On August 12, 1865, Clara Barton established a bureau to identify missing soldiers from the American Civil War at the request of the government. She had already spent four years doing what the government had declined to organize: going to the battlefield.

Barton was born on December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts. She was working as a clerk in the U.S. Patent Office in 1861 when the war began — one of the first female federal employees in American history, employed after a direct appeal to the Patent Commissioner over the objections of colleagues who believed women could not hold such positions.

When Union soldiers arrived in Washington wounded and without supplies after the First Battle of Bull Run, Barton advertised in newspapers for donations and began distributing supplies herself. The Army Surgeon General and the War Department had supply chains that were inadequate and slow. Barton went around them. She showed up at Cedar Mountain, at Second Bull Run, at Antietam — the bloodiest single day in American military history — with wagons of supplies she had collected and distributed.

At Antietam, a bullet passed through the sleeve of her dress and killed the soldier she was dressing. She kept working.

After the war, she spent five years at the missing soldiers bureau, corresponding with families, identifying remains, posting the names of the known dead. When she collapsed from exhaustion in 1869 and traveled to Switzerland to recover, she encountered the International Red Cross and brought the concept back to the United States. She founded the American Red Cross in 1881 and ran it for twenty-three years, expanding its mission from wartime nursing to disaster relief.

The American Medical Association and the War Department had spent the Civil War managing Barton as a problem rather than a resource. She operated on the margins of their authority because she had been given no authority. What she built anyway became one of the most significant humanitarian organizations in American history.