Her poise and determined manner clearly impressed Peter Suydam, and Barton now underscored her persuasiveness with a trump card. She was, she told him, not an inexperienced and naive young woman but a veteran teacher of nearly fifteen years who had handled rougher boys than these, in rougher towns. Neither an adventuress nor a crusading idealist, she simply saw a chronic situation that needed remedying, and the idea of fulfilling that need challenged her.
Suydam was inspired by her words. He agreed to call a meeting of the school board to discuss the issue and invited Barton to attend. At the meeting she reiterated her arguments and effectively convinced the board that they should value her estimation of the situation, for as an experienced educator she had insight into the nature of the children. By the end of the evening she had won the confidence of the officials, who agreed to endorse a free school in the town. Moreover, she had won the school on her own terms, terms which would do much to establish the credibility of the experiment. Barton informed the board that she was willing to teach without salary, that they need provide only classroom space, but that the school must be supported and publicized by the school board. Without their approval she knew it would be considered merely another private school. “In fact,” she wrote adamantly, “it must stand by their order, leaving the work and results to me.”58
With some difficulty the board found an old brick schoolhouse—reportedly first erected in 1798—on Crosswicks Street, several blocks from the center of town. Its dilapidated condition delayed the school's opening, and Barton waited impatiently for the repairs to be completed. “You see I am making a stir among them don’t you?” she boasted to the ever-faithful Bernard; “Well it will never hurt them, it is time they stired [sic] themselves to fit up school houses in Jersey—of all old sheds you never saw the like.”59 Not content with merely airing the house (whose smell she claimed rivaled that of Cologne, Germany, said to be the worst-smelling city in Europe) and building new seats and benches, she instructed Peter Suydam to provide her with maps and blackboards. Blackboards were apparently something of an innovation in the town, but when Barton insisted that she would install them if he did not, Suydam laughingly acquiesced. “Yes, yes,” he replied, “you shall have them although no such mention is made in the contract.”60
The contract, in fact, stated little beyond licensing “Clara H. Barton to teach or keep school in said district for the space of one year.” Under the auspices of the school board, the opening of the school was announced in the local paper and on signs posted throughout the community. Finally in early July, after more delays and with much anticipation, Barton set out for her first day of class.61
She was greeted by a schoolhouse and yard devoid of children, save a few curious boys perched on the rail fence that surrounded the grounds. Bidding them a cheerful good morning, she strolled around the yard, pointing out birds’ nests and butterflies and speaking all the while of pleasantries, not of books or studies. The six boys followed her into the schoolhouse, where she still refrained from playing the rigid schoolmarm. Instead she asked them about themselves and slowly eased into the role of teacher. Using the most striking objects in the room—the large, colorful maps of the United States, world, and Europe—as focal points, she began to answer their questions about the great oceans and foreign lands. She wooed them into the fascination of learning, with the mysteries of continents and customs, with every dramatic tale she could remember. With a certain smugness she noted that they “seemed to find my stories and my conversation generally quite entertaining.” She feared they would not return after the noon recess. To her relief, however, their numbers grew. The afternoon wore on in the same vein, as she used friendship and adventure to convert her audience. “In that three hours until four o’clock we had travelled the world over,” she recalled. Clara left at the end of the day, still without speaking of books or slates, commenting only that she would be back the next day.62
Twenty boys stood outside the schoolhouse the next morning; by week's end she had nearly forty young faces to greet her. Barton had been confident of the school's success, but this ready response far surpassed her expectations or even her hopes. She believed the school would hold only fifty students, but in another week, teacher and pupils alike shoved and rearranged to squeeze in fifty-five. Barton gave up her own chair to an eager youngster, and when the news of this reached the school board, Peter Suydam sent a chair to her from his own parlor. She still attempted only a minimum of traditional instruction. “We were studying each other, more than books, and the chapters opened pleasantly.” Like her pupils in Hightstown, she found Bordentown students lacking in sound educational background but exceptionally well behaved.63
The students, bored with their previous enforced idleness and anxious to make up for lost time, were such eager learners that they surprised even their teacher. “I have two hours intermission…it yet lacks twenty minutes of that time and here they have all set studying as if their lives depended on it,” Barton wrote to Mary Norton soon after the school opened, “for the last 3/4 of an hour, I have invited them to play instead but they don’t want to, I think they are so queer, don’t you?”64 She set them to work learning to do sums, teaching arithmetic as a game—much as her brother Stephen had taught it to her—until they begged her to let them do more. While the fundamental branches of knowledge were honored, she let the advanced students experiment with the studies that interested them most. When she herself read the newly published Uncle Tom's Cabin and found it to be “excellent,” she gave it to the older boys. “My school boys…are reading and crying over it and wishing all sorts of good luck to Uncle Tom and the contrary to his oppressors,” she told a friend.65 As her reputation for academic excellence and discipline grew she found some girls anxious to join the classes. Although she had vowed to take no more pupils into the over-crowded room and each morning found boys crying to get in, she could not turn these girls away. “The large boys met the emergency by smuggling in a little boy beside each,” she noted proudly, “and my timid gentle girls found place.”66
So many pupils, and such crowded quarters taxed even Barton's considerable disciplinary talent. She discovered that it took “the best powers of thought and invention” to control the school. Her solution was to relate the rules of selfgovernment, which her classes in United States history were studying, to the school situation. Consulting the class in the matter, she asked their opinion—and approval—of a code of laws under which each pupil would be responsible for his or her own behavior. Although the students responded favorably to these proposals, the school board became alarmed when the news inevitably reached them. Their confidence in Barton's ability, which had risen so rapidly as the school flourished, sank, and they feared the experiment would end in defeat and mortification. Summoning the entire force of her personality and once again eschewing bombast for the art of persuasion, Barton secured a trial period for her disciplinary system. Promising that she would inform the board if the children became uncontrollable, she returned to the school and laid the case before the pupils themselves. “Now boys,” she said, “you see by this the reputation you bear among the best people of the town—how you are regarded by them…. You must either remain as you are or redeem yourselves.” As she had hoped, her students succeeded in proving the school board wrong.67
Like their counterparts in Charlton, Oxford, and Hightstown, the Bordentown pupils became Barton's devoted admirers. George Ferguson, a member of the group that Barton had encountered on the first day, treasured the memory of this teacher who had recognized and made the boys feel important both inside and outside of the classroom. Writing to Barton more than twenty years later, he gratefully recalled that “you was never ashamed to speak to one of your scholars in school or out it mattered not how our toilets were, ragged or dirty, we always received a kind word and smile of recognition.”68 Another observer also commented on the children's devotion: “I was often with her on little walks about town; and the girls and boys seemed to vie with each other in forestalling any wish of hers. Their affection and chivalry was received so graciously and naturally that it was a pleasure to witness.”69
Before the end of the term the number of children clamoring to get into the school had reached such proportions that Barton wrote to her brother for advice about alleviating the situation. Stephen