Barton was born in Oxford, Massachusetts on Christmas day in 1821, and educated at home, mainly by her two brothers and two sisters.
Between 1836 and 1854 she taught first and then founded various free schools in Massachusetts and New Jersey.
In 1854 she became a clerk in the Patent Office, Washington, D.C., but resigned at the start of the American Civil War to work as a volunteer, distributing supplies to wounded soldiers.
After the war she supervised a systematic search for missing soldiers. She eventually received a Congressional appropriation to run what was known as the Missing Soldiers Office and became the first woman to head a government bureau. Barton tracked down information on nearly 22,000 soldiers before the office was closed in 1868.
Between 1869 and 1873 Barton lived in Europe, where she helped establish hospitals during the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871) and was honored with Germany's Iron Cross for outstanding military service.
Through Barton's efforts the American Red Cross Society was formed in 1881; she served as the first president of the organization until 1904. In 1884 she represented the United States at the Red Cross Conference and at the International Peace Convention in Geneva. She was responsible for the introduction at this convention of the "American amendment," which established that the Red Cross was to serve victims of peacetime disasters as well as victims of war.
In 1887 she was in charge of relief work in the yellow-fever pestilence in Florida; and in 1889 at the Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood; 1891 in the Russian famine; 1896 among the Armenians; and in 1898 the Spanish-American War; and between 1899 to 1902 in the South African War. 1900 was the last time that she personally directed relief of victims of the flood at Galveston, Texas.
During her liftime she wrote several books on the Red Cross and the Story of My Childhood she worte in 1907.
Clara Barton died at the age of 91 on April 12, 1912 at Glen Echo, Maryland. She is buried in her hometown of Oxford, Massachusetts
