Clara Barton

Clarissa Barton was a timid child in rural Massachusetts whose family sent her to teach school at seventeen in the hope it would bring her out of herself. It did. She founded a free school in New Jersey that grew to six hundred pupils, then resigned when the town appointed a man over her at twice the salary. She went to Washington and became a clerk at the Patent Office, one of the first women employed by the federal government.

When the Civil War began she started collecting supplies for the wounded, and in 1862 got permission to take them to the front herself. She arrived at Antietam with a wagon of bandages as surgeons were dressing wounds with corn husks. A bullet passed through her sleeve and killed the man she was tending. She worked through the night by lantern light and was there at Fredericksburg and in the trenches at Petersburg. Soldiers called her the "Angel of the Battlefield".

After the war she ran an office that answered letters from families of missing men, identifying some 22,000, and helped mark the graves at Andersonville prison camp. Exhausted, she went to Europe to rest and encountered the new International Red Cross, whose treaty the United States had refused to sign.

She spent years lobbying and in 1881, at sixty, founded the American Red Cross, sending it to floods, fires and the Spanish-American War. She ran it almost single-handedly, and in 1904 was forced out after criticism of her bookkeeping. She died in 1912 at ninety.