She was a serious child, anxious to learn, but timid to try. Her later reminiscences of childhood were filled with stories of frightful thunderstorms, intimidating schools, encounters with snakes, and crippling illnesses. When she was six her sister Dolly, who had been an intellectual girl, became mentally unbalanced, and the family had to lock her in a room with barred windows. Once Dolly escaped and chased David’s wife, Julia, around the yard with an ax in her hand. Clara Barton never publicly mentioned her sister’s insanity, but she privately thought the illness had been brought on by Dolly’s unfulfilled desire to obtain a higher education. This rather frantic home-life and the presence of Dolly in the Barton household must have added greatly to her timidity and to her later emotional instability.
Barton developed great loyalty for her family, eccentric as they were. On one occasion she nursed her brother David for two years after he was seriously injured in a fall. Later she used her political influence to assist family members; for example, to defend a cousin’s job or to secure suitable military appointment for a relative. Throughout her life she was a faithful correspondent, continually interested in the affairs of nephews, nieces, cousins, brothers, and sisters. And in later years she described her family life in glowing terms, never mentioning her mother’s tantrums or Dolly’s insanity. Her devotion also extended to family friends.
The Bartons were quintessentially industrious. David and Stephen Barton were businessmen, successful pioneers of milling techniques. Clara Barton’s two sisters taught school; a cousin became the first woman Post Office official in Worcester County, Massachusetts. Such diligence was one of the great influences in Clara Barton’s life. “You have never known me without work,” she wrote when in her eighties, “and you never will. It has always been a part of the best religion I had.”
She began work early. She had been an intellectually precocious child and by her late teens was competent to teach. She first taught in the Oxford schools, and later she conducted classes for the children of workers in the Barton family mills. In these one-room schools she gained a reputation for first-rate scholarship and excellent discipline. She expelled and whipped students when necessary, but mostly she cajoled them into obedience through affection and respect. When her first school won the district’s highest marks for discipline, she remonstrated: “I thought it the greatest injustice ... [for] there had been no discipline.... Child that I was, I did not know that the surest test of discipline is its absence.”