Clara Barton

Barton was a clerk in the Patent Office when the Civil War began, and she quickly saw that wounded men were dying not of their wounds but of the days it took supplies to reach them. She gathered bandages and food herself, obtained a pass, and drove wagons to the field while the shooting was still going on — at Antietam she worked close enough that a bullet passed through her sleeve and killed the man she was tending. Soldiers called her the angel of the battlefield, a phrase she disliked.

After the war she ran the Office of Missing Soldiers from her Washington boarding house, answering more than sixty thousand letters from families and identifying nearly thirteen thousand graves at the Andersonville prison camp. Travelling in Europe she encountered the Red Cross and spent years pressing a reluctant government to sign the Geneva Convention; the United States finally did so in 1882. She led the American Red Cross until she was eighty-three and insisted it also respond to floods, fires and famine, not only war. She is buried in the town where she was born.