William E. (William Eleazar) Barton

Born in Sublette, Illinois, in 1861, William Eleazar Barton studied at Berea College and later completed his theological training at Oberlin. He was ordained in the 1880s and went on to serve Congregational churches in Tennessee, Ohio, Massachusetts, and eventually Oak Park, Illinois, where he spent the central years of his ministry.

Alongside his work in the pulpit, he built a strong reputation as an author, lecturer, and researcher. Barton wrote widely on religion, public life, and American history, but he became especially well known for his writing on Abraham Lincoln, emerging as an important Lincoln biographer and scholar in the 1920s.

He also wrote The Life of Clara Barton, a substantial two-volume biography of the founder of the American Red Cross. That mix of minister, historian, and popular writer gives his books a distinctive character: serious in research, but meant for general readers as well as specialists.