At the age of 78, Clara Barton set out on her last great relief effort as head of the American Red Cross.  It was September of 1900 and Galveston, Texas had suffered extensive damage from a hurricane.  Thirty-one years after Barton learned of the International Red Cross, and nineteen years after she established the American Association of the Red Cross, Barton loaded supplies from her warehouse home in Glen Echo, Maryland and headed south roughly 1500 miles to Galveston to aid in the relief efforts by passing out food and supplies and searching for the dead.  Barton’s initiative and dedication to helping victims became her signature, whether it was children, minorities, or those in despair, Barton was the nurturer and caretaker to thousands over her career.  In remembering Clara Barton, Henry Breckenridge, former Secretary of War once stated, “Wherever humanity called for help—in the Balkans or in Strassburg—in Cuba or in Galveston—in Paris or on the American battlefields of the sixties—there came the ministering hand of Clara Barton.”[1]   In that desire to help humanity, Barton became the nation’s mother, caring and protecting those too weak or too lost to care for themselves, making sure American’s had food to eat and a place to live.  Through an analysis of the role of a motherhood in the nineteenth century and Barton’s disaster assistance in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Cuba, and Texas, Clara Barton’s position as president of the American Red Cross and her efforts to aid those affected by war and natural disaster epitomize Barton and her larger importance in American history, enabling her to be recognized as America’s mother.

Clara Barton served as a mother to the American people in the ways that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln served as its fathers.  These presidents, who developed the United States, stood by the nation’s side as they fought for freedom through the initial years, are praised and revered; but, it is the American mother, the woman that cares for the home, who has stood by her country and her countrymen in all times of trouble.  Before the Civil War, while the fathers led the country in the public sphere, women educated and prepared the nation’s youth in the domestic sphere.  Women found their niche inside the home, raising a family and taking care of the house. Barton sidestepped the private sphere for a position in public life, but not without bringing the concept of womanhood and domesticity with her to serve as a mother to the nation.  Inner determination and drive pushed her to educate the poorest of the nation’s children, care for the nation’s wounded soldiers, and establish and provide for the naion at large during its hardest times. Clara Barton was able to extend women's work into the public realm, which was traditionally considered male-dominated. Though born to a world in which a woman's role was limited, Barton embraced all Americans as her family members and the nation as her home, maintaining, but altering, the role of womanhood for the better of all.