Marmee & Louisa (35 page)

Aiming to be hopeful and courageous, Louisa worked long hours in the second-floor bedroom she now had to herself. She only “occasionally” appeared at the dinner table, her father noted, just “to vary a little the round of [her] work, by dashes of wit and amusement, for us chimney-corners ancients.”
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Abigail seemed “very hopeful, only sick a day now and then, when she forgets how young she is at 60.”
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Abigail—whose favorite sayings included “Cast your bread upon the waters, and after many days it will come back buttered” and “Hope and keep busy”—often muttered to her husband, “I hope good things of Louisa.”
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No one encouraged Louisa’s writing so much as her own “dearest critic.”

One evening in February 1861, while Anna was staying with them in Concord, Louisa read aloud “several chapters of her book entitled
Moods,
” her father wrote. Anna, who seemed inexplicably to be going deaf, listened through an ear trumpet.
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The book “is entertaining and witty,” Bronson felt, “her characters are drawn in lively colors, and there are several fine scenes,” many drawn from family history.
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“The book has merits, and should be popular. . . . She writes with unusual ease, and in a style of idiomatic purity. Her culture has come from the writing of letters and the keeping of a diary, chiefly.” Later that year Louisa gathered her parents and May in the parlor and read aloud the entire novel. “It was worth something,” Louisa reported, “to have my three dearest sit up till midnight listening with wide open eyes to Lu’s first novel.” Her father proclaimed, “Emerson must see this. . . . Where did you get your metaphysics?” Her mother simply said, “Remarkable.”

Abigail felt she was beginning to reap the fruits of her labors. “These girls,” she wrote to her brother, are “full of life, aspiration, tact and talent.”
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Louisa and May “both seem to have risen a peg or two” in the world’s eyes “because one can write for the
Atlantic
and the other dipped so decidedly into the depths of the fine arts.” Abigail had long known Louisa was special, but now observed that May, in her early twenties, “has a world of resource, and carries in her head a Mother wit and go-ahead-ativeness that beats all the Alcott family put together.”
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Abigail’s philosophy of raising children had always been to “stand as much out of the[ir] way” as possible “and try to keep myself from being a hindrance” to them. “I will never impose my experience upon them as the better guide or wisest way, tho’ 30-40 years of a most varied life gives me an accumulated knowledge of the world and its requirements.”

At the end of January 1861, she and Louisa heard, probably from May, that Samuel Joseph and a fellow abolitionist, a schoolteacher named Susan B. Anthony, had been hanged in effigy in downtown Syracuse. The two reformers, who had worked together for years, were preparing to address a meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in a building near his church when a mob stormed the building, shouting, “Put the niggers out.” Following the secession of southern states, northern sentiment shifted against the abolitionists, who were believed to threaten the union. Among the well-to-do Syracuse residents opposing the antislavery meeting was Samuel Joseph’s own son-in-law, Alfred Wilkinson, whose father, the president of the Syracuse Railroad, refused to allow any man accompanied by a manacled slave to ride his trains.
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To end the violence May and Anthony led the abolitionists from the hall and out to Hanover Square. Nevertheless, the riot raged for hours. A brass band arrived to serenade men parading through the city with effigies of the minister and Miss Anthony entwined in an obscene embrace. The mob built a bonfire and burned the effigies.

The brewing civil war finally erupted at Fort Sumter, in South Carolina, in April 1861. Young men from every corner of the nation headed to battle. Abigail wrote to Samuel Joseph, “Are we not beginning to reap in the storm what was there sown in the whirlwind? I dread a war, but is not a peace based on such false compromises and compacts much more disastrous to the real prospects of the country generally, and Freedom in particular? I think so.
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If the Border States secede . . . I think we can
call in aid from foreign powers, and may yet subjugate the whole brood South and Border.” Louisa, hearing the approaching drums of the Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, went out to stand alongside the road as the men of the Concord Artillery of the state regiment marched by on their way to the train depot. “I’ve often longed to see a war,” she thought to herself, “and now I have my wish.”
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Yet she was frustrated, as her mother at the same age had been, to be denied the worldly experiences of men. “I long to be a man, but as I can’t fight, I will content myself working for those who can,” she resolved. Alongside her mother, Louisa sewed “night and day for the soldiers,” according to Bronson.
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In October 1861 she wrote in her journal, “Sewing and knitting for ‘our boys’ all the time. It seems as if a few energetic women could carry on the war better than the men do it so far.”

One fine spring day, Louisa went for a sail on Boston Harbor with Anna and John. The boat stopped at an island with a fort. She climbed the ramparts and “felt very martial and Joan-of-Arcy, as I stood on the walls with the flag flying over me and cannon all about.”
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War seemed exciting. Not until a massive Union defeat at Bull Run in July did most northerners begin to realize the actual cost of war.
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President Lincoln determined not to interfere with slavery or to consider emancipation, even as numerous fugitive slaves offered to fight for the Union and Samuel Joseph May and other abolitionists urged the president to free and enlist them. A series of southern victories in 1862 changed Lincoln’s mind. That September, immediately after General Lee’s surrender at Antietam, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing slaves in rebel states. As of January 1, 1863, all slaves in all states were free, at least officially. Hundreds of thousands of male former slaves became eligible to enlist for the Union.

Meanwhile, as she could not fight, Louisa gave in to her father’s encouragement and made another stab at teaching in early 1862. Sponsored by Elizabeth Peabody, who still taught in Boston, and the publisher James T. Fields, who was buying Louisa’s stories, she opened a kindergarten for poor children at the Warren Street Chapel.
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Her sister Anna told a friend that “Miss Peabody . . . knowing Lu’s peculiar faculty with children proposed her.”
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Louisa admitted to her journal, “[I] don’t like to teach, but take what comes; so when Mr. F[ields] offered $40 to fit up with, twelve students, and his patronage, I began.” The salary did
not cover room and board, so she commuted by train from Concord or stayed with Boston friends, among them Mr. Fields and his wife, Annie Adams Fields, a distant cousin of Abigail’s.
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He was the junior partner in Boston’s largest publishing house, Ticknor & Fields, which brought out works of Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Longfellow, Stowe, Emerson, Thoreau, Twain, Whittier, Lowell, Hawthorne, and Child, and the
Atlantic, Our Young Folks,
and the
North American Review
.

Delighted that she was pursuing his field, Bronson said to Louisa, “Your school promises good fruits.”
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“I do it against my own wishes,” she responded.
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After only one term her labors “ended in a wasted winter and a debt of $40.” But Mr. Fields agreed with her father that she should stay in the traditionally female profession. “Stick to your teaching, Miss Alcott,” he told her. “You can’t write.”

Hurt, she scribbled in her journal, “I won’t teach. I
can
write, and I’ll prove it.”
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A month or so later, relieved to be done with teaching, she informed a friend jauntily, “I intend to [begin] with a blood & thunder tale as they are easy to ‘compoze’ & and are better paid than moral & elaborate works of Shakespeare.
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 . . . So don’t be shocked if I send you a paper containing a picture of Indians, pirates, wolves, bears & distressed damsels in a grand tableau over a title like ‘The Maniac Bride’ or ‘The Bath of Blood. A thrilling tale of passion.’ ” She submitted more romantic thrillers to Frank Leslie, the editor of the
Illustrated Newspaper,
in New York City. Entranced, he paid her fifty to seventy-five dollars a story and soon wanted “more than I can send him. . . . I enjoy romancing to suit myself, and though my tales are silly, they are not bad, and my sinners always have a good spot somewhere.”
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That fall Louisa and May were back in Concord, where they planned to stay the winter. Abigail seemed “in the best of health” to Bronson, and Louisa was “as active as ever with her pen.”
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It was her pen that provided solace from loneliness, Louisa suggested in a letter to a second cousin that contained a description of her “pathetic family.”
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Her sister May “lives for her crayons and dancing.” Anna, now pregnant with her first child, lived in a world “composed of John, and John is composed of all the virtues ever known, which amiable delusion I admire and wonder
at from the darkness of my benighted spinsterhood.” Bronson “lives for his garden.” Abigail lives “for the world in general,” assisting “every beggar that comes along,” sewing for Union soldiers, and giving “lectures on Anti-slavery and peace wherever she goes.”

Louisa felt she had to make a change. Like her mother at the same age, she wanted an escape from the life she knew. At nearly thirty, Louisa was now a confirmed old maid. She saw no path to combine a literary career, which she desired, with marriage and a domestic life. So she forswore domesticity except, of course, when Marmee needed her, and the rest of the time she dreamed of seeing the world.

There remained one profession open to women that Louisa had not yet tried. Margaret Fuller, one of her role models, had volunteered as a nurse at Rome’s Fatebenefratelli Hospital during the Italian Revolution. Louisa never forgot Emerson’s descriptions of Fuller’s courage, especially his suggestion that a wartime nurse displays the gallantry of a soldier in battle.
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In nearly every respect, Louisa fulfilled the requirements for a Civil War nurse. By this time the reformer Dorothea Lynde Dix, superintendent of female nurses for the Sanitary Commission of the United States, had convinced the secretary of war that women could serve the Union as nurses so long as they were plain, modestly dressed, age thirty or older, and married without children. Except for the husband, Louisa was the perfect candidate, and she was sure that minor exceptions could be made.

On the verge of her thirtieth birthday, she made a fateful choice in pursuit of a certain kind of independence, as her mother had done a generation before. Abigail had married Bronson in the hope of forming an equal, loving partnership. Louisa went to war.

Chapter Thirteen

The Bitter Drop in This Cup

I
never began the year in a stranger place than this,” Louisa scribbled on the first page of her new journal on January 1, 1863.
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“Five hundred miles from home, alone among strangers, doing painful duties all day long, & leading a life of constant excitement in this greathouse surrounded by 3 or 4 hundred men in all stages of suffering, disease & death.” She was in an army hospital in Washington, D.C., the capital of the nation and the Union war effort, where she was responsible for a forty-bed ward. Louisa had to “cork up” her feelings to avoid crying as she washed, fed, and consoled scores of injured and dying men. She had hardly a moment to stop and record her impressions. But this was something worth describing. “I . . . began my new life by seeing a poor man dying at dawn, and sitting all day between a boy with pneumonia and a man shot through the lungs. . . . [W]hen I put mother’s little black shawl round the boy while he sat up panting for breath, he smiled and said, ‘You are real motherly, ma’am.’ I felt as if I was getting on. The man only lay and stared with his big black eyes, and made me very nervous. . . . I sat looking at the twenty strong faces as they looked back at me,—hoping that I looked ‘motherly’ to them, for my thirty years made me feel old, and the suffering round me made me long to comfort every one.”

She had received her orders from Washington only a few weeks earlier. In haste she had filled a trunk with clothes marked “Louisa Alcott”
in indelible ink by Sophia Hawthorne and Abigail, who though she supported her daughter’s decision confessed to her neighbor, “I shall feel helpless without Louisa.”
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She bid all a tearful good-bye and headed to Boston, escorted by Julian Hawthorne, Sophia and Nathaniel’s sixteen-year-old son, and her sister May. After having a cavity filled and securing nursing credentials, Louisa purchased tickets for her trip: by train to New London, Connecticut; by steamship to Jersey City, New Jersey; by train to Washington, D.C.; and by cab to the filthy, disheveled former hotel in which she now lived and worked on the main road in Georgetown, which she called “this big bee hive” or “Hurly-Burly House.”
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Her superior, Hannah Ropes of Boston, “cheered at the arrival of Miss Alcott of Concord—the prospect of a really good nurse, a gentlewoman who can do more than merely keep the patients from falling out of bed.”
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