well into her eighties she embarked on the study of Thucydides and Xenophon because she felt “ignorant” without the benefit of their insight.
Barton's arrival at her home was unceremonious, and she experienced a distressing feeling of never having left. The hills and wooded streams surrounding North Oxford looked pleasantly familiar, but nothing compelled her to stay in the town. She had left because she saw that her talents were under-used and her time wasted there. If she stayed now, her bold escape to Clinton would be meaningless, and she could look forward to little beyond simple teaching and family association.1
Back once more in the scenes of her childhood and the ten years of teaching, which she later wrote “always haunted me as lost,” Barton felt again the old agonies of uselessness and dependence.2 Her brothers were busily rebuilding their mills; the school she founded for the laborers was thriving without her assistance; sister Sally was thoroughly preoccupied with raising her two sons. Her mother's recent death had broken up the household, and Clara wrote sadly that she felt she was returning to a “home that was still a home, and yet not all a home.”3 Barton wished her father would remarry and keep the old farm going.4 Realizing, however, that he was over seventy, “still hale” but comfortably established at brother David's house, she knew there was little she could do to further influence or help him.5 Gradually she reached the uncomfortable conclusion that everything was thriving without her and that to remain in North Oxford would be to eat again the bread of dependence. “I know too well how bitter it is,” Barton lamented.6 Forty years later she could still recall the discomfort of that time and summed up her reasons for leaving in a single forceful phrase: “I was not needed.”7
Throughout August and the lingering brightness of Indian summer she pondered her future. Distracted and more self-contained than ever, she spent the time riding horseback. One fellow townsman later recalled how “stately and noble” she appeared to him at this time. Preoccupation with her immediate plans probably kept Barton from noticing that it shocked several people when she chose not to dress in mourning for her mother. (It startled them further to hear her declare that she did not grieve and that it would thus be insincere for her to wear the traditional black.8) She made some effort to socialize by enjoying the opportunity to renew acquaintances with Elvira Stone, Annie and Frances Childs, and her nephew Bernard Vassall. But behind her ready humor and easy conversation was a nagging doubt about the future. “I could feel no other way at home,” Barton wrote a few months later, admitting that she was preoccupied with plans to get away. She knew that she must leave; deciding how to go was the only rub. “I had no where to go no one to go [to] nothing to go with and no way of earning my living if I did go anywhere, at least I had no employment or situation in view.”9
In this frame of mind Barton was eager to seize an opportunity that presented itself in the early fall. Charles and Mary Norton had remained favorites among her acquaintances at the Clinton Liberal Institute. Anxious to retain the friendship, they wrote to Clara, asking her to visit them in Hightstown, New Jersey. Mary was a mature and deeply religious girl of sixteen; in Clinton she had looked to her friend Clara for guidance and viewed her with a young girl's idolizing eyes. Both Clara and Mary had enjoyed the relationship and had used the mentor and protege roles to help bridge their fourteen-year age gap. And of course there was Charlie, now a handsome and ebullient twenty-one-year-old, with whom she felt a strong intellectual tie. When her friends’ parents wrote to underscore the invitation, Barton accepted readily. In mid-October she set off, with no knowledge of the future but grateful to escape the stifling atmosphere of home.10
Traveling by train and steamer, Barton arrived in Hightstown, where she was met by “the familiar contours of my old friend Charlie Norton.”11 He drove her through the village—a simple community consisting of a railroad depot, general store, and post office, and Universalist and Baptist churches—to the Nortons’ farm three miles away. It was a prosperous place, containing 178 acres of level, fertile land on which the Nortons grew wheat, corn, and fruits, and raised sheep, cattle, and dairy cows. The mixed farming, aiming as it did at self-sufficiency, must have pleased Clara, reminding her of the similar farms on which she had grown up.12 The house too was inviting. She would remember it as “a commodious country house,” with a sitting room geared to family activities. Books and papers covered a center table, a piano stood in the corner, and a settee and potted plants gave a cozy and comfortable air to the room.13
She soon found that the Nortons were “the XYZ in Hightstown,” dominating local activities and commanding unparalleled respect.14 Richard Norton, the family patriarch, had been raised a Quaker but converted to Universalism as a young man, much as Barton's own father had. Once convinced of the truth of Universalist doctrines, Richard Norton enthusiastically espoused them to his neighbors and relatives. His own position in the community had been consolidated by locally prestigious family connections. His wife, who was affectionately known as “Mistress Nelly,” let her husband dominate her as he did the rest of the family. Charged with running the household, she appeared to Clara to be “slight, active, orderly, busy” and to possess “nervous hands and, clear blue eyes full of capacity and care.” The family further consisted of the Nortons’ six children, four of whom still lived at home. Besides Mary—the youngest and the only girl—and Charlie, there were James and Joshua, who were in their late twenties when Barton arrived. A housekeeper, Margaret Haskins, completed the household.15
The Nortons embraced Clara wholeheartedly, and her early days in New Jersey were filled with pleasure in the company of this merry group. “A sterling family it is,” she told her nephew, “good as gold and true as the sun, every one of them.”16 They included her in church activities and weddings, barn raisings and nut-gathering expeditions. She especially enjoyed Charlie's company. Together they explored neighboring towns or sat in the Nortons’ drawing room writing letters on a shared lap desk.17 The evenings of teasing and piano music, of the boys’ antics as they “telegraphed” secret messages to her through the wall, gave her a strong sense of fellowship, which the Nortons shared.18 “I have learned a Quaker welcome and a warm hearty one it is too,” she reported.19 When, after two weeks, she talked of returning to Hubbell s, the family refused to listen.
The Nortons sensed, however, that Barton could not long remain comfortable without an occupation. Soon after her arrival, Richard Norton asked her if she thought she would be able to teach school. She had chosen not to reveal her past history in Clinton and had kept the policy—”it is my way you know”—in Hightstown.20 Thus it was with skepticism that Norton approached her, and with hesitancy that she replied. The position that was offered was at the nearby Cedarville School, renowned for its rough gang of boys, who were especially fearsome during the winter term. The troubles outlined to her at the school must have seemed an old familiar story by now, but she told the Nortons only that she would try, if they would send Mary along to help her.21
“Commenced school,” Clara noted in her diary on October 23, 1851. Her practiced eye must have noticed, with mingled pleasure and frustration, the similarities between this country school and those over which she had presided for the past ten years. The building itself was woefully like the ramshackle structures she had fought to improve in North Oxford, and the expressions that showed on the faces of her pupils were also familiar. She read expectation and timidity on the countenances of the younger children, but among the older boys the looks were challenging and defiant.22
Clara Barton was in her element in these simple surroundings. She let Mary introduce the children to her one by one, and when she came to one large boy, Hart Bodine, she startled him by stating that she knew him to have “the reputation of a great rogue in school” but expected him to behave now. She further abashed the boy by asking him to help her remove the switches that had been used by the previous teacher. “When she had him carry them all outdoors and break them into small bits,” the boy's mother recalled, “and tenderly took him by the hand, assuring him she would never need them, for he was one of her big boys and she could depend on him to help keep order in the school, he was simply overwhelmed.” Barton saw that the students had come to expect chastisement and received it almost as recreation. When she told them there would be no punishment, the