Clara Barton, Professional Angel. Elizabeth Brown Pryor

In later years she often stated that she was fifteen at the start of this, her earliest career. A letter from a close friend, dated in the spring of 1838, however, indicates that if she taught before this date he knew nothing about it. Moreover, her mill work, which she admitted was finished before she began to teach school, took place in 1839 when she was seventeen. Elsewhere Clara mentions that she was sixteen when she undertook her first summer session, yet her earliest extant teaching certificate (won after “an examination of the learned committee of one clergyman, one lawyer and one justice of the peace”) is dated 1839.³ Whatever her age, she felt the handicap of being but slightly older than her pupils. She had been treated as a child at home and had had little experience with the responsibilities of the working world, save two weeks at the looms of her brother's mill. “We had all been children together,” Barton wrote of her first pupils.⁴

      Barton taught her first classes in a barren stone building, “neither large nor new,” she recalled. An ungraded school, it was filled with rows of shabby desks into which were crammed forty curious pupils, ranging in age from toddlers to four young men in their late teens. In summer schools such as these, the pupils were apt to be girls and little boys who were not needed at home to help with the farm work. (School boards thought the sessions easier for that reason and paid the young women who taught them a salary substantially below the going rate for winter schools.) Facing her pupils from the teacher's platform the first day, Clara felt no optimism about the ease of her task. She found the pupils distracted by the sweet smell of meadow grass and the warm breezes, and knew the boys stood ready to test her. With a rush of panic, she realized she had no idea how to open a school. Lighting on the first object at hand, she opened a Bible. Too shy to address the pupils, she directed them to read from the text of the Sermon on the Mount. She was pleased to find them responsive and amusing, and to discover that the four larger boys could be checked with a stinging glance.⁵

      Elvira Stone recalled that her cousin Clara “took to teaching as natural as could be.”⁶ Clara was, in fact, a gifted pedagogue who formed an immediate and strong rapport with her pupils. Her own interest in learning was infectious, and her agile mind kept the pupils continually challenged. Moreover, she knew instinctively that if she made her expectations known her pupils would rise to the mark and that this would be an effective disciplinary tool. She coupled this with an unerring ability to earn their respect. When Miss Barton found that the boys played too roughly at the noon recess she joined the game, winning them over with her admirable talent for throwing a ball. “My four lads soon perceived that I was no stranger to their sports or their tricks…. When they found…that if they won a game it was because I permitted it, their respect knew no bounds.” Their admiration was carried over into the schoolhouse, and she found little need for the harsh punishments that characterized many common schools.⁷ A girl who sat in Barton's school attested to this when she wrote to her former teacher with fond memories. “I remember you walking about with your ruler in your hand.…I don’t remember that you ever punished anyone, you used your ruler for other purposes.”⁸ At the end of the term Barton's school received the highest standing in North Oxford for discipline. The young teacher remonstrated, stating that there had been no disciplinary actions during the whole term. “Child that I was,” Barton later wrote, “I did not know that the surest test of discipline is its absence.”⁹

      This ability to gain her pupils’ affections and discipline them gave her an unequaled reputation in the town, and she was soon in demand as a teacher. Initially Barton herself was uncertain about continuing to teach because she still felt that her own education was lacking. Her family, however, was far too pleased with her progress to allow her to decline. At the end of the next term, therefore, she reluctantly accepted a position with a school in Charlton, a village adjoining North Oxford. It was, again, a summer school, but one with a reputation for boisterous children and a need for discipline.¹⁰

      Charlton was just far enough away that Barton could not continue to live at home during the school term. Outwardly she faced the move from her family with more serenity than she had felt on former separations. Yet when her father drove her to the school at the commencement of her term, she admitted that her “cheery good-bye” was only “typical of most of the things said and done in practical life, altogether unlike the thing felt or meant.” She believed that she had reached a turning point in her life, a branch of the road along which she would have to find her way alone. This thought sobered her and reinforced her already pensive turn of mind, but the confidence she had gained from her teaching success helped to allay the sting of terror she had felt before on such occasions. Fortunately, too, the ache of separation from home was eased by the cozy and genial residence in which she boarded.¹¹

      The school in Charlton, like so many others Barton would see, had “a rather time worn edifice.” She taught fifty pupils, for which she received around two dollars a week. No advanced teaching was required. The schoolroom resounded only with the monotonous drone of ABCs, multiplication tables, and recitation of state capitals. Despite the easy curriculum, however, Barton worked hard for her salary, since the school was not only large but lived up to its rough reputation. She soon discovered that it was dominated by a group of unruly boys, whose leader was “contrary, sullen and half-insolent,” and that the members of this gang were not as easily managed as their counterparts in North Oxford. Attempts to win them over with smiles and respect brought only jeers and the exchange of knowing glances among the rowdies, who were certain that this schoolmarm would be broken as quickly as the rest.¹²

      When they began to seriously disrupt the classes and an attempt to contact the ringleader's mother gave no satisfaction, Barton was left with little choice but to save her school by drastic means. One morning, when the most troublesome boy swaggered tardily into the classroom, annoying the pupils and mocking Barton by refusing to make even a pretext of correctly reciting his lessons, she took action. She requested him to come forward, and as he walked saucily up the aisle, she pulled a long riding whip from her desk, lashing out and tripping him while the other pupils watched with horror. Barton continued to wield the whip, jerking him to his knees until he apologized to the school for his actions. She then dismissed the shaken students for the day and suggested that they have a picnic in the meadow near the school. Barton herself was shocked by this episode, which was her only experience with corporal punishment. It made an impression so lasting that in 1908 she would write that “all these years have not been able to efface [it].” Needless to say, it put an end to trouble in the school for that term. “I had learnt what discipline meant, and it was for all time as far as that school was concerned; none ever needed more than a kindly smile.”¹³

      The control Barton exercised over this school further enhanced her reputation. She was asked to teach it again the next year, and for nearly ten years her services were actively sought in both Oxford and the surrounding area. Rarely did she teach the same school twice. Though she allowed her older students a certain leeway in the subjects they studied, she was not an innovator in matters of curriculum; rather, she was challenged by the organization and discipline of the school. It intrigued her to ferret out the unique problems of each schoolhouse and to channel her pupils’ energies into study instead of mischief. But once the problems were conquered and the school settled down to a contented routine, Clara's active mind became distracted. For this reason she refused to teach again in Charlton, and after a short, unchallenging term at another neighboring town called West Millbury, she again sought a more demanding position. She was pleased, therefore, when the school board in Oxford requested that she teach the winter term of a particularly difficult school. When they offered her the salary usually paid women for the shorter and easier summer session, however, she declined. “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing,” she told the board, “but if paid at all, I shall never do a man's work for less than a man's pay.” It was a measure of Barton's growing confidence that she felt emboldened to make such a demand, and of her value as a teacher that the school board withdrew the original offer and paid what she requested.¹⁴

      Clara's monetary rewards were matched by increasing satisfaction in her work during these early years. She viewed herself as a serious, professional teacher, and unlike many young men and women, who saw teaching as a temporary station between the end of their own schooling and the beginning of a profession or marriage, she seems to have embraced her work as a long-term