prussian War in Paris and 
other cities. 

She returned to America in 1873 and was invited to establish an American Red 
Cross.  She founded the American Red Cross in Washington in 1881.  Later that 
year she founded the first local chapter, in Dansville, NY.  Subsequently she 
spoke about the Red Cross in Rochester.  Her good friend Susan B. Anthony, a 
member of that congregation, started the second chapter of the Red Cross in America.

The connection of the two women was strong.  In 1867 they attended the World 
Suffragette Conference together.  Their relationship is illustrated in one of 
Clara Barton’s most famous speeches, her 1867 women’s-rights speech to Civil War 
veterans in a little town in Iowa.  Her speech was advertised in words that 
caused her to take strong exception.  At the end of her scheduled speech she said:

        Soldiers, you have called me here to speak to you of the war we lived
        together.  I have done it.  Now I have a word to you.  I wish to read to
        you this paragraph which you have used to help fill your hall:  “We can
        promise our citizens a rare treat of patriotic eloquence, such as is
        seldom listened to, and we can assure them that there will be no cause
        for disappointment; they will not have thrust upon them a lecture about
        women’s rights after the style of Susan B. Anthony and her clique.  Miss
        Barton does not belong to that class of women.”

        That paragraph, my comrades, does worse than misrepresent me as a woman;
        it maligns my friend.  It abuses the highest and bravest work ever done
        in this land for either you or me.  You glorify the women who made their
        way to the front to reach you in your misery, and nursed you back to
        life.  You called us angels.

        Who opened the way for women to go, and made it possible?  Who but that
        detested clique who through years of opposition, toil and pain had
        openly claimed that women had rights and should have the privilege to
        exercise them, the right to her own property, her own children, her own
        home, her just individual claim before the law, to her freedom of
        action, to her personal liberty.

        Upon this, other women claimed the right and took the courage, if only
        to go to an army camp and drag wounded men out of a trench and try to
        save them for their families, their country.

        And, soldiers, for every woman’s hand that ever cooled your fevered
        brow, stanched your bleeding wounds, gave food to your famishing bodies,
        or water to your parching lips, and called back life to your perishing
        bodies, you should bless God for Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady
        Stanton, Frances D. Gage and their followers.

        Boys, three cheers for Susan B. Anthony!


The audience rose to its feet and cheered.

In the late 1800s there was a community begun as a Chautauqua society called 
Glen Echo, up the Potomac from Washington, and Clara Barton was asked to make 
her permanent residence there.  She was offered land at no cost and invited to 
design her house, which was built for her.  The 38-room home of Miss Barton’s 
was for seven years – from 1897 to 1904 – the headquarters of the American Red 
Cross.  And you can still go up to Glen Echo and visit that building today and 
see her tiny office.  The grand, unusual structure served as her last home. 

Clara Barton’s Universalist beliefs had consequences.  Outcast boys deserved an 
education even if the town leaders had already condemned them.  A wounded 
soldier needs care.  She did not separate them into the camp of friend or enemy; 
she recognized their universal humanity.

There are so many things that divide us in our present time: race, religion, 
social status.  Occasionally, it seems, the Civil War continues to this day.  
Our task is to find ways to overcome the barriers, to have courage to not fear 
resistance, to be angels in the battlefields around us.

And this work continues, even today.  I’ll be sending you an e-mail about some 
of the groups I’ll be talking about.  First is the American Red Cross; they are 
still very active today. [1]  They are active in helping soldiers and their 
families get financial aid, get trips back home and leave.  They introduce 
humanity to the war scene to our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan and elsewhere 
around the world.  The International Committee of the Red Cross is in Iraq 
visiting detainees, visiting detainees all over the world. [2]  They have been 
there without protection because they take no protection from governments, 
either from the insurgents or the Americans.  And they’ve lost five people over 
there.  And they’re part of the people who are watchdog groups over prisoners of 
war.

And there are other groups around that I think this congregation could attach 
themselves to, individually or as a congregation.  Some of them are a little 
offbeat and some address specific things.  There is Operation Comfort, which 
seeks to find therapists for people who are returning from the front. [3]  A 
couple of years ago at Fort Bragg, in one month there were about five cases of 
domestic violence that ended in murder, just because the re-entry into peacetime 
or into civilian life after the trauma of war is very difficult.  You can lend 
support in money or – those of you who are therapists yourselves – can offer 
time to connect with groups that help people make that transition.

One that speaks particularly to UU sentiments is bocajava.com. Send the troops 
good coffee! . . . It’s a piece of home to let the people over there know that 
they’re not forgotten.  Something special. [4]

And there’s Operation Home Front, which works with families left behind. [5]   
The provisions, the salaries that our soldiers get are a pittance.  For those 
who live off the base, they can hardly scratch out a living. And there is so 
much need, psychological and physical that these families need that there’s a 
way for us to be involved.  The term “Support Our Troops,” which we see 
everywhere, really has more than just support the mission or support the plans 
of our government.  It also involves supporting the people themselves, who for a 
variety of circumstances have found themselves in situations that are very difficult

We need to put a commitment to peace and Universalism and hope and care and 
compassion on the line.  The responsive reading says that it’s easier to 
venerate heroes than to listen to them and act upon their ideals.   

We have a lot of people in this country who are hurting.  And we can help.  We 
are here now, and we are standing in the tradition of universal compassion, 
universal compassion that includes our soldiers and the people over in Iraq, the 
people who are being detained.  It should include the whole world, and it’s a 
hard thing to do because we get caught up in the political fights of right and 
wrong, and our opinions.  But opinions matter little if we don’t see the people 
who are hurting and help them.

May we bless and be blessed.

1. American Red Cross, P.O. Box 37243, Washington, D.C. 20013
    www.redcross.org/donate/donate.html
    Facilitates communication between US soldiers and  families, financial aid

2. International Committee of the Red Cross, 19 avenue de la Paix, CH 1202 Geneva
    www.icrc.org/
    Visiting detainees  in  Iraq

3. Operation Comfort
    http://www.operationcomfort.com/
    Finds therapists for soldiers; families

4. http://www.bocajava.com
    Send coffee to the troops

5. Operation Homefront, 6309 Laketrail Dr., Fayetteville, NC 28307
    http://www.operationhomefront.net/FtBraggNC/
    Supports  families  of deployed  soldiers.