Like Florence Nightingale, Clara Barton was so much more than the "Angel of the Battlefield." It was not until the American Civil War that she found her calling. As a young woman, she struggled with the deep emotions that would be a lifelong trait. She received an appointment as clerk in the Patent Office at a salary of $1400 a year. She was one of the first, and believed herself to have been the very first, of women appointed to a regular position in one of the departments, with work and wages equal to that of a man. Then came the catastrophe of the Civil War. Early on, she decided that marriage would not be the direction of her life. She didn't just throw herself into her battlefield work...she reinvented how it should be done. She operated independently from Dorothea Dix and the corps of army nursing. She went where the shells were flying.