Marmee & Louisa (14 page)

More than three decades later, the Boston of Louisa’s early life was disorderly and sometimes violent. Immigrants from Europe flooded the
city. Catholics and Protestants battled for space. Antislavery lectures provoked crowds of angry protesters. On October 21, 1835, when Louisa was not yet three years old, she could hear from home the noise of a crowd of more than a thousand rioters as they gathered to denounce abolition.

That day, members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society had invited George Thompson to speak at their annual meeting. Antislavery opponents, learning of the scheduled speech, published this advertisement in the morning newspaper: “That infamous foreign scoundrel THOMPSON will hold forth this afternoon at the Liberator Office, No. 48 Washington Street. The present is a fair opportunity for the friends of the Union to snake Thompson out. It will be a contest between the Abolitionist and the friends of the Union. A purse of $100 has been raised by a number of patriotic citizens to reward the individual who shall first lay violent hands on Thompson.”

The angry crowd moved up Washington Street toward Faneuil Hall. At the office of the
Liberator
rioters kicked in the door. Thompson was urged not to appear because of the violence, but Garrison attempted to address the crowd. Seeing him in danger, colleagues tried to pull Garrison from the mob, which followed and seized him. They dragged him behind the Old State House, tore off his clothes, and tied a rope around him, intending to hang him. Rescued by the mayor, Theodore Lyman, Garrison spent a night in prison, the only place where the mayor could ensure his safety. Abigail insisted that evening that Bronson accompany her to visit Garrison at the Everett Street jail.
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The next morning Garrison slipped away to return to his pregnant wife in Brooklyn, Connecticut.
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During the riot Abigail was at home with her children. Hearing the shouts of the crowd, she rushed to remove a painting of George Thompson from the wall. Louisa watched her mother hide the portrait underneath a bed. The toddler crawled beneath the bed alongside the portrait, saying she wanted to comfort “the good man who helped the poor slaves.”
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Around this time Louisa’s uncle Sam took a leave from his church in Connecticut, where he had preached for thirteen years, to work fulltime for antislavery. This move disturbed his father and stepmother, according to Abigail, who informed her brother, “Some of your family are very much grieved that you are going to leave the dignified and
respectable office of minister of the Everlasting Gospel, and become an itinerant fanatic.”
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For eighteen months as secretary of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, he traveled around the eastern United States lecturing and writing for antislavery, peace, temperance, universal education, and an end to capital punishment. Mobs in Rhode Island, Maine, and Massachusetts pelted him with rocks, paint, and eggs, stormed his lectures, and drowned him out with drums and shouts.
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They prevented him from entering some halls and threatened to burn down others. Local officials, businessmen, and militias attacked him five times in Vermont alone. In New York City, a crowd destroyed the home of his wealthy abolitionist friend Lewis Tappan. “Private assassins from New Orleans are lurking at the corners of the streets to stab [Lewis’s brother] Arthur Tappan,” Lydia Maria Child said, “and very large sums are offered for anyone who will convey Mr.
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Thompson into the slave States.” Garrison stepped out of his house in Connecticut one day to find a gallows and a note, “Judge Lynch’s law,” on his front lawn.
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Unlike some abolitionists, Garrison and May were “nonresistants,” who advocated neither resisting nor responding violently to violence. They advised other agents to avoid mobs, to act surprised if a mob occurred, and to continue speaking as long as possible. They tried to publish the perpetrators’ names, which was difficult in the mainstream northern press because it generally encouraged violence against the antislavery movement.
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In 1836 the governor of Massachusetts, Edward Everett, shut down the abolitionist press on the grounds that it was “calculated to excite an insurrection among the slaves.” Samuel Joseph came to Boston to address the state legislature, defend the right to free speech and a free press, and call for the press to be restored.
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The legislature supported the governor, who explicitly denounced May, Garrison, and Samuel E. Sewall as enemies of the Constitution.

The peak of the violence against abolition came in 1835, when American newspapers reported five hundred mob incidents in a single week.
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These were “respectable mobs,” abolitionists noted with irony. Protesters came from “the
higher classes of society,
” one of May’s colleagues reported, “—men of wealth, of office, of literature, of elegant leisure, including politicians, and that portion of the clergy who naturally associate with that class just described.”
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Another colleague, James Freeman Clarke, said America’s “united South had for its allies at the North both
the great political parties, the commercial and manufacturing interests, nearly the whole press, and both extremes of society.
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Abolition was equally obnoxious in the parlors of the wealthy and to the crowd of roughs in the streets, fashion and the mob being for once united by a common enmity. It was against this immense weight of opinions that the Abolitionists contended.”

The Mays were shocked by the violence that abolitionists encountered in their hometown. How did a cradle of liberty become “the nursery of illiberality and prejudice?” Samuel Joseph asked Garrison. By dragging slavery “into the full blaze of the noon day,” he hoped, “the doom of slavery is sealed.” But the life of a reformer on the road was difficult. He missed his family and disliked being vilified by crowds. “I am not made for . . . turmoil,” he admitted to his wife.
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“I long for the quiet of home.”

Despite all the violence, 1835 was a wonderful year for Bronson. Elizabeth Peabody published her
Record of a School,
describing his and her classroom, to rave reviews. A magazine called Bronson “one of the best men that ever drew the breath of life.”
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About a month after his daughter Elizabeth’s birth, Bronson finally met the Reverend Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose sermons he had heard. Emerson, who had resigned from the Unitarian ministry and begun a career as a writer and philosopher, responded to Bronson as the Mays had earlier, calling him “a wise man” and “a God-made priest.”
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At the Temple School that fall, Bronson began his “Conversations on the Gospels” with children. “We are now going to speak of the life of Christ,” he said to his students, “if any of you are interested to understand how Jesus Christ came into this world and lived and acted and went back to God.” At home he began holding conversations with adults as “a dispenser of moral truth” in the tradition of Socrates and Jesus Christ.
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He titled these conversations, “How Like An Angel I Came Down.” He had no prepared text, according to Theodore Dahlstrand, but rather employed “an oracular style, with no logical sequence.
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Bronson made spontaneous pronouncements, as if he spoke truth at all times and no concrete evidence was necessary, because he believed he could intuit the truth, without evidence, from the atmosphere. He modeled himself on Jesus.”

Small children, too, Bronson believed, were invested with divine powers. Each morning, he wrote in his journal that fall, he woke to “my
little one [Elizabeth] murmuring the spirit’s melodies as she reposes on her mother’s arm, with opened eyes and loving heart surveying the things of the outward scene and investing them in the glories of her inner life. . . . Verily, the Divine Life is alive in the infant’s heart.”

Louisa turned three on November 29. At ten that morning Abigail brought the birthday girl to her father’s school. His students crowned him and Louisa with laurels, in celebration of their shared birthday. Bronson delivered a “short account” of his life, and one girl read an ode to Bronson. When it was time for treats, Abigail asked Louisa to hand out little frosted fruitcakes she had made. Louisa gave each child a cake until only one remained on the plate. There was still one pupil to serve besides herself. “I saw that if I gave away the last one I should have none,” Louisa recalled. “As I was queen of the revel, I felt that I ought to have it, and held on to it tightly till my mother said, ‘It is always better to give away than to keep the nice things.
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’ ” The three-year-old hesitated. “I know my Louie will not let the little friend go without,” Abigail prompted, reaching down to kiss her. “The little friend received the dear plummy cake,” Louisa said, “and I a kiss and my first lesson in the sweetness of self-denial, a lesson which my dear mother beautifully illustrated all her long and noble life.”

Little Women
opens with a similar scene. Marmee asks her daughters to give their Christmas breakfast to a poor family. After a momentary hesitation the girls agree, pleasing their mother. Delivering the feast enables them to enjoy “a happy breakfast, though they didn’t get any of it; and when they went away, leaving comfort behind, I think there were not in the city four merrier people than the hungry little girls who gave away their breakfasts and contented themselves with bread and milk on Christmas morning.”
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Self-denial was hard even for Abigail. She had moved the family four times in the year since their return to Boston, usually to less expensive quarters. They had occupied three boardinghouses—on Somerset Court, Bedford Street, and Beach Street—and now rented a house at 36 Front Street (now Harrison Avenue) on the neck between the tidal waters. Money was a constant worry. In the summer, around the time of Lizzie’s birth, Mary Peabody forgot to repay five dollars she had borrowed from Abigail. It was “the last five dollars I had,” according to Abigail, who was too proud to ask for it back. “I could not!” Hoping to
remind Mary of the outstanding loan, Abigail asked her for “a quarter of a dollar.”
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To her dismay, Mary “left the room as if to look for it [and] never returned.” Abigail was often on edge. A letter she received from Mary questioning abolitionism “made her very angry,” Mary’s sister Elizabeth observed.
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Abigail “spoke quite sharply about” the letter to Maria Weston Chapman, Garrison’s assistant editor at the
Liberator
.

A conflict between Elizabeth Peabody and Bronson strained Abigail’s close relationship with Elizabeth, who with her sister Mary occupied the same boardinghouse as the Alcott family. In early 1836, while discussing the Bible with his students, Bronson had asked them questions that seemed to Elizabeth suggestive and inappropriate, such as, Where do humans come from? His manner, she informed Mary, was offensive and “heavy-handed.”
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People in Boston had begun to whisper that Bronson was guilty of blasphemy. Not long afterward, Bronson, who must have heard of the gossip, approached Elizabeth to accuse her of publicly ridiculing him. A heated discussion ensued, which Abigail, ever loyal to her spouse, joined.

In response, Elizabeth decided to sever her professional relationship with Bronson. She suspected that he and Abigail had gone into her room and read her correspondence with her sister. Due to this “breach of honour,” she informed him, “our relations are at an end.”
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He in turn accused Elizabeth of writing to her other sister, Sophia, who occasionally substituted for Elizabeth at the Temple School, a letter, which he had presumably found and read, that would make people think he was “a thief and a murderer!” Elizabeth tried not to respond to this accusation, she reported later to Mary. “But as he went on saying what [he imagined] I thought & had said & had done about him . . . This induced me to reply, but it was to little purpose—except that it gave him new grounds of animadversion respecting my tones.”

In the heat of the moment Elizabeth said to Bronson, “You consider yourself a thinker superior to all other people.”

“You are guilty of littleness in the extreme,” he retorted. She asked him to retract this accusation. He said, “I do not see any reason to alter my opinion, except . . . for the worse.”

The cause of their rupture, Elizabeth felt, was Bronson’s arrogant “self-estimation without a doubt of having the key that unlocks all wisdom. . . .
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In his own metaphysical system he subjects everything to the
test of his talismanic words, and as they answer to them in his predisposed ear, they take their places.” She informed Mary, “I do not regret the crisis. It is better we should separate.”

Elizabeth Peabody did not sever her tie to Abigail. The two women had “a little talk” and still trusted each other, Elizabeth told her sister Mary. Within days Elizabeth moved out and left the Temple School, which now enrolled forty students.

Bronson would later change his third daughter’s name from Elizabeth Peabody Alcott to Elizabeth Sewall Alcott. But the change had not yet occurred on Sunday, May 22, 1836, when Samuel Joseph baptized Bronson’s three little girls “Anna Bronson, Louisa May, [and] Elizabeth Peabody . . . at my own dwelling,” Bronson reported.
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“Our friends were present. The ceremony was impressive, interesting.”

Although pleased by the baptisms, Bronson was generally “dissatisfied with the general preaching of any sect.”
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Raised in the Episcopal Church, he abandoned formal religion as a young adult and developed a personal theology similar to Unitarianism in that it rejected the Trinity, the doctrine of Original Sin, and the divinity of Jesus Christ.
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He strongly identified with Christ, signing letters to his children, “Your Ascended Father.”
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Anna wrote at age eight, “I like to read about Jesus, because he is good.
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Father is the best man in the world now.” Henry James Sr. claimed to have asked Bronson if he ever claimed to be Jesus Resurrected, to which Bronson replied, “Yes, often.”
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In his journal he explained, “I preach the Gospel as it is revealed to my own soul.
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 . . . My doctrine is from heaven. . . . I am a meek and simple follower of the Divine Word within, which I must announce and interpret in the face of all obstacles.” He could “commune with God in the hearts of . . . my own children, my pupils, the divine and unsoiled Child, even Jesus Christ.”
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His wife’s devotional practices were more conventional: she attended church services, prayed regularly, and often led her children in “Sabbath exercises” of psalms, hymns, and Bible reading, as her father had done when she was small.
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Bronson, however, was convinced that “my own spirit preaches sounder doctrine” than any church, so “I must listen to its divine teachings.”
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