(Top) Clara Barton, President of the Red Cross, 1904, photograph by J.E. Purdy, courtesy of the Library of Congress. (Bottom) The Red Cross' sleeping apartments at their Charleston headquarters, circa 1893, photograph from The Red Cross: In Peace and War.

While no government agency yet existed for handling a field of disaster such as the hurricane of 1893, there was an independent humanitarian organization whose leader had taken notice of the crisis in the Lowcountry. Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross in 1881 after her extensive work with the International Committee of the Red Cross and as a nurse in conflict zones. Barton was a tireless humanitarian, and since the founding of the American Red Cross, she had led relief efforts after floods, fires, and other calamities around the United States. Her interest was piqued when Governor Tillman first raised the idea, pondering whether the Red Cross could be brought to the Lowcountry. Barton contacted South Carolina Senator Matthew Calbraith Butler to note her interest, and Butler brought Barton to the state for a tour of the distraught coast. While Barton herself was anxious because the field of recovery would be much larger than any that the American Red Cross had handled before, Barton ultimately agreed to direct the relief effort in the Lowcountry.

On October 1st, just over a month after the hurricane hit, Barton and her crew of seasoned volunteers arrived in Beaufort, South Carolina. They set up their headquarters in a warehouse and a storefront on Bay Street. While Barton maintained the American Red Cross with a hierarchical structure of leadership, she brought on the Sea Island Relief Committee as an advisory board because she recognized an effort of this size would require local expertise. 

Under Barton’s leadership, the American Red Cross was a paternalistic humanitarian organization. As such, alongside providing food and clothing in the wake of disaster, Barton was also interested in inculcating lessons in citizenship to Black South Carolinians. She had grown up as part of the middle- and upper-class white Northern abolitionists who, even as they fought to end slavery, practiced paternalistic thinking towards Black people. She did not believe in the inherent biological inferiority of African Americans as white supremacists like Hammond and Tillman, but she did think that the debased conditions of slavery had created bad habits that Black southerners needed to shed. Through the relief effort, she hoped to “cure” them. Her paternalism is reflected in her journal entries when she wrote, “They must not eat the bread of idleness...We must not leave a race of beggars, but teach them the manliness of self-support, and methods of self-dependence.” Her ethos, common among white reformers, acknowledged many of the wrongs of slavery. But this perspective failed to acknowledge the systems of support and community with which Black sea islanders were already well-equipped and had used to survive slavery, the choppy seas of emancipation and Reconstruction, and now, this hurricane. 

Barton imagined that individual improvement was both needed and could counteract structural harm. Because of this guiding ideology, the Red Cross’s mission in the Lowcountry extended beyond alleviating the immediate needs of Black residents. Through a community-oriented relief effort, Barton intended to help “improve” the Black citizenry of the region by introducing lessons in inter-community cooperation, self-reliance, and progressive farming practices. Ironically, she hoped to do this even as powerful white South Carolinians sought to strip Black South Carolinians of as many aspects of citizenship as possible. Barton initially presumed that the lessons she and the Red Cross brought were apolitical and as such would not upset white South Carolinians. However, Black dependence was fundamental to the maintenance of white South Carolinians’ power: to preserve a racial hierarchy, wealthy whites needed to control how African Americans made a living, fed their families, and survived from day to day. Any efforts that encouraged Black autonomy, which would separate them from economic dependence on whites, was therefore a threat to white power. This placed the Red Cross in a unique position as an intermediary in the racial and political conflicts in the Lowcountry. 

Barton began to reorganize the field of recovery first by bringing in and speaking with Black community leaders from up and down the sea island coast. Through these conversations, she assessed the region’s needs and devised a plan to rebuild the region by providing rations, goods, and tools to storm survivors to nourish them and also to supply them with the ability to repair their communities.

October 1893 marked the first of the nine months that the American Red Cross spent in the Lowcountry. With Barton at the helm, at least 550 African Americans in the Lowcountry were outfitted with American Red Cross sewing needles, shovels, and hammers to remake clothing and rebuild their homes and fields. Black women formed sewing circles, and Black men formed work crews. The Red Cross provided rations and resources to 75,000 Lowcountry residents, mostly Black but also some white; and while technically the Red Cross was only charged with care of the sea islands, the organization distributed goods to South Carolinians on the coastal plain too. Over the course of those months, Barton and American Red Cross volunteers, along with local Black men and women, produced voluminous documentation of the work that they accomplished. Men who led construction crews wrote detailed labor reports. Barton and her crew corresponded with Black and white South Carolinians about the recovery effort, supplies, and rations. American Red Cross volunteers advocated for donations and federal assistance. The volunteers kept numerous records of the work that they conducted and how they interacted with locals. African American communities petitioned the Red Cross for assistance, even as some white powerbrokers sought to undercut their pleas and reduce the Red Cross’s aid to primarily African American communities. Black residents, in the meantime, embraced the Red Cross’s presence and worked to fit the recovery effort to their communities’ needs.