Transcripts For CSPAN3 1865 Person Of The Year Elizabeth Bro

St uncorrected proof of that book standing at this podium during the introduction of our 2007 symposium about robert e. Lee z ofte as isn often true, theres a hi story behind elizabeths rise to historian. She studied with the now president of harvard university. And i must tell a story about drew. When she waswh madee the president of harvard, people were saying le, sh isnt this unbelievable . Shes the first female to be theto president of harvard and i commented to her that i thought it was more remarkable she was the first prepped of thefriend of the confederacy. But she embarked as a career at arlington house. She published clara barton professional angel. Meanwhile, her career took off in a different direction when she entered the u. S. Foreign service and served 20 years. Is now this is typical background for a civil war historian. Zabeth elizabeth served 20 years as a highly decorated senior diplomat and conventional arms negotiator for the state al department. She has spokenl all over the world on American History. In american diplomacy and appears regularly on radio and Television Programs based on hernow work. Now retired and were great to great have her here with us in he richmond, now retired from the n and foreign service, shes a promises fulltime historian and is continuing an important study ofof abr abraham lincoln. Nd gen ladies and gentlemen elizabeth pryor. [ applause ] good afternoon. Ce thanks for such a very nice th introduction and thanks to the American Civil War museum and john koski in particular for arranging this program. Ave and thanks to you. Youve been a champion audience. Yo so ill flatter you also. S a but it actually is a pleasure to th speak to a group thats so knowledgeable. So quick g with good questions and you c follow up and newsy information. Its great that you can get the nuances without having somebody smooth them over for you. Best for now we just heard powerfour great la talks, but weve saved the best for last. And i have the pleasure of rkable talking about a remarkable quir visionary and feisty and quirky ng person. So its a bit like having a reward at the end of a long day. When i first got the message from john koski asking me to pr give a presentation i thought i ask was going to ask me to speak about somebody else. My house is populated by a popula number of historical ghosts. So i thought he was going to ask me to speak about robert e. Lee or maybe abraham lincoln, and i was a little dishart neartened, because i didnt think i could f th legitimately make the case for either of those or maybe even should make the case for them for person of the year in 1865. I thought their laurels should plea come in different years. But i was extremely pleased when he asked me to talk about deserv someone elsees and its the person i think deserves to win for 1865. Job i think my colleagues did an excellent job, but this is the person i think deserves the on designation. Not only for what this person did in 1865, but for how those deeds changed the world, and a deed affected the life of every person in this room. Now you recall that on may 23 and it24 1865, Union Soldiers of every rank flanked the president and had a mighty victory display, but someone was absent from that parade. Raerson was prominent enough that aides in the white house went out onto the portico to see if they had missed the moment, if they could see this person in the parade. And they were quite annoyed when they didnt see who they thought they were going to. One of them took the time to note it down in his diary. And he said, one person who should be here is ms. Clara barton. She has been known and called the angel of the battle field. She was in fredericksburg during the terrible burnside battle there, having crossed the river on the pontoon bridge while the rebels were shelling it. She was there again last summer when the city was filled with our wounded after the battle of the wilderness. Im told that she seemed on such occasions totally incensible to danger. Now, as it happens clara barton had been invited to be in that victory parade. She had a good reason for not being there. She had work to do. As Horatio Nelson taft noted clara barton was already a household name in 1865. She had done everything he mentioned and more. She had part of her skirt blown away as she crossed that pontoon bridge in fredericksburg. She was also under heavy fire at Cedar Mountain second manassas, fort wagner and spotsylvania. At an feet tim, a bullet whizzed under her arm as she was cradling a soldier, wounded soldier on the field, cut through her plows and killed that man. You know i thought at one point that i had been possibly been hoodwinked by some of claras stories, they were so dramatic because this is a story she told in a series of lectures that she gave. I thought, well, clara was her up best publicist sometimes and so maybe something about this is true but not quite. And when we were searching through some newly discovered rooms of hers on 7th street in washington, d. C. , where she lived after the war and she stashed a whole a lot of her stuff, one of the things we found was a blouse with a bullet hole going under there. [ laughter ] at an teat tim, she also assisted at amputations under artillery fire when the sur johns assistants flinched. When they ran out of bandables, she bound up the wounds with green corn leaves. She also solicited supply, basketballered the War Department for better treatment for the soldiers and directed four regimental hospitals. Through it all, she treated the wounded of both sides equally. Now, clara barton was not the only woman who did splendid work for the armies. On both sides, many, many women volunteered. Some 8,000 women on the union side alone worked in the hospitals. What sets barton apart is that she was actually working on the field under heavy fire most of the time. She once said that my place is anywhere between the bullet and the hospital. When she returned from one field, she described wringing the blood from the pot both tomorrow of her skirts to relieve the weight about her feet. Needless to say all of this was remarkable enough to win laurels for clara barton, but thats not why she deserves to be person of the year for 1865. January 1865 found clara parton supervising a hospital at city point. It was the beginning of an astonishing year, during which she recognized a series of badly needed reforms and began to put them in place. At the time, her ideas were visionary. Today, we cant imagine our World Without them. As she spoke to the men in the hospital barton noted how many were desperate that their families should know what happened to them. And she realized that there was a glaring gap in army accountability. By 1864, strict roll calls were required and meticulous rosters of army remments were kept but next to many of the names, the word missing was placed. And increasingly so after the terrible battles of spring 1864. Prison records on both sides were, at best, incomplete. In fact, by the end of the war, half of the union dead were unknown, unnamed. And some 200,000 were officially listed as missing. These figures were shocking enough but what barton understood was that raw statistics alope could not capture the mental anguish of the uncertainty that these peoples families felt. Absolutely maximized the scars and suffering that the nation had already undergone. This was not just a problem for the military you a problem for the american people, a terrible burden, both north and south. But the army and navy had no mechanism to find out what had happened to so many of their men. Barton recognized that the only record, as it were of these soldiers was in the memory of their comrades. Brothers in arms are called where one had fall on captured or a patrol boat had gone down or, in some cases, who had disappeared while straggling. Barton had also begun to receive a great many requests from anxious families for information about the whereabouts of individuals. She was a known name people thought she was working in the hospitals. Maybe she had seen my son or my husband. She wanted to create a system by which she could match those inquiries with information provided by hospital workers wounded soldiers, Company Captains and returning prisoners, prisoners who just at that point, were beginning to return. And she came up with the idea of publishing lists of names of people thought to be missing in newspapers and to request anyone who had knowledge about them to send it to her. She would be a kind of passthrough. She would get the information and send it along, both to the War Department and to the families. This was a homemade cottage project, but the information was almost impossible to find in any other way. Barton tried to see president lincoln about it in february 1865, but he wouldnt see her. Lincoln did not like strongminded women. [ laughter ] and in fact more or less what today we would call dissed every single one who came to his office including Julia Ward Howe Susan B Anthony, harriet beacher stowe, Anna Dickenson and so on. All of them were working for his cause but he refused to see them. So, bart. Got her friend, senator henry wilson to lobby for her and in the end general ethan allen hitchcock, who was in charge of prisoners approved the project. She got her lists published in the newspapers through some connections and cronies that she had there and she had them published in all the major papers of new york, philadelphia, boston and new orleans and charleston. She had a Little Office for a while at man nap poe his where the returning prisoners were coming in but later moved the operation, if thats what you could call this to her rooms on 7th street. She always hoped that the military would officially take on the project and give her a Proper Office and some staff you for a variety of reasons, that never happened. Some of this had to do with red tape, some of it had to do with personality, some had to do with resistance of for having a woman, any woman, even clara barton sitting in the male precinct of the War Department n the end, she not only virtually did the job by herself, but paid for it. She had worked for free throughout the war and did so again during all of 1865. By the end of that year, she had used up her ready cash and her inher tans from her father. Its not the first time in my life that ive come to the bottom of the bag, she wrote in her diary that christmas. I guess ill die a pauper yet. But in its way bartons scheme had been a success. She was receiving thousands of letters a week what she called the collective coinage of aching hearts. The War Department was beginning to take her work seriously and she had been able to identify more than 22,000 of the missing. Most of them were dead. You at least their families could move forward with certainty. An important part of the story began on a day when a horribly thin young man named dore rance atwater contacted barton. He had been taken prisoner after gettysburg and ultimately had ended up at andersonville prison. Because of his exceptional handwriting, atwater had been given the rather grisly job of accounting for each days death cataloging them on a roster. The numbers grew so horrifying that atwater began to fear that prison officials would either falsify or destroy the death rolls. So he secretly copied them and he was able to spirit them out when i was finally released in the spring of 1865. He brought them to barton to compare with her own lists of missing men and more than 13,000 names matched. Atwater also told barton that the men had been buried in long common graves with only a number to mark the spot, but that he had noted the numbers next to the names of the dead on his ledger. Barton decided right then and there to go to the scene and properly mark the graves. She took her plan to general hitchcock and then later to secretary stannen, who, for once, received her warmly and when stanton heard of bartons plan to make andersonville memorial to the men who had perished there he embraced the plan. He asked atwater to travel back to the site, sent a military contingent along with him and he invited barton to accompany them. So, in july 1865 barton began a remarkable odyssey into the heart of the devastated south. It was a very painful journey. Roads and Railway Lines were destroyed. Citizens were hostile. Military men in charge of the expedition were not particularly pleased that a lady was in their minds, just along for the ride. Parton and her tales about andersonville prison from returning prisoners, and there were many prisons north and south that were quite terrible places, but i think we are safe in saying that andersonville stood out for its horrendous conditions of exposure and starvation. We dont entirely know the reasons for this. Robert e lee said that the confederacy was broke. By the time andersonville was started and that his own soldiers were starving at the same time but other people said that in that part of georgia, there was plenty of food and water and plenty of wood and other materials that they could have made proper housing. In any case, whether because of mismanagement or the personality of the common dant andersonville did seem to be a particularly harsh place. Barton was one of the first persons to see this dreadful place after its closure. The relishes of imprisonment were everywhere. Stockades where the men had been crowded, burr rose in the earth where the prisoners had tried shelter themselves, the deadline that they were shot for stepping over. She thought she had seen everything in the war. Every terror it had to offer, every built of brutality every kind of deprivation. But nothing had prepared barton for the horror of andersonville. I have looked upon its terrible face, she wrote, but friends not in the same breath in which i would speak of anything else would i speak of this. My heart sickened, stood still and my brain whirled and the light of my eyes went out. Overwhelmed, she consoled herself in the evenings with mr. Tufts blackberry cordial. She also began to formulate a plan. Fortunately, the lists atwater had made corresponded to the numbered pass graves and began to lay out a space as a real cemetery to market graves with names and regiments to plant gardens around the remnants of suffering. When the army team fat faltered parton lettered the headboards herself. Finally, 12,500 names were memorialized there. The captain in charge still shunned her and the other male workers pointedly ignored her, but in the end, barton they paid barton an enormous tribute. When the cemetery was completed and about to be dedicated, bart. Was chosen to raise the flag over the newly identified graves. I advanced and ran it up amid the cheers of the men she wrote in her diary. The work was done. The dedication of the cemetery at andersonville was country wide news. On october 7, 1865, harpers weekly ran as its cover story a lithograph of ms. Clara barton raising the flag. And of course, today, its both a National Cemetery and National Historic site. One other thing happened during the weeks at andersonville that strongly affected bartons work during 1865. When word got out she was there local africanamericans began to visit her, often coming long distances, they had heard of lincolns assassination and some were being duped into believing that the emancipation proclamation had now been returned and they were not free. Others were being kept in a kind of quasislavery with the promise of wages but no payment ever forthcoming much i think dr. Newbie alexander did an excellent job of explaining some of the situations that the freed men found themselves in. Word got out that an honest yankee woman was in the neighborhood and it seems to have traveled very quickly because right away barton had many people at her door, some days more than 100 former slaves. She told them that lincoln was, indeed, dead, but read them the 13th amendment to the constitution, and army orders that prohibited keeping anyone in forced labor. She also reported the situation to secretary stanton. This was not the first time barton had encountered the difficulties of freed persons n 1863 while stationed in south carolina, she had been exposed to the black population on sea islands and to experiments an education and job training that were going on there. She hospital known much about slavery until that time but it had powerfully affected her and especially after she witnessed the bravery of the u. S. Colored troops at the assault on fort wagner. She increasingly saw the destiny of the country being bound up in the way it handled the societial revolution that came about really as a result of emancipation n 1865, barton pledged to work on behalf of a africanamericans africanamericans, writing to joseph grieving very active in that movement and later to Frederick Douglass to offer her services for freed mens education. During debate over Voting Rights she sided with douglas and others who thought the ballot should be given directly to africanamericans without complicating the issues with womens suffrage or other extrainious matters. She was a i lovelong feminist and vocal advocate of womens entitlement to vote. Barton would write requests if the door be not wide enough to admit all at once and one must wait, then i am willing. I am willing to stand back and see the old slave go through before me while i stand with head uncovered. I would add that although the experiences at andersonville troubled barton deeply she never stopped treating people the same in all regions of the country. Her office of missing men searched for southerners as well as for union men. And when she directed the red cross, every relief field but one she worked on was in a southern state. To say that bartons work in the summer of 1865 was pioneering is to understate the case. No one had taken the trouble to account for missing men. No one had even considered them important once off the fields except as a casualty statistic. No one had considered the dignity of recognizing every soldier and the importance of every soldiers family. No one had figured out how to search for the missing, let alone honor them by caring enough to make the effort n later years of the 19th censure ray number of groups did make it their business. Both north and south to mark graves, erect memorials and pay tribute to the unknown dead. And of course, today the military credo is that every individual counts that no one gets left behind. But in 1865, nobody was doing that except clara barton. Bartons work with missing men at andersonville and