Barton's family had only an inkling of the trial through which she was passing. The clues in her letters were too scanty to give a full picture of the problem, but Stephen “thought there was something in the wind” and begged her to come home, to relax from business and spend time with their aging father.87 The family would be glad of her presence, he wrote, for they had troubles of their own. Otis Learned, the mischievous playmate of Clara's youth, was accused of robbing a safe in the company in which he worked. “I can hardly tell why,” complained Stephen, “only that his name is Larned [sic].”88 After she finally wrote “a long history” of her “trials and perplexities,” her brothers made a special effort to encourage her. “I suppose that you have done much to establish the system of free schools in the city and in so doing have done an infinite amount of good to the rising generations,” wrote Stephen.89 And later: “I am sorry that things have taken such a turn in the public schools, and think it must be unpleasant to you after you have done so much to help to establish them to feel that you cannot with propriety and respect to yourself continue to assist them.”90
Despite this show of support, Clara could scarcely imagine returning home. Whereas, less than a year earlier, her plans and prospects had been on the verge of fulfillment, they now lay wasted and scattered. Her own health was, to her, a sign of her failure to meet her ambitious goals and to accept with grace the blow to her pride. To return home again at thirty-two, with no future plans, was, in her mind, to cast herself once more into subservience. Moreover, there was, in the Learned robbery, yet another family scandal to be faced. After years of smalltown gossip centering on robberies, Dolly's tragic insanity, and the storms and rages of her mother, Barton felt she could not bear another such disgrace.
Clara left Bordentown in February, but it was not until mid-March that her brother received word from her. Picking up the envelope with the familiar copperplate handwriting, he was surprised to see that the postmark read “Washington, D.C.”
five
In her hasty departure from the rivalries in Bordentown, Clara Barton herself seems hardly to have known why she headed south. “I wanted the mild air for my throat,” she later claimed, stating that she believed Washington to be the furthest point south an unescorted woman could go with propriety. At other times she maintained that the decision was influenced by her interest in politics or the presence of the Library of Congress in the capital. Since the library offered her access to a greater variety of materials than she had ever before encountered, Barton hoped to spend her time in therapeutic study.1
Certainly her decision had little to do with any lure of city lights, for Washington in the early 1850s was hardly a stimulating metropolis. The capital had been plopped down into the wilderness a half century earlier, and unfinished public buildings still stood like splendidly incongruous islands in a sea of seedy and temporary structures. These lent an air of hesitancy to the city, as did the transient population that flocked to it, anxious to receive the favors of the men who governed there, and then, with unabashed fickleness, left town when better prospects were seen elsewhere. The existence of slavery in the capital, the sleepy tempo, and a lack of adequate public water or sewage facilities often startled those visiting from Europe or the northern United States. Social and political life ebbed and flowed with the sessions of Congress. Those seeking entertainment could look chiefly to the galleries of the Senate or House of Representatives, a stroll on the Capitol grounds, or to private levees, to which everyone, from lowly government clerks to foreign diplomats, was invited. Both the government and the social arena were dominated by those from below the Mason-Dixon line; the city spoke with a decidedly southern drawl.2
Barton welcomed the slow pace and balmy spring air, for she was battered by the overwork and disappointment she had met in Bordentown. She and Fanny Childs took rooms near the Capitol in one of the city's innumerable boarding houses. While her friend looked for a new school in which to teach, Barton settled in to the “dim quiet of the alcoves” and arranged an ambitious course of reading for herself. Still eager to make up for her “lost 10 years” of teaching, she sped through books until, even as her throat grew better, her eyes suffered from the strain. “I enjoyed my quiet, almost friendless and unknown life,” Barton wrote.3 Her belief that she had done the right thing in escaping the situation in Bordentown was reinforced when the news reached her from New Jersey that the town had lost faith in the schools and had dismissed the principal and several teachers. “We have…all come to the conclusion that you took a prudent course with the Bordentown school and left it at just the right time,” wrote Stephen in May 1854. “I think it will be a long time before they can have a peaceable publick school and they had better have none than to have any other.”4
Barton's life was “almost friendless,” but not completely so. Among her first acquaintances in Washington was Alexander DeWitt, congressman from her home district. A tall, congenial man and a distant cousin, he made it his business to offer Clara hospitality and to act as an influential “sympathizer and benefactor.”5 Through DeWitt, Barton met another early friend and patron: Charles Mason, the commissioner of patents. Calm, self-effacing, and with an imposing intellectual curiosity, Mason proved to be a stimulating companion. Moreover, he shared many of Barton's views about public-spirited philanthropy and impressed her with his earnest efforts to conduct Patent Office business in an atmosphere of scrupulous fairness. For his part, Mason found Barton to be an excellent conversationalist and an astute political observer.6
Impressed with Barton's motivation and credentials, Mason asked her to become governess to his twelve-year-old daughter, Mary.7 Before the arrangements could be settled, however, DeWitt used his influence to persuade Mason that she would be much more suited to work as a clerk in the Patent Office. To her surprise she was requested to attend a formal interview, and the commissioner went so far as to send his private carriage to pick her up.8 At the interview Mason offered her a job as a clerk, copying patent applications, caveats, and regulations at the very respectable salary of fourteen hundred dollars a year. By July 1854, she had put her reading aside and had taken on the new role of office worker.9
Barton had a naturally inquisitive mind, and the Patent Office must have seemed an especially stimulating atmosphere. Her working life had been dominated before by children, among whom she had neither peers nor competition. Now she was challenged and amused by a whole office of fellow workers. Moreover, the work of the office encompassed an enticing range of pursuits—not only the regulation and granting of patents but many types of scientific research and acquistion. Although the office was under the auspices of the Department of the Interior, it carried out many of the functions of the later Department of Agriculture, Smithsonian Institution, and Weather Bureau. It sponsored scientific expeditions around the world and had amassed a large collection of specimens, many relating to the natural history of North America and the background and inventiveness of its people. Charles Mason believed these articles were too valuable and too interesting to sit in the cellar in which he had discovered them. After he cajoled Congress into appropriating money to construct a large addition to the already imposing Greek Revival building, the Patent Office took on some aspects of a museum. A march up the high steps and along its arched and marbelized corridors became a necessary stop for visitors to the capital. “It contains many of the rarest curiosities in the United States,” Clara wrote enthusiastically to a former pupil, including “Jackson's dress worn at the battle of New Orleans, and scores of relics too numerous to mention.” Like other branches of the government, the Patent Office had its spindles of red tape, petty spoils, and wasteful paper shuffle, but with its emphasis on innovation, it kept its reputation as one of the more dynamic places to work in Washington.10
The office employed lawyers, patent examiners, and clerks, whose number was strictly regulated by law. The commissioner had the option of hiring temporary clerks when the rush of business required it, however. Mason had chosen to use a very liberal