Clara Barton, a battlefield nurse during the Civil War, founded the American Red Cross after years advocating for the U.S. to join the Geneva Convention. She served as its first president, expanding the organization's mission beyond wartime relief to disaster response, a distinctly American addition to the international Red Cross movement.
Clara Barton had spent the Civil War treating wounded soldiers so close to the front lines that she was nicknamed the 'Angel of the Battlefield.' After the war she traveled to Europe, where she encountered the International Red Cross movement, founded by Swiss businessman Henry Dunant, and became convinced the United States needed its own chapter.
Barton lobbied for years, arguing to skeptical American politicians who saw no need for a European-style humanitarian society, that such an organization would prove invaluable not just in war but in peacetime disasters, floods, fires, and epidemics. She finally succeeded in gathering supporters in Washington, D.C. on this date in 1881.
Under her leadership the American Red Cross responded to the Johnstown Flood, the Galveston hurricane, and other catastrophes, cementing the 'American Amendment' that broadened the Red Cross mandate worldwide. Barton ran the organization for 23 years, often controversially, but her insistence on peacetime relief work became a defining feature of Red Cross societies everywhere.
Key people: Clara Barton