Letter [Front]

The content includes her efforts to furnish the hospital at Fort Mitchell, horseback riding with Captain Lamb and a doctor from the Virginia fields of battle and her riding dress.

Clara Barton was in the Sea Islands region of South Carolina ( Hilton Head Island is a part) between April 7 and December 31, 1863. She was there for the siege of Charleston, S.C. and assisted with the African American troops of the 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry following the attack at Fort Wagner on Morris Island. Her brother, David Barton, commissioned to serve as a quartermaster in the Union Army and his son, Stephen Barton, only fifteen years old, served as a Union telegraph officer also in the region.

It was here that Barton’s interest in African American people developed. She witnessed both the horrendous condition of slavery in the southern region of America and the valor of freed and emancipated African Americans fighting with the Union Army. She met and befriended Frances D. Gage and her daughter Mary Gage, who were in South Carolina providing care and education for former slaves. Miss Barton joined their efforts and during times in which she is was needed for war relief, she organized classes for the African Americans living in the region.

Barton returned to this region during 1893 and 1894 and led American Red Cross relief efforts following a devastating hurricane which struck the Sea Islands in 1893. Many of the victims were former slaves and their families that had stayed in the area after the Civil War. Barton’s relief efforts were supported by former members of the 54th Massachusetts.

Captain Samuel T. Lamb was the son of the Barton family physician back in Massachusetts. His two sons were also stationed in the area, and Clara Barton could enjoy the wild gallops around the South Carolina regions with her friends during breaks in war relief and be reminded of her childhood experiences. She was an excellent rider, and her brother David Barton, also stationed in Hilton Head had been her childhood instructor. In this letter, Clara Barton described her riding dress as “a good permanent blue.”