Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Hecker stoically believed that “all our difficulties should be looked at in such a light as to improve and elevate our minds.”31 At first, Hecker thought that he had found elevation at Fruitlands, and his first diary entries from the farm speak enthusiastically of the “very fine things” that Lane and Alcott said to him. During those first few evenings, the men conversed long into the night about such topics as friendship, the role of clothing in society (the contributions of Samuel Bower would have been most intriguing), and the highest aim of earthly existence.32 Hecker took an eager part in these discussions, and Lane, at least, looked on him as a member of bright promise.

  Thereafter, however, doubts began to crowd swiftly in on all sides. Hecker’s emotional bonds to his biological family were strong. He spoke so often of his life at home that Lane in particular began to wonder if he could truly devote himself to his new “family.” Alcott, it seems, was more willing to reserve judgment. Hecker came from money—a feature that distinguished him from most of the other Fruitlands recruits. Already, Alcott was becoming dissatisfied with the land that Lane had purchased for the commune, and he had his eye on a more promising tract near Leominster. If only Hecker could persuade his brothers to supply some backing…well, the possibility cried out for exploration.

  While there is no direct evidence that Alcott wanted to use Hecker for his fortune, Hecker himself was wary. The philosopher’s “insinuating and persuasive way” made him uneasy, and he could not shake the suspicion that Alcott wanted him “because he thought I would bring money to the Community.”33 In a different way, Hecker also doubted himself, and only a week passed before he started to doubt his fitness for the enterprise. He did not feel that he could renounce the world as easily as Alcott and Lane evidently had. Moreover, Hecker’s outlook was essentially Christian, and it bothered him that Alcott and Lane seemed to care only about creating an earthly paradise. As an old man, Hecker recollected that Alcott and Lane had no definite concept of the hereafter.34 Though Hecker admitted that Alcott and Lane had “much, very much” to offer him, he quickly began to doubt that the Fruitlands philosophy was sufficient to his needs.35

  On July 20, only nine days after Hecker’s arrival, his two would-be mentors had decided to address his ambivalence head on. That night, they confronted him, demanding to know his “position with regard to my family, my duty, and my position here.” Alcott asked what was keeping Hecker from committing himself wholeheartedly to the community. He was not prepared for the answer he received. Hecker had been saving up for this moment. He started with Alcott, whom he chided for his “want of frankness” and “his disposition to separateness rather than win cooperation with the aims of his own mind.” Hecker also thought that Alcott was in a pretty poor position to criticize the familial attachments of others. The young man accused Alcott’s own family of “tending to prevent his immediate plans of reformation.” Furthermore, Hecker claimed that the two men had “too decided [a] tendency toward literature and writing for the prosperity and success of their enterprise.”36

  Three days later, Hecker went home, to “be true to the spirit with the help of God, and wait for further light and strength.”37 Alcott reacted with disgust. He went to Lane and said, “Well, Hecker has flunked out. He hadn’t the courage to persevere. He’s a coward.” Feeling the unfairness of his friend’s judgment, Lane replied, “No; you’re mistaken. Hecker is right. He wanted more than we had to give him.”38 This exchange found its way to Hecker’s ears. For the rest of his life, he never forgot either Alcott’s curt dismissal or Lane’s defense of him. Hecker later proved himself anything but a coward in matters of faith. Ordained as a Catholic priest in 1848, he went on to found the Paulist Fathers. At the end of his life, he pronounced Alcott, Thoreau, and even Emerson “three consecrated cranks.”39

  Louisa was still far from considering her father a crank. From the beginning, Fruitlands seems to have intensified her sense of the importance of family ties, though the concept of universal family being touted by Mr. Lane remained forever foreign to her. Critical as she was of Lane and openly hostile to Anna Page, she never wrote a single bitter word at Fruitlands about any member of her biological family except herself. One forms the impression that she thought of the non-Alcott members of the commune as intruders on her rightful sphere, sapping the attentions, energy, and patience of the people she loved. A Fruitlands of the Alcotts, by the Alcotts, and for the Alcotts would have been more to her liking. Louisa may have wanted to be good all the time to everyone, but the one day she awoke with the thought, “I must be very good” was her mother’s birthday.40

  At Fruitlands, Louisa absorbed different lessons from the ones her father had intended. She was discovering that the same word in different mouths could mean very different things and that the content of virtue itself might change, depending on the standpoint of the viewer. She also learned that the form of goodness that proclaimed itself most loudly might not be the most authentic or desirable. Mr. Lane preached kindness to all human beings alike; however, kindness divided so many ways seemed to leave a very thin slice for each. Louisa heard her own father arguing with serene confidence for the rights of all living beings. But when worm-eaten apples arrived at the dinner table or the autumn wind blew through her linen tunic, this generosity on all sides did not appear generous to her. Inevitably, she wondered whether earthly comforts were so terrible as her father made them out to be.

  However, Louisa was also seeing quiet examples of kindness. She saw it in the patience with which her mother taught her how to sew and the pride with which her mother congratulated her on improving her handwriting. When, in mid-October, Abba and Lizzie planned a trip to Boston, Louisa was disconsolate, for she knew that, in their absence, “No one will be as good to me as Mother.”41 She saw kindness, too, in the taciturn figure of Joseph Palmer, who was always giving freely of his time and tools. Indeed, she sometimes saw this kindness in her father, at least as far as the rules of the society allowed. Aware of the unappealing nature of the simple bread he produced for his table, Alcott took to fashioning the loaves in the shapes of animals to make them more pleasing to the children. The example showed her that it was sometimes in the bending of the rules, not their strict enforcement, that a loving spirit could shine forth. Louisa dutifully copied into her diary the dreary maxims that made up the Fruitlands creed: “Vegetable diet and sweet repose—Animal food and nightmare” “Pluck your body from the orchard––do not snatch it from the shamble.”42 But she knew that they contained less love than any one of her father’s animal loaves.

  On August 7, Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller that he had had a visit from Alcott and Lane, who were on a trip to Boston together. Alcott was battling an unspecified illness, which became serious enough for Abba to pronounce him “‘low indeed’ and suffering from ‘extreme debility’” on his return.43 Bronson’s mood, it seems, was no better than his health. Emerson told Fuller, “Mr. A. already anticipates the time when he shall be forsaken of all, & left alone, inasmuch as none will stand by him in the rigidness of his asceticism.”44

  Lane, too, was starting to have second thoughts. He mentioned to Emerson the presence of a colony of Shakers that lay across the Nashua River and within an easy distance of Fruitlands. Emerson deduced that the Englishman had become “very much engaged” with the Shaker settlement. He also told Fuller that Lane meant to write something about the colony for The Dial. Lane even hinted that he might eventually join the Shakers and forsake Fruitlands altogether. The Shaker colony across the river from Fruitlands had been personally established by the religion’s founder, and it had been thriving since 1781. The implicit comparison with Fruitlands, which was already struggling, was either embarrassing or intriguing. Why did the Shakers rise as the Fruitlanders fell into confusion? Lane thought he knew the answer, and his deductions would soon threaten to shatter the Alcott family forever.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  LOST ILLUSIONS

  “Then said Charity to Christian, Have
you a family? are you a married man? Chr. I have a Wife and four small children. Cha. And why did you not bring them along with you?”

  —JOHN BUNYAN,

  The Pilgrim’s Progress

  ON AUGUST 4, 1843, BRONSON ALCOTT AND CHARLES LANE set out from Fruitlands in the company of James Kay, a visitor whose curiosity about things utopian had briefly lured him from Philadelphia. They followed a rustic roadside sign that pointed toward the Shaker community that lay two or three miles north of the town of Harvard. Louisa, who stayed behind at the farm with her mother and sisters, mentioned the men’s excursion in her journal, adding that the three did not come back until evening. Apparently, they had been expected back earlier, but something about the Shaker settlement had caused them to linger. The truth, not yet known to the other members of the Alcott family, was that Lane and Bronson were in the early stages of a fascination with the Shakers. On this August day, Lane was taking careful notes, which he soon edited into an article for The Dial. True to form, his article spoke critically of the aspects of the Shaker colony that had even a slight flavor of worldliness. His sensitivities on the subject of animal rights were aroused by the commune’s stables, which he compared to a prison. He also took a reproving tone as he noted that most of the members consumed “flesh-meat,” used milk in profusion, and liberally imbibed coffee and tea.1 He was equally displeased to find that the Shakers routinely traded with the outside world. Doing a yearly volume of business worth about ten thousand dollars—a respectable sum in those times—the Shakers were too prosperous for Lane to approve of them completely. On the whole, he argued, the Shakers engaged in “more extensive interchanges of money, and more frequent intercourse with the world, than seems compatible with a serene life.”2

  Overall, however, Lane’s impressions were favorable. He saw in the community an agreeable appearance of order and prosperity. The fields and gardens, filled with cheerful, active laborers, and the vigor with which all kinds of improvements were daily being made, presented an all-too-clear contrast with Fruitlands. He also found his hosts to be open, hospitable people who spoke enthusiastically about life in their simple colony. Lane eagerly pressed his hosts to learn the secrets of their success. What he did not know already about the Shaker religion and social philosophy, the community elders were more than happy to fill in. The movement had been founded by a visionary Englishwoman named Ann Lee, whose memory her followers revered by referring to her always as “Mother.” Like Lane, Ann Lee had been born in England and had been drawn to America by a spiritually inspired vision of reform; these similarities to Lane’s own situation must surely have touched a place in his heart. Mother Ann had proclaimed that the true Christian God had both male and female attributes. The incarnation of the Holy Spirit in Jesus Christ had been only the first appearance of God in human form. The divine afflatus had now returned, and it had come to rest in Mother Ann’s own person. Through her, God now commanded a new ordering of social life. Members of the Shaker religion were to regard themselves as belonging to the last generation of human mortals, committed to achieving spiritual perfection in this life, rather than passing the quest down to their children. Indeed, since perfection was the current aim of the Shakers, no children were necessary. Therefore, sexual relations, themselves a tawdry reminder of the Fall of Man, were no longer to be engaged in. To attain salvation, the Shakers not only retreated from the world, but also from procreation.

  Although the Shaker communities comprised both sexes, a firm discipline prevented them from intermingling. Men and women in the community were prohibited from passing each other on a staircase, shaking hands, or exchanging gifts across the gender line. When it was necessary for a man and woman to speak to each other, they were permitted to do so only in the company of a chaperone. They walked, worked, and worshipped apart.3 If a family that already had children joined the Shakers, the children were taken from their parents and were permitted to see them only once a year, in a brief interview supervised by an elder.4 Lane listened engrossed. Their austere commitment, he wrote, “reigns so monarchically in their hearts that they have always a stirring topic whereon to speak, and an exalting object for which to act.” He did not find the verbal arguments of the Shakers entirely persuasive; however, when he saw around him the real results of those arguments, their contentions “became almost irresistible.”

  Abba Alcott, however, regarded the Shakers with suspicion. Late in August, Bronson persuaded her to have a look for herself. Something was not quite right about them, she thought, and she tried to explain her misgivings in her journal:

  I gain but little from their domestic and internal arrangements. There is servitude somewhere, I have no doubt. There is a fat, sleek, comfortable look about the men, and among the women there is a stiff, awkward reserve that belongs to neither sublime resignation nor divine hope.5

  Abba did not credit the Shakers or their principles with having worked any great miracles. She saw in the Shakers simply another social arrangement in which the men grew plump and the women grew solemn, and she was already familiar with conditions of that kind.

  At the same time that Abba was setting down her suspicions regarding the Shakers, Lane was becoming ever more convinced that his own idea of paradise could never be realized as long as Abba remained on the scene. Although he wrote with approval that she had shed some of her aristocratic manner, passing, as he put it, “from the ladylike to the industrious order,” he felt that she still had “much inward experience to realize.” Most irritatingly, however, it seemed impossible to cure her of her particular fondness for her own children. Lane complained, “Her peculiar maternal love blinds her to all else—whom does it not so blind for a season?”6

  But Abba’s presumed blindness did not prevent her from grasping a truth that Lane refused to admit; she knew that hard work was more likely to save Fruitlands than a different social theory. As Abba continued her daily round of cooking and cleaning, she and the girls were finding out that life in Utopia was leaving them less time to spend with one another. The family post office that Abba had maintained from the time her daughters were first learning to write was still in service, but now the time for letter writing was scarce. Anna in particular missed these casual written exchanges. In one of the few intrafamily notes that survives from Fruitlands, Anna wrote, “I do not write to you very often, dear mother, but I love to dearly when I feel like it, and I love to have letters from you though I do not expect them very often.” Anna was also sorry to see how seldom her mother was able to join the family for meals. “I enjoy my food much better when you are at the table,” Anna told her mother. With a commonsense appeal to justice, she added, “If you prepare the food you ought to eat it with us.”7

  Louisa tried as hard as she could to help the family through the bleak autumn. She helped with the dishes and all the other chores she was old enough to manage. Sometimes she and Anna gave their mother a rest by cooking supper. At various times, Louisa helped with the ironing, the corn husking, and the sewing. The evenings brought some rest, and one night Louisa diverted herself by writing a poem about the sunset:

  Softly doth the sun descend

  To his couch behind the hill.

  Then, oh, then, I love to sit

  On mossy banks beside the rill.8

  Anna praised the poem; Louisa herself thought it was poor. In any event, it is telling that the simple act of sitting still and doing nothing was luxury enough to move her to poetry. After sunset, her father and Mr. Lane droned on with their wearisome metaphysics. Louisa’s journal entry from November 2 may be taken as typical: “Anna and I did the work. In the evening Mr. Lane asked us, ‘What is man?’ These were our answers: A human being; an animal with a mind; a creature; a body; a soul and a mind. After a long talk we went to bed very tired.” Rereading this entry forty years later, Louisa added in the margin, “No wonder [they were tired], after doing the work and worrying their little wits with such lessons.”9

  In keeping with the objectives of the co
lony, Louisa was still doing her best to gain mastery over her emotions, though the secret of their control still escaped her. Her gladdest times came when she played pretend games with Anna and Lizzie. On one of her more carefree days, she told her journal, “I ran in the wind and played be a horse [sic], and had a lovely time in the woods with Anna and Lizzie. We were fairies, and made gowns and paper wings. I ‘flied’ the highest of all.”10

  As Bronson’s daughters tried to fly, their impoverished circumstances seemed to pull them back down. Louisa felt the lack of things poignantly on her mother’s birthday. She awoke that day with the thought that she must be especially good, and she ran to kiss her mother and to give her her best wishes. But she had little else to give—only a poem and a little cross that she had made out of moss. Mothers typically know how to transform even the smallest gifts from their children into priceless gems, but Louisa knew the difference. That evening, ironically after reading a story called “Contentment,” Louisa wondered about what contentment might actually be. What she wrote in her diary was, by Fruitlands standards, a confession of heresy: “I wish I was rich, I wish I was good, and we were all a happy family this day.”11 At the wise age of ten, Louisa had accepted the idea that happiness was not complete and that goodness was not sufficient without some small amount of wealth. Here was the beginning of a long, resentful struggle against poverty. In founding a colony where commerce was to be abolished, Bronson had hoped to teach his children that money was meaningless and dispensable. However, the experience of want was ingraining the opposite lesson.

  Meanwhile, the colony was falling apart. By midautumn, only the Alcotts and Lanes were left. Bronson and Lane faced two pressing tasks: to find replacements for the defectors and to make the farm ready for the coming winter. Lacking the resources to do both, they made a seemingly harebrained decision. With their crops still in the field and colder weather closing in, they elected to strike out across New England and New York, proceeding on foot whenever possible, in search of new recruits. Clad in their linen tunics, Alcott and Lane turned up in the drawing rooms of almost everyone they could think of who might join them. In New York alone, they paid visits to Emerson’s older brother William, Horace Greeley, William Henry Channing, Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Maria Child.12 When the last welcomed the two men, she politely asked what had brought them to New York. The befuddled Alcott replied, “I don’t know. It seems a miracle we are here.” On their strange, improbable journeys, Alcott and Lane saw much and spoke to many, but when they returned to Fruitlands, not a single convert came with them.