habit of “taking the pupils into her confidence.”24 One student noted that she rarely sat at her desk, preferring to walk among the children or to stand at the stove “with one foot crossed in somewhat masculine fashion and resting on the hearth.”25 At recess she played ball with the boys or talked with them of philosophy. “Button” was the favorite game on nasty days, and she sometimes joined in the fun. “Then they are so overwhelmed they can find no means of expressing this gratitude but by giving me the button every time they go ‘round,” she told Bernard.26 By setting herself with the pupils instead of against them, and by establishing clear standards at the outset, she kept discipline by simply expecting them to conform to her behavioral norms. By the end of November, her reputation was so well established that she had eight or ten pupils from other districts in the school and at one time crowded sixty pupils under the leaky roof.27 “To all who remember Clara Barton as a teacher at Cedarville,” wrote one Hightstown resident, “her success is still a tale of wonder.”28
At the time Barton wrote that it was “the most pleasant school thus far that I ever had.”29 Nevertheless, there were elements of the job that disturbed her. The children had been poorly trained academically; they had been exposed only to spelling and simple arithmetic, a shocking state of affairs for pupils in their teens. The students were anxious to learn, however, and Barton instituted classes in geography, American history, and natural philosophy. More bothersome to Barton was her discovery that the school was not free. Each student paid two dollars per term for basic studies and an additional dollar for higher branches of learning. The proceeds went to the teacher and constituted her pay. Imbued with the long and sacred traditions of free public education in Hubbell s, Barton found it a difficult situation to accept. She acknowledged that teaching here was more profitable than in New England, but it dismayed her to bill the students at term's end, and she relieved herself of this burden by soliciting the aid of Mary and Charles during the accounting process. “I had kept time for grown men,” Clara remarked, “but never for little children.”30 Although she quietly sought aid from the state, she received only $19.10 for the term, barely enough to keep the schoolhouse repaired.31 After considering starting a campaign to rid the area of subscription schools, Clara decided against it. “I was in a different social atmosphere, and realizing in a way the value of discretion, I kept my reflections to myself.”32
Barton's school was going well, but troubles appeared in other areas of her life. Chief among these was the lack of privacy she felt in the Norton household. What had begun as a pleasant feeling of inclusion in the family's activities had become a social burden. By January 1852 she had grown tired of the entertainments, which consisted “chiefly in the attempt to have as many kinds of cake as possible on one's table.”33 Used to interspersing companionship with solitude, Clara found tedious the expectation that even letter writing would take place in the family drawing room amidst the distractions of piano playing and conversation. Worse yet, her presence was required on every family outing. The situation became absurd one Sunday morning when Barton decided not to accompany the Nortons to church. “I…thought that need make no difference with the rest of them,” she wrote in exasperation to Bernard Vassall, “but not an inch would one of them go…. I offered to go when I see [sic] the effect I was producing but they would not allow it on any consideration.”34 To avoid the confusion, she resorted to writing her diary and correspondence in the schoolroom while her pupils studied, and privately sought a way to remedy the problem. Spring found Barton still complaining to her diary of her inability to determine her own activities, however. She had just begun writing a letter to her brother when “a wild set of company came from church and everything must be laid aside—pass a foolish and unsatisfactory day with which I am morally sure no one could have been much pleased.”35
At this time, too, a set of romantic entanglements left her confused and alternately exhilarated or depressed. It was a period when Clara indulged in flirtation and several young men seriously courted her. Charlie Norton was still among the suitors, and she was as attracted to his fine intellect, genial nature, and good looks as ever. Together they visited Trenton and Philadelphia, went sleigh riding, and roamed the woods. When he returned to Clinton she missed him and anxiously awaited his arrival home. But Charlie was her junior by nearly a decade. Whether he knew of the age difference or not—for, as she wrote, the good citizens of Hightstown had no idea of her past, and she might “have been taken for any age from 15 to 25”—there was a difference in experience that gave a certain adulation to his view of her. Barton found this flattering, but, as with Oliver Williams and others she would relate to in this way, it fostered on her part a sense of superiority that precluded a response to Charlie's affectionate gestures. The situation was further complicated by the flirtation of Charlie's brothers, James and Joshua. They liked to tease her by “bearding” her, their term for drawing their rough beards across her face in mock kisses. Her protests were gen erally ignored; indeed, as James reported, they “only set Joshua on all the more.”36
Another Hightstown swain, Edgar Ely, put in his appearance soon after Clara's arrival in the town. A lawyer and self-taught scholar, Ely impressed her as “one of the most unpretending men I ever met.”37 He patiently accompanied her as she walked to and from school in her tall rubber boots, took her sleigh riding, and invited her to use his extensive library.38 The Nortons liked to rib Barton about his habit of meeting her in the road and abruptly turning around to walk the other way with her.39 Clara showed some initial enthusiasm for this admirer, but after a short time his attentions barely rated a mention in her diary.
Clara was, in fact, preoccupied with an interest of her own. Noted generally in her diary as “JLE,” he was Joshua Ely, a farmer who lived near Philadelphia. How and when Barton met this young man is unclear, but by the time of her removal to Hightstown they were regular correspondents. The frequency of their letters increased during Barton's stay there, as did the anticipation with which she awaited the mail. She became “rather melancholy” when she received no letters; then her feelings soared when the familiar envelopes arrived. “Alone, quite happy,” she wrote in her diary on March 19, 1852; “J's letter was longer than usual and of course pleased me in proportion to its length.”40 This was, however, to be the last such jubilant notation. By March 31 Clara was expressing surprise that she had not heard “from JLE think must be sick or worse but fear to imagine.”41 When a few days later she still had received no letter, she was so agitated that she could not concentrate on work or conversation. Acutely sensitive to the fact that at thirty she had had no serious love affair, she concluded that “there is no such thing as true friendship, at least not for me.” She evidently determined to find the root of Ely's silence, for a fortnight later, having still received no letter, she visited her friend. The details of their meeting are omitted from Barton's diary, but that it dashed her romantic hopes is evident from her entry of April 20: “Have kept no journal for a month or more had nothing to note as I had done nothing but some things have transpired in the time which are registered where they will never be effaced in my lifetime.”42 No further communication with Joshua Ely is recorded after this date.
During this period of turmoil—exacerbated by news of yet another burning at the Barton Mills in North Oxford and squabbles with the parents of a few of her pupils—Barton's mood was characterized by a heightened depression. Amidst the laughing (and ever-present) Nortons she felt alone and under pressure to maintain a cheery countenance. “I have seldom felt more friendless,” she lamented. “True I laugh and joke but could weep that very moment and be the happier for it.”43 The depth of her despair caused her to lose confidence in herself and the world. Even as she struggled to stop her “useless complaints,” she seriously considered suicide.44 “There is not a living thing but would be just as well off without me,” she wrote on March 11; “I contribute to the happiness of not a single object and often to the unhappiness of many and always my own, for I am never happy.”45 The whole world seemed false and brought her to her “old inquiry again, what is the use of living in it.” “I have grown weary of life,” she concluded, “at an age when other people are enjoying it most.”46
It is tempting to view these musings as Barton's earliest struggle with what was to become a lifelong battle against