LITMIR.BIZ

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dutifully to help pull another vessel out of the ice; it finally succeeded, only to find itself stuck more firmly than the other boat had been. “She was thumped and heaved since,” Barton noted in her journal, “and Heaven only knows which way she will stray if she ever starts.”⁵ After much ado, and to the passengers’ great relief, the boat loosed itself and kept on its way toward Albany. From there Barton took the train for Utica and thence on to Clinton.

      In Clinton she made her way to the Clinton House, “a typical old time tavern,” where Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Bertram rented rooms to students. She was disappointed to find school would not start on the first Monday in January as advertised.⁶ Although the institute had been established twenty years previously, in the year that Barton arrived it was undergoing vast structural and academic changes. A new building called the “White Seminary,” an imposing structure with a broad portico supported by Ionic columns, was being built to house the female portion of the school, and classes could not be resumed until it was finished.⁷ Meanwhile, the faculty was working to institute a program of studies that they believed would give the students an academic foundation “as good as can be obtained in most colleges of the country.”⁸ While these changes were taking place, the opening of school was delayed several weeks.

      Clara spent the time exploring the town. The home of Hamilton College as well as the Clinton Liberal Institute, Clinton wore the traditional college air of youthful frivolousness and scholarly gravity. Over half of the population in 1850 were students, hailing chiefly from New England but occasionally coming from as far away as Canada or Alabama. They slept in plainly furnished rooms in the several lodging houses around town, living on a shoestring and socializing in the debating and Philomien societies, which were then popular.⁹ Yet Clara could not rejoice in the abundance of young people; she felt only the frigid atmosphere of the dark January days. Even the appealing buildings looked cold and hostile to her, and the “two plank walk with a two feet space between, leading up from the town was not suggestive of the warmest degree of sociability to say the least of it.”¹⁰ Wondering whether her decision to leave Oxford had been wise, she wandered alone through the town every day. At night she wrote cheerful letters home, crafted to reveal little of her anxiety.

      Clara was much relieved when school began and life once more had a purpose. The newly finished schoolrooms still seemed cold and forbidding to her, but she found to her delight that the girls’ principal, Louise Barker, was a rare leader, with qualities that could truly inspire her pupils. “I found an unlooked-for activity, a cordiality, and an irresistible charm of manner that none could have foreseen—a winning indescribable grace which I have met in only a few persons in a whole lifetime,” recalled Barton. Louise Barker not only made the timid young woman feel at ease, she encouraged her to lead a balanced life at the institute. Barton, eager to gain the widest education possible in her year in Clinton, often tried to forego the pleasures and sociability of student life. It was Barker who unfailingly steered her toward a more active existence and instilled in her the importance of developing her confidence as well as her intellect.¹¹

      Clara was probably in the third class at the institute, although the scanty documents related to her year at Clinton never state this precisely. The studies of this course were well beyond those of secondary school and included analytic geometry, French and German, ancient history, philosophy, calculus, astronomy, and religious studies. The male and female students were physically separated, but girls were encouraged to “pursue the Languages, the Mathematics, and the Natural Sciences, to any extent they may wish.”¹² This policy, rare for the time, had enormous appeal for Barton. Unfortunately, however, the institute limited the number of studies allowed each term. Barton, convinced of the necessity of utilizing every moment, begged and cajoled the faculty until they had stretched the limit to the utmost. “I recall with some amusement, the last evening I entered with my request,” wrote Barton. “The teachers were assembled in the parlor and, divining my errand, as I never had any other, Miss Barker broke into a merry laugh—with ‘Miss Barton, we have a few studies left; you had better take what there are, and we will say nothing about it.’” Thereafter Clara took what courses she liked, studying with “a burning anxiety to make the most of lost time.”¹³

      For this privilege she paid, as did the other female students, a flat rate of thirty-five dollars per term, which included tuition, room and board, and laundry. She had moved from the old Clinton House into the dormitory rooms of the White Seminary. The accommodations were bare but adequate, and the building included, besides the sleeping compartments and classrooms, a parlor, sitting room, and library. But while Clara was comfortable in her living situation, socially she decidedly was not.¹⁴

      Barton had purposely refrained from revealing her past teaching experiences, which she believed might cause discomfort to either the teachers or other students. She hoped instead to blend in without noticeable difference among the other pupils, and to glean what she could from the instructors without prejudice. “There was no reason why I should volunteer my history or step in among that crowd of eager pupils as a ‘school marm’, expected to know everything.”¹⁵ But the maturity of her experiences, as well as her years, kept her distinct from her fellow students. Most of Barton's classmates were ten or more years her junior, and she had trouble assimilating herself with the ‘frolicsome girls.”¹⁶ While they found her “a perfect mystery,” unassuming yet with a forbidding aloofness, she saw them as narrow in their prejudices and immature.¹⁷ One roommate noted “some peculiarities,” such as her habit of eating only two meals a day, but charitably announced that none of her oddities were “bad ones.”¹⁸ Barton was also self-conscious about her clothes. With characteristic thrift she had had two dresses cut from one length of material in her favorite shade of green. Though the garments had different trimmings, the other girls thought it odd that she should wear such similar clothes day after day and attached a mysterious significance to the color. Fortunately, among the 150 pupils at the institute she did find several kindred spirits. Barton long remembered “Gentle Clara Hurd” affectionately, but Abby Barker, from Connecticut, and Mary Norton, a Quaker from Hightstown, New Jersey, became her closest chums. These girls, whose jokes and secrets she shared, were to remain lifelong friends and supporters.¹⁹

      “When at school, her photograph, would have shown you a rather thick-set girl, with head bent a little forward, looking up with small black eyes, through heavy, low eyebrows,” wrote a classmate. Despite this unflattering description, Barton seems to have attracted the attention of a number of men while at Clinton. Indeed, the same writer went on to admit that she “was much admired.”²⁰ One of her most ardent beaus was Charles Norton, her friend Mary's brother, who also attended the institute. He was a genial and intelligent fellow who appreciated Barton's sense of humor, but he was ten years younger than Clara, and she found it difficult to take him seriously. “While she esteemed him as friend,” wrote an acquaintance, “I don’t think she regarded him as a lover.”²¹ Another person who was intrigued by this dark, serious girl was Samuel Ramsey, a professor of mathematics at Hamilton College. He admired her fine horsemanship, and their long afternoons riding together aroused much speculation among the young women of the institute. Here, too, Clara seems to have drawn the line at friendship. Nonetheless, Ramsey, like Charles Norton, remained a devoted and lifelong friend to Clara Barton, and rumors about a possible romance between the two were whispered until well after the Civil War.²²

      Other references to men crop up in Barton's writings at this time, but they are generally cryptic, identifying these friends only by their initials. Years later she was to share with Abby Barker happy memories of exchanging secrets about gentlemen friends. The two of them, she recalled, would stand giggling and talking at the top of the stairs before the gas was turned out at ten o’clock. “I have a letter in the pocket of this green dress,” Barton wrote, conjuring up the scene,

      you may take it to your room, and tell me tomorrow night, as we stand here gain, what you think of it…. And while Louise Clap is fandangling around, and Sarah Stoddard is putting up the stray locks that won’t stay in place…Abby Barker and the strange girl in the green gown will exchange views over the letter and say how it seems to us, and you can give it back to me, & tell me how you would answer it if you were in my place, &

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