Clara Barton

Clarissa Harlowe Barton was born in Oxford, Massachusetts, the youngest of five children. As a girl she nursed her brother David through a long illness. She became a schoolteacher at seventeen and founded a free public school in Bordentown, New Jersey, but when the town board hired a man at a higher salary to run it, she resigned. She then worked as a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, one of the first women to do so. When the Civil War began, she collected supplies for soldiers and won permission to take them to the battlefields herself, where she nursed the wounded at Antietam, Fredericksburg and other battles, sometimes under fire; soldiers called her the Angel of the Battlefield. After the war she led an effort to identify missing soldiers. In Europe she worked with the International Red Cross during the Franco-Prussian War, and in 1881 she founded the American Red Cross, which she led for twenty-three years, organizing relief for floods, fires and hurricanes, including the Johnstown Flood of 1889. She died in 1912.

Faith: Her wartime diaries show she was a devout Christian. Source: Wikipedia