A Woman of Valor: Clara Barton and the Civil War starts off in Washington City when she receives notice that the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment in Baltimore had been attacked. As Clara was born in North Oxford, Massachusetts, some of the regiment were her childhood friends. When the injured came in on the southbound train, she was horrified to see that some of them were her schoolmates. Clara was especially horrified to know that the Union Medical Department was so understaffed that it could barely cope with a riot, let alone the war that was upon them. When she went to talk to the department responsible for building hospitals, the Quartermaster Department, they argued that “Men need guns, not beds.” As the daughter of Captain Stephen Barton,…show more content… The first is the battle of Antietam in 1862. While tending to an injured soldier while the battle was still going on, Clara felt her sleeve move. A bullet had grazed it and killed the soldier she was helping. To me, this is both overwhelmingly historically accurate and helped to define Clara’s character. To her, it didn’t matter that she could quite possibly be killed by a stray bullet because the guns were not very accurate. All she cared about was proving society wrong and being on that battlefield. At Fredericksburg, a shell exploded and cut a nearby soldier’s artery but Clara tied it off and effectively saved his life. To me, based off of the person that Oates so effectively described, I thought that these two moments defined Clara and who and what she stood for. A third moment that I liked particularly well was the fact that Clara did not like Dorothea Dix. She said that she was “equally hostile to independent women working in the hospitals outside her authority,” and with Clara’s very strong and independent personality, the two clashed. Clara could do little more than bringing the patients food and water, and this wasn’t what Clara stood for. I like this small part of the book only because in our history books, Dorothea is portrayed as someone who fought for those that couldn’t and worked alongside others that had the similar mindset of doing
