Introduction
On April 12, 1861, the war between the Union and the Confederacy inevitably broke out when Confederate forces bombarded Fort Sumter until its surrender to the Confederacy the next day. No one had died in this day-long battle. Though this first battle had lacked the demise of American lives, the rest of the war came to be far from a reflection of this. Instead, the Civil War turned out to be the deadliest to American life in all of US history. Approximately one in four soldiers who left for the war never came back. There were more casualties and deaths that resulted from non-combatant related diseases than actual combat. The cost of this war was an estimated 620,000 lives lost in the line of duty. For every three soldiersâ deaths in battle, five more would be the result of undeveloped Civil War medicine. Among the death and suffering, many answered the call to help. Men were called to serve in their respective armies and as a result, women picked up the work left behind. Under new and unfamiliar positions that were predominated by men, women also entered the nursing field. The U.S. Sanitary Commission mobilized large numbers of female nurses to field hospitals. Clara Barton, later the founder of the American Red Cross, was one of the many who managed to assist the Union through relief of the pain of those suffering. During the Civil War, Clara Barton was instrumental in alleviating the physical and emotional damage to the millions of soldiers through caring and supplying for the first troops, attending to the wounded men in the field, and identifying those left on the battlefield for the sake of the person and their families.