Louisa May Alcott Page 16
The social reformer Dorothea Lynde Dix had been appointed the Union’s superintendent of female nurses during the Civil War. The autocratic crusader had spent more than twenty years working for improved treatment of mentally ill patients and for better prison conditions. A week after the attack on Fort Sumter, Dix, at age fifty-nine, volunteered her services to the Union and received the appointment in June 1861, placing her in charge of all women nurses working in army hospitals.
Sometimes called “Dragon Dix” for her opinionated manner, Dix had definite ideas about who her nurses should be and what they should do. Previously women who followed armies had often been camp followers providing sex and companionship for the soldiers. Dix knew that she had to work against this stereotype. After convincing the army that women could serve as nurses, she recruited the plainest women she could find and dressed them in modest dark-colored clothing. She refused to have nurses younger than thirty years old and did not want women with children. Not only was she deeply concerned about the welfare of her nurses, she raised private money to supplement the meager funding the army gave her for her nurses and worked for nothing herself. Three thousand nurses served under her administration. One of them was Louisa May Alcott.
It was December 11 by the time Louisa received a letter telling her to start south. She was assigned to serve under Matron Hannah Ropes of Boston in the Union Hotel Hospital, a former hotel that had been commandeered by the Union. She wasted no time, spent the afternoon packing and saying an emotional but hurried good-bye to her parents, and by nightfall was off to the train station to take the train to Boston with her sister May and her neighbor Julian Hawthorne, who would travel with her on this first part of the journey. Hawthorne, the only son of Nathaniel and Sophia, was now living next door to the Alcotts in their old house. He remembered her before her trip to Washington as lively and generous. “A black-haired, red-cheeked, long-legged hobbledehoy of 26, though not looking or seeming near that age,” he wrote.12
The young Edward Emerson, younger than Louisa, concurred. “The Civil War so kindled her that no one was astonished, or ventured to remonstrate, when she took the almost unheard of decision to volunteer as nurse behind the lines,” he wrote, describing Louisa as tall, dark and “flashing.” “She was a big, lovable, tender-hearted, generous girl, with black hair, thick and long, and flashing, humorous black eyes.”13
In those playful days before the war changed everything, days of gardening and floating down the river under the willows and childhood games, the young Julian Hawthorne had a severe crush on May, the younger Alcott sister. Almost every day, he walked up the road to nearby Orchard House to visit the object of his enchantment. The two young people took walks together or worked in the garden or sat in the Alcott parlor. Julian thought May was also pleased to see him, but one week she made him nervous by mentioning that she was expecting a visit from a “cousin from England” who was coming to stay at Orchard House.
One summer afternoon, as Julian approached the house, he saw two figures standing by the Alcott fence in what looked like a very intimate conversation. One was his beloved May and the other a tall, elegant-looking gentleman with a monocle. No one even noticed Julian approach, the two seemed so engrossed with each other. He interrupted, and the two acted as if they were both disturbed in an important conversation. May blushed as she introduced him to the English cousin who glared through his monocle and spoke condescendingly with a clipped accent.
The young Hawthorne, increasingly jealous, wondered if he could beat the English cousin to a punch, when the gentleman put an arm around May’s waist and drew her toward the house. “Come, my dear,” the visitor murmured into May’s shell-like ear. Furious, Julian began to sputter with rage and rush after them in protest when the English gentleman pulled off his hat and burst out laughing—the English gentleman was a cleverly disguised Louisa! That mischievous nature combined with an impressive acting talent was the Louisa Julian had grown up with. The war would change all that.
As Louisa hurriedly packed for her trip, Union soldiers 500 miles south of her began finally to assemble pontoon bridges over the Rappahannock River to the town of Fredericksburg. The bridges had been one reason for many, many delays in the Union Army advance. General Ambrose Burnside had insisted on waiting for the bridges, which took nearly a month to arrive. While he waited, he lost his ability to surprise the Confederate Army.
A handsome West Point graduate—his name and his flamboyant whiskers gave us the expression “sideburns”—Burnside had replaced the popular General George McClellan after the Union victory at Antietam, which had been the bloodiest day of the war and decimated the Union ranks. Unlike the confident McClellan, who was often compared to Napoleon, Burnside was a reluctant leader—he had twice turned down Lincoln’s offer of command of the Army of the Potomac before he accepted it in the fall of 1862.
Burnside’s army of 115,000 was much larger than the opposing southern force. Burnside positioned his men across the Rappahannock from the town of Fredericksburg, a town on the flatlands below the hills where the Confederate Army was encamped. As he waited a full month for the pontoon bridges, the Confederate Army had time to call for reinforcements and solidify its position. In fact, by the time the bridges arrived, the Army of Northern Virginia, led by General Robert E. Lee, was firmly entrenched with 78,000 men in the wooded hills above the town of Fredericksburg. Before the official Union charge, Burnside ordered an artillery barrage that decimated the town of Fredericksburg but left the protected Confederate soldiers untouched.
Louisa May Alcott spent the day of December 12 in Boston doing errands, going to the dentist to get a tooth filled, and rushing from office to office, trying to unsnarl the bureaucratic obstacles to getting her credentials as a nurse and to buying her series of tickets for the trip. In order to get from Boston to Washington, she would travel by rail to New London, Connecticut, by steamship from New London to Jersey City, and then again by train to Washington, D.C.
As soon as she boarded the train to New London, Alcott returned to faithfully keeping the journal she had started at the beginning of her trip—a journal that later became a weekly letter home. These descriptions are written in a different voice than either of her previous writing voices. They do not have the melodramatic blood and thunder of the stories Alcott wrote for Frank Leslie, nor do they have the metaphysical underpinnings and ornate language of her more serious work. That day, on the train to New London, Louisa May Alcott came a long way toward finding the voice that would create Jo March. Her gentle self-mockery and willingness to be wry appear and reappear. “Put my tickets in every conceivable place . . . and finish by losing them entirely,” she wrote. “Suffer agonies till a compassionate neighbor pokes them out of a crack with his pen-knife. Put them in the inmost corner of my purse, then in the deepest recesses of my pocket, pile a collection of miscellaneous articles atop and pin up the whole. Just get composed, feeling I’ve done my best to keep them safely, when the conductor appears.”14
As Louisa May Alcott was bumbling through her trip in a way familiar to many travelers, General Ambrose Burnside was getting ready to make a far more serious series of blunders. Burnside’s delay in taking command in the first place was closer to his nature than anyone realized. Later, in hindsight, the great Union General Ulysses S. Grant would describe Burnside as “an officer who was generally liked and respected. He was not, however, fitted to command an army. No one knew this better than himself.” Burnside’s stubbornness had been previously mistaken for courage. Having lost the opportunity to attack Lee’s Army, commanded by Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet, when they were not prepared, and having divided his own troops into three less effective sections, Burnside still delayed.
On December 12, the Union soldiers, having struggled to get the pontoon bridges into place and finally managed to cross the river, tore into the sleepy, charming southern town of Fredericksburg in a terrifying spree of looting and pillaging. Stores were gutted and soldiers tra
shed whatever could not be carried off. They entered houses, defaced walls with paint and graffiti that included their unit numbers, and tossed the contents of the gracious southern parlors and bedrooms into the street. Soldiers lounged in covered armchairs that had been dragged outdoors, and on Princess Anne Street a ragged group gathered around a stolen piano to sing. Mountains of household silver, women’s jewelry, and anything of value were carried back across the Rappahannock to the Union lines and tents.
This ferocity on the part of the Union soldiers was presumably condoned at the highest levels, although a few officers ordered their men to stop. It stoked Confederate fury even before the two armies engaged. Many of the Confederate men, watching the looting of a Virginia town by Yankees, were from Virginia themselves. They were fighting to protect the virtue of their mothers and sisters and daughters and the sanctity of their own families. Local newspapers made much of the depredations inflicted by the Union Army, stressing how their women had been violated. Although the women of Fredericksburg were not raped or attacked physically, their boudoirs were stripped and muddied and the roads out of Fredericksburg were filled with fleeing, defenseless women and children.15
Further up the Atlantic Coast, Louisa May Alcott was taking her first trip beyond New England. She hadn’t left Baltimore yet, but her journal is already more Dickensian than Richardsonian. Gone were the pacing beauties and mustachioed villains of her A. M. Barnard stories. Gone were the convoluted metaphysics of her more serious work. Instead, she wrote in a wry, direct voice. Just south of Baltimore, Alcott’s train had an accident when a coupling iron broke, creating a small crash between two cars. “Hats flew off, bonnets were flattened, the stove skipped, the lamps fell down, the water jar turned a somersault,” she wrote. “Of course it became necessary for all the men to get out and stand about in everybody’s way, while repairs were made; and for the women to wrestle their heads out of the windows, asking nine foolish questions for one sensible one.”16
Finally on the morning of December 13, Burnside gave the command to attack. The Union Army, two months late, started across the pontoon bridges with all possible pomp and fanfare. The blue columns crossed the river on the swaying bridges in vast, organized waves, flooding through the town and fanning out onto the open plain below the Army of Northern Virginia. “It moved with flags and with bands and with a great rumbling of moving cannon, making a display of might that impressed the waiting Confederates, impressed even Lee himself.”17 Looking down at the approaching army from Marye’s Heights, Lee had an acute consciousness of history—he had been educated at West Point like Ambrose Burnside—and of the future. A brilliant strategist, he knew that the attack was hopeless and that the superior strength of the Union Army was unimportant because of the position and preparation of his own army. “It is well that we know how terrible war really is,” he commented to an aide as the glorious but doomed Union Army approached, “else we would grow too fond of it.”18 Burnside’s men swept across the river and through the remains of the town into the entrenched Confederate lines, where they were mowed down immediately.
As the dead of the Union Army began to pile up below the Confederate position at Marye’s Heights, Burnside’s men led another attack. The day wore on, and Burnside, sequestered in headquarters on the other side of the river, watched the battle from the second floor of a beautifully furnished Greek Revival house. The Union Army made sixteen attacks against a position that had been shown to be unbreachable earlier that day.
The waves of Union soldiers marching forward under a rain of fire and sometimes crawling over their fallen comrades to move ahead sickened even the Confederate troops who were mowing them down. The Battle of Fredericksburg was one of the worst defeats in the history of the United States Army; 12,700 men were killed that day as Burnside ordered his men over and over again into death and they obediently followed his orders. Fredericksburg quickly became a symbol of stubbornness in the face of unbeatable odds and of the resulting, almost incomprehensible, horror.
As the day waned, Burnside seemed to fall apart, and finally, at dusk, weeping, he announced he would lead the last charge himself. Instead, he was coaxed to retreat. As he left the field strewn with the Union dead, his aide called for three cheers; instead, there was an appalled silence from the men. “A battle is indescribable,” a Union chaplain wrote after seeing the carnage at Fredericksburg, “but once seen it haunts a man till the day of his death.”19
That night, defeated Union soldiers and their Confederate enemy looked out over acres of land that seemed to be carpeted with the Union dead and wounded, heaps of men groaning and screaming. Quiet figures moved among the wounded and dying, some Union and some Confederate. The wounded must be retrieved, the dead buried. The soldiers from the Twentieth Maine carved rude grave markers and dug shallow graves for the bodies they could find and identify. A Confederate doctor gave the dying remnants of men water from his canteen. Slowly the sky lit up and an extraordinary natural phenomenon illuminated the scene. Sheets of red and gold—an aurora borealis, usually called northern lights and very rare as far south as Virginia—threw curtains of lurid light down from the sky. Nature herself seemed to be shining a horrified spotlight on the events of that day.
Watching in exhausted wonder, the Union soldiers took the marvelous lights as a sign of their righteousness. “Firey lances and gold all pointing and beckoning upward. Befitting scene! Who would die a nobler death or dream of a more glorious burial?”20 wrote a soldier in the Maine division. On the Confederate side, the heavenly lights were seen as God’s approval of their victory. “We enthusiastic young fellows felt that the heavens were hanging out banners and streamers and setting off fireworks in honor of our victory,” wrote Robert Stiles, a Confederate officer who had graduated from Yale a few years earlier.21
Does nature reflect the feelings we have? No. In literature this is called the “pathetic fallacy,” the mistaken idea that there should be a storm when a character is furious or that the dawn arrives just as a character dies. The literature of the nineteenth century from Wordsworth to Louisa May Alcott leans heavily on this device. But here there was no literary device, unless you believe that God is a writer. Following one of the worst battles in history, the sky actually did light up with the kinds of lights and mysterious movements that seemed a reflection of divine response.
Walt Whitman’s brother George had been one of Burnside’s soldiers, a captain in the Union Army, and Whitman rushed from Brooklyn to the battlefield to see if he could find his brother. George Whitman survived with a superficial wound, but the sight of the battlefield at Fredericksburg and a pile of human parts—amputated legs and hands outside a hospital tent—changed Whitman’s career. For the rest of the war, he devoted himself to the Union hospitals, starting at a hospital near Fredericksburg, where another Civil War nurse, Clara Barton, was also at work.
Whitman visited the wounded and dying, brought gifts of candy and rice pudding, and wrote sometimes dozens of letters a day home for soldiers who were unable to write letters for themselves. He always carried a pocketful of notebooks for his own observations. Even sadder, Whitman wrote letters to the families of soldiers who were dead or dying, trying to fold some kind of consolation into the words for those whose losses he understood would be unbearable.
Louisa May Alcott and Walt Whitman had never met, but Bronson Alcott had twice visited the burly author of Leaves of Grass in his mother’s Brooklyn house on Classon Avenue before the war. Emerson had been an early fan of the book, and his laudatory phrase “I greet you at the beginning of a great career” was emblazoned by the shameless, self-promoting Whitman on the jacket of the book. Some Bostonians were not forgiving of Whitman’s bold voice. “It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass,” Emerson’s friend and Emily Dickinson’s mentor Thomas Wentworth Higginson cracked, “only that he did not burn it afterwards.”22
Given Whitman’s address by Emerson, Alcott had taken Henry David Thoreau on a special visi
t to Brooklyn to visit in 1856. Whitman whisked the visitors through the house and up to his attic bedroom where the walls were covered with pictures of well-muscled half-naked men—images of Hercules and Bacchus. For the visit, Whitman then offered his guests a chair, while he reclined his 200-pound body, dressed in a red flannel undershirt, and lay back against his own bent elbow. Alcott had found Whitman “full of brute power” and his eyes “gray, unimaginative, cautious yet sagacious: his voice deep. Sharp, tender sometimes and almost melting.”23
Whitman, the sensual spider in his Brooklyn lair, was changed forever by his visit to his brother George at Fredericksburg. Feeling that the soldiers he saw represented the majesty of the American people, Whitman gave his help to them wholeheartedly. Although no Christian himself, he tried to comfort the families he addressed. “There is a text, ‘God doeth all things well’—the meaning of which, after due time, appears to the soul,” he wrote the family of one soldier, Frank Irwin.24 In his greatest poems, like “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman’s sense of loss and yearning seems to rise straight out of the men he helped. Louisa May Alcott was not the only writer whose mature prose was forged among the wounded of the Union Army. Whitman’s Civil War journals became the poems in his book Drum-Taps, published in 1865.
Battlefields and hospitals go together, but the progress in weaponry that caused the Civil War slaughter had not been matched by progress in medicine. The only anesthetic available was chloroform, when it could be had; the idea that germs caused disease was not widely accepted, and doctors did not wash their hands as they went from patient to patient or when they performed surgery. There was no sterilization or even soap and water attendant on operations. The idea of antiseptic would not make it to our hospitals until after a British doctor, Joseph Lister, discovered the work of Louis Pasteur in 1865. No one understood that mosquitoes carried malaria, or that fecal matter could cause illness.