Her interest in the extension of liberties for women was not selfishly inspired. Rather it was a product of her deep-rooted sense of integrity and fairness. She believed rigidly in human rights, especially in the rights of those unable to defend or help themselves. “What is everybody’s business is nobody’s business,” Barton once declared. “What is nobody’s business is my business.” Her advocacy of equality colored her political views. Neither could Barton tolerate dishonesty and petty arrogance. More than once during the Civil War she railed against “the conduct of improper, heartless, unfaithful Union officers” who blithely ignored the plight of the “dirty, lousy, common soldiers.” She expected high standards of politicians, soldiers, and schoolboys alike. Once when a former pupil had misused some money she had entrusted to him, she lamented: “I am less grieved by the loss than I am about his manner of treating my trust.... I am as square as a brick and I expect my boys to be square.” In 1852, Barton demonstrated the sincerity of her principles in a dramatic way. She left Clinton to stay with a schoolmate near Bordentown, New Jersey, and taught at a private subscription school, for there were no free public schools. She felt uneasy about the numbers of children whose parents could not afford private instruction, and she began to agitate for a free school. But the popular view was that free schools were a form of charity. She refused to give in and eventually swayed the local school board. A small house was outfitted, and she began to lead one of the first free schools in the state. The Bordentown free school was a pronounced success. In its first year the number of pupils rose from 6 to 600, and the town built a new school-house. The town, however, could not accept a woman as the head of a school of 600 pupils and a man was named principal. She became his assistant. “I could bear the ingratitude, but not the pettiness and jealousy of this principal.” Whether the pettiness was real or imagined, Barton could not endure a secondary position. While she debated resignation, her nerves gave way, causing a case of laryngitis. Early in 1854, she resigned and left for Washington, D.C., where she hoped to improve her health and “do something decided” with her newly realized “courage and tolerable faculty of winning [her] way with strangers.”