Clara Barton naturally becomes President of the…

Clara Barton naturally becomes President of the American branch of the society, known officially as the American National Red Cross, which holds its first official meeting at her I Street apartment in Washington, DC, on May 21, 1881.

Clara Barton had had a career as a teacher and federal bureaucrat when the American Civil War broke out.

Barton liked teaching when she was younger; all of her older siblings had become teachers.

Her youngest sibling, David, was twelve years old when Barton was born; he will always be like a teacher to her.

She had taught her first class, at age seventeen.

She had also expanded her concept of soldier aid, traveling to Camp Parole, Maryland, to organize a program for locating men listed as missing in action.

Through interviews with Federal parolees returning from Southern prisons, she had often been able to determine the status of some of the missing and notify families.

After performing humanitarian work during and after the conflict, on advice of her doctors, in 1869, she had gone for a restful vacation to Europe, where she had seen and become involved in the work of the International Red Cross during the Franco-Prussian War, and had determined to bring the organization home with her to America.

When Barton began the organizing work in the U.S. in 1873, no one thought the country would ever again face an experience like the Civil War.

However, Barton was not one to lose hope in the face of the bureaucracy, and she had finally succeeds on the basis that the new American Red Cross organization could also be available to respond to other types of crisis.

As Barton expands the original concept of the Red Cross to include assisting in any great national disaster, this service brings the United States the "Good Samaritan of Nations" label in the International Red Cross.