Editing Clara Barton (section)

==Personal life and beliefs==
Barton's wartime diary entries show she was a devout [[Christianity in the United States|Christian]]. She specifically had a strong belief in [[divine providence]], writing for instance that she "believed that Providence had ordained Lincoln's election."<ref>{{cite book |title=A Woman of Valor |last=Oates |first=Stephen B. |author-link=Stephen B. Oates |publisher=Macmillan |year=1994 |isbn=0029234050 |pages=452}}</ref> Upon hearing of the death of an acquaintance's child, she wrote, "God is great; and fearfully just, truly it is a fearful thing to fall into his hands. [H]is ways are past finding out."<ref name="Diary1"/> Furthermore, while reflecting on whether or not to return home early from her visit to the Sea Islands in 1863, she wrote, "Gods [sic] will not mine be done – I am content, how I wish I could always keep in full view the fact and feeling that God orders all things precisely as they should be – all is best as it is."<ref name="Diary1"/>

Although not formally a member of the [[Universalist Church of America]],<ref>{{cite book |first=Russell E. |last=Miller |title=The Larger Hope: The First Century of the Universalist Church in America 1770 – 1870 |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=FYPZAAAAMAAJ |quote=Although not formally a Universalist by church membership, she had come of a Universalist family, was sympathetic to the tenets of the denomination, and has always been claimed by it. |page=124 |oclc=16690792 |year=1979 |publisher=Unitarian Universalist Association |isbn=9780933840003 }}</ref> in a 1905 letter to the widow of Carl Norman Thrasher, she identified herself with her parents' church as a "Universalist".<ref name="Barton letter">{{cite web |title = Positive Atheism website |url =http://www.positiveatheism.org/mail/eml8886.htm |access-date= May 25, 2007 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160305033013/http://www.positiveatheism.org/mail/eml8886.htm |archive-date=March 5, 2016 |url-status=dead }} Source taken from ''The Universalist Leader'' 120/49 1938.</ref>
{{blockquote|My dear friend and sister:

Your belief that I am a Universalist is as correct as your greater belief that you are one yourself, a belief in which all who are privileged to possess it rejoice. In my case, it was a great gift, like St. Paul, I "was born free", and saved the pain of reaching it through years of struggle and doubt.

My father was a leader in the building of the church in which Hosea Ballow preached his first dedication sermon. Your historic records will show that the old Huguenot town of Oxford, Mass. erected one of, if not the first Universalist Church in America. In this town I was born; in this church I was reared. In all its reconstructions and remodelings I have taken a part, and I look anxiously for a time in the near future when the busy world will let me once more become a living part of its people, praising God for the advance in the liberal faith of the religions of the world today, so largely due to the teachings of this belief.

Give, I pray you, dear sister, my warmest congratulations to the members of your society. My best wishes for the success of your annual meeting, and accept my thanks most sincerely for having written me.

Fraternally yours, (Signed) Clara Barton.}} While she was not an active member of her parents' church, Barton wrote about how well known her family was in her hometown and how many relationships her father formed with others in their town through their church and religion.<ref name="Pryor, Elizabeth Brown 1987"/>

With regards to politics, Barton firmly supported President Lincoln and the [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican Party]] during the war. In 1863, she rebuffed a request from a [[Copperhead (politics)|Copperhead]] [[Democratic Party (United States)|Democrat]], T.W. Meighan, to denounce the Republican Party.<ref name="Oates157-158">{{cite book |title=A Woman of Valor |last=Oates |first=Stephen B. |author-link=Stephen B. Oates |publisher=Macmillan |year=1994 |isbn=0029234050 |pages=157–158}}</ref> In her letter to Meighan, Barton also stated, "I am a U.S. soldier you know [...] and, as I am a soldier, and not a statesman, I shall make no attempt at discussing political points with you."<ref name="Oates157-158"/> Further, she wrote that with regards to politics, "I am supposed to be profoundly ignorant."<ref name="Oates157-158"/> While the historian Stephen B. Oates reads these statements as [[irony|ironic]],<ref name="Oates157-158"/> this is disputed by Nina Silber (a historian of [[Women in the American Civil War|women in the Civil War era]]). Silber claims that "Clara Barton came to believe her job had very little to do with politics"<ref>{{cite book |title=Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War |last=Silber |first=Nina |publisher=Harvard University Press |year=2005 |isbn=9780674016774 |pages=218}}</ref> and "emerged from the war more aware than ever of women's political weaknesses."<ref>{{cite book |title=Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War |last=Silber |first=Nina |publisher=Harvard University Press |year=2005 |isbn=9780674016774 |pages=160–161}}</ref> While Oates labels Barton a "committed [[Feminism|feminist]]",<ref name="Oates192">{{cite book |title=A Woman of Valor |last=Oates |first=Stephen B. |author-link=Stephen B. Oates |publisher=Macmillan |year=1994 |isbn=0029234050 |pages=192}}</ref> Silber compares her to other nurses such as [[Mary Ann Bickerdyke]] and [[Cornelia Hancock]], who clung to [[patriarchy|patriarchal]] ideas of male hierarchical authority and the arrangement of "[[separate spheres]]" during the Civil War.<ref>{{cite book |title=Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War |last=Silber |first=Nina |publisher=Harvard University Press |year=2005 |isbn=9780674016774 |pages=210–212}}</ref> Barton became a proponent of [[Women's suffrage in the United States|women's suffrage]] after conversing with her friend, Gage, on the topic.<ref name="Oates192"/>

Barton was a fan of the poetry of [[Lord Tennyson]] and [[Walter Scott]].<ref name="Diary1"/>