Clara Barton, who founded the American Red Cross but was later pushed out of that organization, is the focus of today’s #stampoftheday, a3-cent stamp issued on September 7, 1948. (It’s not clear why the stamp was issued on September 7; the day is not her birthday, the anniversary of when she died, or linked to the founding of the Red Cross.)

Barton, who was the 10th woman to appear on a US stamp, clearly was remarkable. She was a teacher who, in 1852, launched New Jersey’s first free school (in Bordentown, south of Trenton). But after the town built a new building for the school, the local school board replaced her with a man. Reflecting later on the experience, Barten said “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing, but if paid at all, I shall never do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay.” In 1855, she moved to Washington D.C. and became the first woman to work as a clerk in the federal government. But due to political opposition to women doing such work, her job was downgraded to that of copyist. A year later, when Democrat administration James Buchanan won the presidency, she was fired because of her “Black Republicanism.”

Her shift to nursing was not really planned. On April 19, 1861, pro-Confederate supporters in Baltimore attacked regiments from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania that were on their way to Washington. The four soldiers killed in that attack were the first to die in the Civil War. The remaining victims travelled by train to Washington, DC. Hearing of the attack, Barton provided aid to the about 40 wounded soldiers when they arrived and continued to aid them by taking supplies to the unfinished Capitol Building where they were being housed. Barton, along with several other women, began providing clothing, food, supplies and support for soldiers who had been wounded in nearby battles after the war began in earnest. In addition, she began making public appeals for donations including advertising in the local papers in her home state of Massachusetts.

Initially the War Department and field surgeons opposed her efforts to distribute those materials to battlefield facilities and provide assistance there as well. But in August 1862 US Surgeon General William A. Hammond gave her a general pass allowing her to travel with the army ambulances “for the purpose of distributing comforts for the sick and wounded, and nursing them,” (help that not only include medical care but also reading books, writing letters to their families for them, and just talking with sick and wounded soldiers.) Not long afterwards, she traveled through the night with a wagon full of supplies after the battle of Cedar Mountain. The surgeon at the field hospital later wrote, “I thought that night if heaven ever sent out an angel, she must be one – her assistance was so timely.” (Barton became known as the “Angel of the Battlefield,” a phrase that appears on the first-day cover for the stamp.)

Towards the end of the war, Barton discovered that thousands of letters from distraught relatives to the War Department were not being answered because the soldiers they were asking about were listed as missing. She contacted President Lincoln and was given permission, and set up the Office of Missing Soldiers. Barton and her assistants wrote 41,855 replies to inquiries and helped locate, bury, and mark the graves of more than 22,000 missing men, including 13,000 who died in Andersonville, a notorious Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia. (In 1996, while exploring a building scheduled for demolition, a government employee discovered over 1,000 objects associated with the office in a boarded-up attic. The building was preserved and turned into to the Clara Barton Missing Soldiers Office Museum, which opened in 2015.)

Mentally and physically exhausted, Barten closed the office in 1868 and traveled to Europe where she learned about the Geneva Convention on how wounded soldiers should be treated as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), an organization created to provide such assistance. When she returned to the United States, she began working on a dual project of getting the government to ratify the Geneva Convention and to create an American chapter of the ICRC. She lobbied President Rutherford B. Hayes, who initially expressed interest but, worried that the treaty would be seen as a “possible entangling alliance” with European nations, decided not to sign it. Undaunted, Barton established the American Red Cross (ARC) in 1881. She also approached Hayes’ successor, James Garfield, who was supportive but was assassinated before he could act. However, his successor, Chester A. Arthur, agreed to sign and on May 16, 1882, the U.S. Senate ratified it.

Over the next two decades, the ARC provided relief after a variety of natural and man-made disasters including the Johnstown Flood and the Galveston hurricane. It also provided aid to refugees from the Spanish-American War. Her work and that of the ARC received increasing coverage. But a new generation of all-male scientific experts began to question her idiosyncratic leadership style, which they claimed was not appropriate for a large organization. In 1904, before she could be officially forced out, the 84-year old Barten resigned. She founded the National First Aid Society and she continued that work until she died at her Maryland home in 1912.

Sadly, ARC refused to acknowledge her role for many years. Most notably, in 1917, when ARC’s monumental headquarters opened on a site near the White House, no one even mentioned Barton’s name during the dedication ceremony. Moreover, the tablet on the stairway to building says only that it honors the “labors and ministrations to the sick and wounded” done by “the women of the North and .. the women of the South” during the Civil War.

For her part, it’s not clear Barten would have been offended because her focus was on the work, not the credit. Or, as she once said, “an institution or reform movement that is not selfish, must originate in the recognition of some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering, or diminishing the sum of happiness.”

Be well, stay safe, fight “to alleviate some evil that is adding to the sum of human suffering, or diminishing the sum of happiness,” and work for peace.