Clara Barton and the American Red Cross

Clara Barton was at Berne in the summer of 1870, trying to recover her health, when France declared war on Prussia on 15 July. Within three days, she later wrote, agents of the International Committee of Geneva led by Dr. Louis Appia stood at her door on their way to the front and asked her to come. She followed within a week. Barton had aided Union soldiers through the Civil War, and afterwards, with President Lincoln's authorization, ran an office that by 1867 had answered 63,183 letters and identified 22,000 missing men. Following the armies, she watched Red Cross societies accomplish in four months, as she put it, what Americans had failed to do in four years without such an organization. She promised to make Americans understand the Red Cross and its treaty.

The treaty was the Geneva Convention of 1864, which the United States had not joined. Gustave Moynier, president of the International Committee, had written to the President in August 1877. Barton delivered the letter to President Hayes, and nothing came of it. President Garfield referred it to Secretary of State Blaine on 30 March 1881, and Blaine's reply in May gave her enough assurance to organize. On 21 May 1881 a meeting in Washington formed the American National Association of the Red Cross, with Barton as president.

She wanted it to act in peace as well as war. In an address written in 1881 she proposed extending its work to pestilence, famine, fires and floods, to any calamity too great for local charity. The people of Dansville, New York, where she had a country home, formed the first local society on 22 August 1881. That September the Red Cross made its first disaster relief effort, for victims of forest fires in Michigan, with the new societies of western New York sending money and an agent to the burnt districts.

Barton's own list of adhering governments dates the United States' accession to the Geneva Convention to 1 March 1882, and the Senate ratified it on 16 March. The peacetime work, Barton wrote, became known abroad as the American amendment. Her Red Cross went to the Johnstown flood of 1889, which killed more than 2,000 people, and her last relief operation was at Galveston after the hurricane of September 1900. Congress chartered the organization in 1900 and again in 1905, the year after she resigned.