Page:The part taken by women in American history.djvu/349

316 in Richmond they raised a fund of thirteen thousand dollars in gold to aid Union prisoners, while their gifts of clothing, food and luxuries were of much greater value. Moreover, had we space, many pages might be filled with the heroic deeds of noble southern women who believed in the cause for which their husbands stood, and who sacrificed their homes and all that was most dear during the Civil War, and who worked prodigiously trying to contrive ways and means with which to relieve the sufferings which abounded everywhere in the southland. Their improvised hospitals were poorly supplied with the bare necessities for the relief of the sick and wounded. In and out of hospitals, the demands upon the humane were heartrending; but to the very last heroism characterized the women as well as the bravest of the men who fought and died in the cause of the Condederacy.

One of the greatest, if not the greatest woman of the nineteenth century, is Clara Barton, who, in a Christmas greeting to her legion of friends, writes: "I would tell you that all is well with me; that, although the unerring records affirm that on Christmas Day of 1821, eighty-four years ago, I commenced this earthy life, still, by the blessing of God, I am strong and well, knowing neither illness nor fatigue, disability nor despondency."

Miss Barton is the daughter of Stephen Barton, of North Oxford, Mass., a man highly esteemed in the community in which he dwelt. In early youth he had served as a soldier under General Wayne, the "Mad Anthony" of the early days of the Republic. His boyish years had witnessed the evacua-