Barton was introspective and keenly aware of herself as an individual, and this enabled her to view her students individually. She gave them such personal attention that scores of former pupils wrote to her in later years, confident that their uniqueness had touched her. Barton in turn called her pupils “my boys” and made no apologies for her loyalty. “They were all mine,” she recalled in the second part of her autobiography, “second only to the claims and interests of the real mother.... And so they had remained. Scattered over the world, some near, some far, I have been their confidant.... I count little in comparison with the faithful grateful love I hold today of the few survivors of my Oxford school.” Teaching thus reinforced her loyalty and her sense of individuality. Her excellence as an instructor also had the effect of mitigating her introversion and strengthening her self-assurance. Indeed, she became confident enough to teach the roughest district schools and to demand pay equal to a man’s. “I may sometimes be willing to teach for nothing,” she told one school board, “but if paid at all, I shall never do a man’s work for less than a man’s pay.” In 1850, after more than ten years of successful teaching, she felt compelled to “find a school ... to teach _me_ something.” Female academies were rare. She settled upon the Clinton Liberal Institute in Clinton, New York, and took as many classes as possible in her course. The institute was, in many ways, an ideal academy for Barton. The school’s liberal philosophy and broad approach to education for women corresponded with her family’s liberal traditions and her own political and religious feelings. Moreover, the climate of New England and New York in the 1830s and 1840s was one of intellectual and moral progressiveness: Horace Mann instituted far-reaching educational reforms in Massachusetts; Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about the philosophic basis of human liberty; religion lost its evangelistic approach; William Lloyd Garrison expounded on the plight of the enslaved black; and a few women such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton realized that their position was little better than that of slaves and protested against it.