Louisa May Alcott Read online

  The Bedford Street house was abandoned, and in April, with Anna still at the Pratts and May back in Boston, what was left of the Alcott family—Louisa and her parents—moved into Hawthorne’s Wayside, the better to oversee the renovations at Orchard House next door. “Came to occupy one wing of Hawthorne’s house (once ours) while the new one was being repaired,”9 Louisa wrote in her journals with typical terseness. Living in a house they had left ten years earlier, a house in which all four girls had been bursting with life and energy, a house that had been another of those places which seemed to be the solution for the pathetic family, evoked deep feelings for at least one of the Alcotts. “It suggests memories of busy days spent within these walls, and pleasing experiences in times past when Thoreau and [William Ellery] Channing and Emerson sometimes honored me with their sittings,”10 Bronson mused on the past.

  Then on April 7, less than a month after Lizzie’s death, the family cohesiveness and the golden band of sisters was dealt another fatal blow, this time in the form of happy, happy news. Anna Alcott came back from living at the Pratt farm with John Pratt and announced that she was in love and that they were engaged. Even for Bronson, this departure of another daughter—to marriage instead of death—was complicated. “The thought is more than I am ready for at this moment,”11 he wrote. But for Louisa, this “happy” announcement was a dreadful betrayal. In public Louisa congratulated the happy couple. “I moaned in private over my great loss and said I’d never forgive J. for taking Anna from me.”12

  In some ways, Anna’s engagement to John Pratt, which was the only conventional marriage among the four sisters, was harder to bear than Lizzie’s death. The death was awful and everyone agreed that it was awful. Sitting by Lizzie’s bedside, desperately trying to amuse her as she cycled in and out of unbearable pain, giving her ether, watching her sleep, were all satisfying in their own sad way. We all grieve when we lose someone close; sadness is normal.

  An engagement is supposed to be a happy occasion. Love makes the world go around. Our community gathers to rejoice with us even as, after a death, they gather to mourn. We are supposed to be thrilled. Presumably, Anna’s engagement was a happy thing for her; but for Louisa it felt like another death, a death that she was not allowed to mourn.

  Lizzie’s death and Anna’s engagement signaled the end of the Alcott family as Louisa had known it. The golden band of four sisters was now down to two, and May was often away. When a family creates its own intimate mythology, such shifts are hard. As long as Louisa was one of four sisters, sisters devoted to each other and to the family, her inability to connect with an appropriate man, and her own inability to conform to a feminine ideal was obscured. Anna’s engagement threw Louisa’s emotional isolation into sharp relief. At the same time, Louisa’s mother was profoundly distracted by the death of her youngest daughter and the betrothal of her oldest. Once again she didn’t have time to comfort the daughter who always seemed competent and able to take care of herself.

  Louisa’s other passions had seemed fine when they were the dreams of a young girl: her father’s older friends, those Olympian married men, or younger men who were happy to climb trees, plan practical jokes, and take the lesser parts in the dramas she wrote and directed. That had all been happily normal when it was part of the fabric of the pathetic family.

  Louisa may have been ambivalent sexually. She often referred to her masculine traits and her “mannish” looks. She did not, however, seem attracted to other women; quite the contrary. It seems more likely that, growing up in a family rocked by the throes of a passionate and stormy marriage between two people she adored, she formed a deep and abiding distrust of the state of holy matrimony. Later, when Little Women was a success, she refused to marry Jo to Laurie because she didn’t want to represent marriage as a happy ending when she had abundant evidence that it was no such thing. Louisa as a child had watched the Hawthornes come to an accommodation of Hawthorne’s friendship with Margaret Fuller; she had seen Lidian Emerson’s pain over her husband’s emotional and physical absences. She had watched the admirable Thoreau repel advances, and of course she was an astute observer of her own parents’ struggles.

  Whether because of her nature or because of the environment in which she grew up, Louisa May Alcott was deeply practical and able to suppress most of her feelings. Her focus was on helping the family survive and earning the money to ensure this, rather than with planning her own individual future. Louisa May Alcott kept journals during these difficult years. Later, when she was an older, wealthier, and well-known writer, she annotated the journals. As a result, her surviving journals are a fascinating study in perspective. In the passage written in 1858, she cried out in the written word over the loss of Anna to John Pratt.

  The mature Louisa May Alcott had a different point of view. “Now that John is dead, I can truly say that we all had cause to bless the day he came into the family, for we gained a son and a brother and Anna the best husband ever known,” she wrote in a footnote in 1873, fifteen years later.13 For Alcott’s readers, John Pratt was certainly a benefit, since Louisa’s closeness to Anna enabled her to write a laser-sharp portrait of the stresses of young marriage in Little Women.

  That was later; the fall of 1858 found Louisa, as she approached her birthday at the end of November, feeling abandoned and useless in a way she had not anticipated. With much fanfare, the Alcott family moved into Orchard House and began to receive visitors. Their Monday night open houses featuring bowls of Bronson’s apples were often crowded with old friends like the Hawthornes and the Emersons. “Much company to see the new house. All seem to be glad that the wandering family is anchored at last. We won’t move again for twenty years if I can help it. The old people need an abiding place, and now that death and love have taken two of us away, I can, I hope, soon manage to care for the remaining four,”14 wrote Louisa in her journal. But what was left of the wandering family?

  There are three bedrooms at the top of the narrow stairs in Orchard House, laid out by Bronson Alcott. Moving into her little room at the front of the house was very different from the rough-and-tumble of life in the places the family had previously moved. May was in Boston and Louisa was the only child left at home. Before, they had been crowded. Now, suddenly, there was too much space. The possibility loomed that Louisa would become the spinster sister.

  In many New England families, one sibling ended up in the unenviable position of being the maiden aunt, the one who spent her life caring for the parents who had brought them all up. Louisa didn’t want this position, but she seemed to be veering toward it. Her powerful dreams of finding fame and fortune as a writer—of being as famous as Jenny Lind or as talented as Charlotte Brontë—seemed to be slowly devoured by circumstance.

  Louisa had come to dislike Concord. She wasn’t even enchanted by Orchard House, which she called “Apple Slump.” The railroad had changed the sleepy, isolated country town into a bustling business hub. The once-picturesque Milldam, Concord’s eccentric Main Street, which is still on a dam built over the river—like a Yankee version of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence—was a busy thoroughfare crowded with shops like Holden’s grocery, Reynolds’s apothecary, and Jonas Hastings’s boot shop.

  When winter loomed, Louisa planned her escape. Her spirits were at their lowest ebb, and she decided to go to Boston to stay with her cousin Thomas Sewall on Chestnut Street and see if she could once again bring in some cash for the family and relaunch her literary career. “I am not needed at home and seem to be the only bread-winner just now,”15 she wrote. After this entry, Louisa seems to have plunged into a loneliness and despair that were new for her. What she refers to later as her “fit of despair” passed, and Louisa wrote of suicide that “it seemed so cowardly to run away before the battle was over.”16 Buttressed by her Boston friends the Parkers and an offer of work as a governess for the charming child Alice Lovering, Louisa recovered. “There is work for me and I will have it,” she wrote. She “resolved to take Fate by the throat
and shake a living out of her.”17 Had she known what the next decade would hold for her and for her country, would she have been heartened or further depressed?

  There are dozens of theories about what started the Civil War. How could it have been avoided? Was it the election of Hawthorne’s friend Franklin Pierce, who hadn’t the skills to find a way to bring the states together, or the passage of the 1850 Compromise, or the Dred Scott decision in 1857? Was it the local civil war in Kansas fought between the men who wanted the new state to sanction slavery and the men—many of them transplanted New Englanders—who abhorred slavery and wanted Kansas to be a free state? Was it the day that South Carolina Representative Preston Brooks used his cane to protest an antislavery speech by beating Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner unconscious on the floor of the United States Senate, or was it the liberation of Shadrach Minkins, or was it Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin? A few years later, when Stowe was introduced to President Abraham Lincoln, the story goes he looked down at her from his great height and joked, “So you’re the little lady who started this big war.”

  Many of these factors were more than hearsay to Louisa May Alcott and her family. None brought them closer to an understanding of the causes of the war than the short, violent career of a man named John Brown. Was John Brown a madman who kept his wife and children in an Adirondack hideout while he went about fomenting unnecessary revolution? Did he want slaves to rise up and murder their owners? Or was he a courageous freedom fighter, willing to give his own life for the equality guaranteed in the United States Constitution—an equality that would extend to all men no matter what their color?

  In 1857, John Brown, a Connecticut native who had become a loud voice for abolition, came to Boston to raise money and made his first visit to Concord. He was contemptuous of the Concord intellectuals who were safe in their pretty houses while the world came apart. Yet he spoke to a packed meeting at the Concord Town Hall and won over Emerson and Thoreau. John Brown reflected the passion of the Alcotts and their friends, a passion that in their case had come from the very personal experience of helping frightened runaways to freedom.

  Brown moved with his five sons to Kansas in order to fight against those who would have slaves there. He had become an outlaw and had organized a secret committee to raise money, called the Secret Six, that included Concord schoolmaster Franklin Sanborn and Emerson’s friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson. President Buchanan put a price of $250 on Brown’s head, and Brown mocked him by offering $2.50 for Buchanan’s.

  In May of 1856, after the town of Lawrence, Kansas, had been sacked and burned by proslavery men, Brown and his sons went on a killing spree among the families who lived along the banks of Pottawattomie Creek. They hacked one man to death and shot another execution-style. Five men were killed.

  By the next summer, Brown was back in Concord giving another lecture to his fans, a lecture punctuated by waving the Bowie knife he had used in the Pottawattomie massacres. Few of the Concord townspeople gave money, but they were all enchanted with Brown. How did this group of nonviolent men and women reconcile their admiration for Brown with his barbaric actions? His fiery rhetoric combined with their passionate beliefs in individual freedom seemed to ignite in a way that obscured the moral landscape.

  “Thoreau and Emerson took John Brown at the value he set himself,” explains Robert Penn Warren in his brilliant biography of John Brown. “They didn’t give him money, but they gave to the world his own definition of himself. . . . Emerson spent his life trying to find something which would correspond to (his) fine ideas. In John Brown Emerson thought he had found his man.”18

  Then at midnight of Sunday, October 16, 1859, a year and a half after the death of Lizzie Alcott, John Brown and his men took over the United States Armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and waited for a revolution among the slaves from the neighboring plantations, a revolution that never came. Instead, U.S. Marines led by Colonel Robert E. Lee arrived, killed ten of the conspirators, and captured Brown and killed two of his sons. The events at Harpers Ferry were as important in Concord as if they had happened next door. “We have a daily stampede for papers & a nightly indignation meeting over the wickedness of our country, & the cowardice of the human race,”19 Louisa wrote another casual friend from her Concord childhood, Alf Whitman.

  Brown was hanged as a traitor in Charlestown, Virginia, on December 2. Thoreau and Emerson and Bronson Alcott all referred to him as a Christ-like martyr, and Louisa, who by this time was spending most of her time in Boston, even wrote a poem about his death. The poem demonstrates that as independent and clear-thinking as Louisa usually was, she was capable of sentimental lapses and was sometimes able to follow those she admired without being disturbed by the facts.

  No monument of quarried stone,

  No eloquence of speech,

  Can grave the lessons on the land

  His martyrdom will teach.20

  In one of the annotations that Alcott wrote in her own journals years later, the wry Louisa reasserts herself, pointing out that her patriotism was better than her poetry.

  John Brown’s execution also became the subject of a more popular verse, “John Brown’s body Lies a’mouldering in the grave,” which in turn became the unofficial anthem of the Union Army a few years later. By then Robert E. Lee had turned down an offer to lead the Union Army and was leading the Army of Northern Virginia. After his execution, two of John Brown’s daughters came to stay with the Alcotts for a few months, and Anne Brown later wrote a short memoir about staying in the house that she described as filled with fun and a happy family.

  “One day Miss Louisa came bounding in, whirled around and clapped her hands above her head, exclaiming, ‘I came, I saw, I’ve conquered,’” Brown wrote.21 Louisa explained to her surprised houseguest that she had been trying to get the Alcotts’ cranky next-door neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to let her have a look at the new sky tower which he had built onto the top of his house—once the Alcott house. He didn’t seem inclined to let his boisterous young neighbor up the narrow flight of stairs, which had been built as an extension of the hallway above where she had once had a treasured first room of her own. Louisa kept asking for the loans of books that she knew were in the sky tower. Finally he had told her to go look for herself.

  Brown also described playing games with the Alcotts, Nine Men’s Morris, cribbage, casino, and Old Maid. When Brown asked Louisa why she had turned down a proposal, Louisa answered that she would have shocked her husband too much for the marriage to work.

  In 1859, as war approached, Abba Alcott got sick, as she was to be almost every winter. Louisa went home to nurse her, and this hardship, a week nursing even a beloved old lady in a town she hated, opened another path for her. “Wonder if I ought to be a nurse, as I seem to have a gift for it,” she wrote. “If I couldn’t act or write I would try it. May yet.”22 As the war approached, Boston filled with soldiers and rumors. Louisa, still caught up in her round of story submissions and sewing and teaching jobs, watched the preparations swirl around her.

  In May, Anna Alcott married John Bridge Pratt in a simple ceremony at Orchard House. Smiling on the outside, Louisa could not stop grieving on the inside. “We are in grey thin stuff and roses,” she wrote of Anna’s bridal party and dresses. “Sackcloth I called it and ashes of roses, for I mourn the loss of my Nan, and am not comforted.”23 Still it was interesting to see some of the benefits of being married, Louisa wrote. “Mr. Emerson kissed her, and I thought that honor would make even matrimony endurable, for he is the god of my idolatry and has been for years.”

  Louisa’s career finally seemed to be taking off. The Atlantic Monthly bought her melodramatic story about an orphan with a heart of gold, “Love and Self-Love.” Louisa had been rejected by the Atlantic and its editors, James T. Fields and James Russell Lowell, so many times that she had despaired. But she never gave up. She had the endurance that is as much a necessity for a successful writing career as is talent. Her story appeared under her
own name in the magazine in March 1860. Encouraged, she began to work on her first serious novel. The title was Moods, after an Emersonian epigram from his essay “Experience.” “Life is a chain of moods like a string of beads, and as we pass through them they prove to be many colored lenses, which paint the world their own hue, and each shows us only what lies in its own focus.”

  In Moods, Alcott told a story that was quintessentially Concord. Her young heroine, Sylvia Yule, is torn between two loves; a Thoreau-like Adam who is at one with nature, and an Emerson-like fellow who is as elegant as he is desirable. Mistakenly thinking that the Thoreau character is lost to her—that he is married to someone else—Sylvia accepts the proposal of the other man. This love triangle, set on river trips and at country houses, obsessed Louisa all through the summer. “I was perfectly happy and seemed to have no wants,”24 she wrote in her journal. By November, when her shared birthday with her father passed pleasantly, Abraham Lincoln had been elected president, and three weeks later South Carolina officially seceded from the Union, followed by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas.

  Soon after Lincoln’s inauguration, a stalemate that had been coming a long time developed over the United States’ Fort Sumter in the bay off Charleston, South Carolina. Sumter was a federal fort and therefore, according to the Yankees, the property of the Union. Sumter was in South Carolina, and therefore the property of the southern states according to what had recently become the Confederacy under the leadership of Jefferson Davis.

  In April 1861, the standoff at far-away Fort Sumter would have consequences for everyone in Concord and Boston. War in those days was still considered a gentleman’s game, and few seemed to realize the carnage and heartbreak that would be released by a few shots on an obscure federal garrison. Louisa turned out to wave good-bye to the Concord Artillery of the State Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, that was ordered to Washington along with all other volunteer units. “I’ve often longed to see a war, and now I have my wish,” Louisa wrote with an innocence that in retrospect seems sad and mistaken. “I long to be a man, but as I can’t fight, I will content myself working for those who can.”