Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  By ambiguously presenting Ventnor as potentially either a father or a lover, “Love and Self-Love” implies a perilous choice regarding the categories of affection. It suggests that two people who fail initially to achieve a deep connection can nevertheless find satisfaction if they start again on a less volatile basis of respect and duty. “Love and Self-Love” speaks as eloquently of the maturing relationship between Bronson and Louisa as anything she ever wrote, and great significance lies in the fact that she wrote the story as her relationship with her family was emerging from crisis and near the time when she briefly considered suicide. “Love and Self-Love,” of course, also describes a suicide attempt, but that attempt is not really about physical death. Rather, it concerns the death of an immature spiritual self, which departs only to be replaced by a wiser, more resilient soul.

  The resurrected, wiser Effie finds that deep feelings need not seek exuberant expression. She eventually achieves the acceptance she craves, but only after she has mastered the art of self-control. Louisa’s moment at the Mill Dam seems to have marked a similar crossroads in the development of her emotional nature. Like Effie with regard to Ventnor, she had previously sought to elicit from her father an effusive response that he was not capable of giving. Indeed, it can be argued that Louisa’s youthful romanticism placed her in an analogous relation with the world at large. She wanted to embrace life, and she wanted life to receive her and her talents with passionate enthusiasm. She did not realize at once that the world is, at bottom, phlegmatic, and that, for most of us, impressing it takes much more patience and effort than she had thus far dedicated to that purpose.

  Had Bronson read between the lines of “Love and Self-Love,” he would perhaps have detected some insights into his own psychology. Although Louisa portrays Ventnor as a man of fine charitable instincts, she represents his apparent unselfishness as a symptom of a deeper narcissism. Shunning the world, engrossing himself in his books, Ventnor appears to be a man of modest appetites. However, Ventnor deems himself superior to others precisely because of his ability to resist pleasure. Through her portrayal of Ventnor, Louisa makes the incisive point that self-discipline, pursued so obsessively that it harms and alienates others, is its own species of sinful self-absorption. No one had taught Louisa this lesson more effectively than her father.

  As she passed her twenty-sixth birthday, Louisa was far from deciding that life was sweet and wonderful merely because her fortunes had taken a momentarily upward turn. She was prepared to treat life as an absurd joke and to proceed on that basis, accepting irony as a means of greeting adversity on its own bitter terms. She voiced her satirical outlook in a letter to Anna in which she suggested that the allegedly all-wise Creator might do well to begin again from scratch:

  As the poet remarks, “Life is a strife, ’tis a struggle, ’tis a dream,” and if he goes on to say it were also “a bubble,” I should feel gratified and sincerely hope some sportive young angel should smash said bubble in his infantine glee and the Almighty bubble-blowing company would start another with rather more of the soothing properties of soap & a little less salt water, one less empty and shiny and one one [sic] which there wasn’t such a tendency to slip and pitch, to say nothing of falling off into space & being seen no more.46

  Anna thought the passage funny and copied it into a letter to Bronson. There is no sure way of telling whether he saw through the humorous gloss and into the cynical nihilism beneath. In any event, it must have pleased him to know that his stormiest child was making people laugh again.

  Bronson received this letter on the road, during another tour of the West. Louisa remarked that he had set out full of hope. “Dear man!” she observed. “How happy he will be if people will only listen to and pay for his wisdom.”47 Western excursions were becoming something of a habit with him, and if they still did not bring the profits he imagined, he always seemed to locate high-minded persons generous enough to house him and cover his expenses. He outfitted himself simply and carried his own bags.48 In the homes of his hosts, he found warm fires to sit by and babies to play with. To Anna, as well as to others, her father’s ability to inspire kindness and receive blessings seemed a sort of ongoing miracle. She asked, “Doesn’t it sometimes seem as though Providence took trusting spirits like your own into his especial keeping, and smoothed the rough places, or is it that people who ‘live in the clouds’ don’t so much mind the little troubles that beset us of the earthly mould?”49 Anna knew no better way to account for her father. He was a lily of the field, one of the rarest species of holy fool. Those who loved him learned to emphasize the adjective instead of the noun.

  By mid-December, Bronson was in Chicago. On this trip, he admitted, his expectations were moderate. Everyone seemed pinched for money, and he hoped only to “glean something as we go.” He sent home an unspecified amount of money for the holidays, apologizing that its meagerness was “in keeping with our humble fortunes.” In a wan, philosophic tone, he added, “Blessed be something to those who have so long waited for nothing.”50 He felt the sadness of knowing that the first Christmas at Orchard House would pass without him. He wrote to Louisa in Boston and urged her to make up for his own absence, “to run up and warm the House of Seven Gables and as many fireplaces.” He took pride, he said, in her enterprise and courage, and he advised her to make her Christmas visit to Concord as long as possible, and make “the house joyous to its inmates all.”51

  Louisa honored her father’s wish, though her mother and Anna disagreed in their description of her visit. Abba wrote to Bronson, “Louisa is with us and we are having cosy times. She is not very well and is enjoying the freedom of her home and the joys of rest, rest.”52 Anna’s account described a much more vivacious visitor. She related that Louisa had come “bringing news, gossip, & fun, enough to keep us laughing the whole time, & doing us heaps of good into the bargain.”53 Louisa surprised everyone by saying that she did not want to go back to Boston and was quite willing to stay longer if only her obligations did not call her away. Abba and Anna reluctantly let her go.54

  “The past year,” Bronson wrote in early 1859, “has changed the aspects of life to us all.”55 With Lizzie’s death and Anna’s betrothal, it had seemed to Louisa at various times in 1858 that the family would dissolve. To the contrary, it had reformed itself on a different basis, and as the year ended, all were appreciative of one another’s strengths and confident of one another’s love. But if, as 1859 began, the Alcotts seemed able to withstand all challenges, the greater Union of the United States inspired far less confidence. Before the year had run its course, the mounting disquietude over slavery would erupt into violence, and the repercussions would be felt within the Alcotts’ closest circle.

  It was a hard winter for Abba, who became seriously ill in January. Anna took over the housekeeping but wished her sisters, both in Boston, could be with her to take the gloom out of the dismal days.56 Louisa responded, coming home for a week to ease Anna’s burdens and take care of their mother. She began to wonder whether nursing might be her true calling. Bronson wrote that necessity alone prevented him from hastening to Abba’s side. He called it “good and true” of Louisa to have come so quickly when needed.57 He was at a loss to explain the urge that sent him forth on his tours when he suspected that his usefulness and welcome would always be greatest at home. He was, perhaps, as perplexed as anyone by his life of “wandering thus far from one’s fireside and chambers, to sit solitary often and strange in strangers’ houses and companies to which one feels drawn by sympathies he is sometimes ashamed to own, and yet is fated to admit.”58 He perhaps sensed that, to continue thinking independently, he had to keep moving independently as well. In choosing the road over his hearth and study, he continually chose the harder path, as if deep armchair comfort were a kind of death to the spirit.

  Abba was evidently better by the time her husband came back from his journey in early March.59 Bronson was very much of two minds about the inland regions of the country. On the o
ne hand, he found everywhere “in this wide West…earnest men and women, seeking faith if they have lost it, or [e]stablishing themselves as they may in the little they have chanced to keep.”60 And yet the turgid streams, the sparse cornfields, and the dreary monotony of the prairie depressed him. The flatness of the land seemed mirrored in the flat speech of its inhabitants. Was there not a flatness of the mind at work as well? Travel for a month in that wild country, he claimed, “and you shall come round home, whatever you were at starting, the Cynic confirmed, the Skeptic and the Sloven, in spite of yourself.”61 On coming home, he observed, “I perceive that I am neither a planter of the backwoods, pioneer, nor settler there, but an inhabitant of the Mind, and given to friendship and ideas. The ancient society, the Old England of New England, Massachusetts for me.”62

  The trip had tired him out. He spent the early spring reading over old books and putting his garden back in order, always a task of some magnitude after a New England winter. Meanwhile, Louisa was taking pleasure in the praise she was receiving for a new story, “Mark Field’s Mistake,” published in the Saturday Evening Gazette. She was busy with teaching, writing, sewing, and gathering all the available benefits of lectures, books, and good people. She wrote that life was her college. She hoped to graduate well and earn some honors.63 In April, she finished her teaching for the spring, with the hope that she would never again have to stand before a classroom. The qualities that had made her father a remarkable teacher—his patience, his love of trying new methods, and his fascination with the slow, mysterious progress of children—were ones she had not inherited.

  At almost the same time that Louisa was grumbling to her journal about the miseries of teaching, Bronson received news that heralded his improbable return to the profession after an absence of twenty years. On April 7, Franklin Sanborn came to Orchard House to announce that the town’s school board, under Sanborn’s leadership, had decided to offer Alcott the position of superintendent of the Concord schools. The job would require him to pay periodic visits to the town’s schools and report to the board at its monthly meetings. The salary was a paltry one hundred dollars a year. Nevertheless, it was the first regular employment that Alcott had had since the closing of his last school in 1839. Bronson said he would accept only if the board were willing to allow him the freedom of action to make the job truly his own, and if they accepted that he would discharge his duties in a manner consistent with his own ideas on education. The committee, certainly at Sanborn’s insistence, assented, and Bronson became a paid employee of the town that had never known quite what to do with him.

  In May, Sanborn played host to an extraordinary guest. Sanborn’s friend immediately struck Bronson with his simplicity and sense. He seemed to impress everyone with his courage and religious earnestness. He had a sharply angled jaw and a curious wildness in his blue-gray eyes. He let people know that he and his younger traveling companion, Jeremiah Anderson, were armed and would defend themselves if necessary. On May 8 the visitor spoke at the town hall, and the next morning Concord murmured and speculated about the ideas and intentions of Captain John Brown. Brown had also spoken in Concord two years earlier, in March 1857. At that time, however, Alcott was in New Haven. Thus, when he went to hear Brown, Bronson knew the speaker only by reputation. It was a reputation for mingling the highest of motives with the most horrible of means.

  Like Bronson, Brown was a native of Connecticut. He had lived much of his life in Ohio and had failed in a variety of business ventures. Following the murder of an antislavery newspaper editor in Alton, Illinois, in 1837, Brown had stood up at a prayer meeting in Ohio and consecrated his life to the destruction of slavery. Not until he moved to Kansas in the mid-1850s, however, could Brown begin to carry out his vow. When he arrived, the territory was already plunged into violence over the question of whether it would enter the Union as a free or slave state. David Rice Atchison, a proslavery senator from Missouri, thought it would be a good idea “to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the territory.”64 The territory’s proslavery legislature, seated by a corrupt election, had passed laws making it a crime to express opinions against slavery. Long before their father came to join them, John Brown’s sons, all staunch abolitionists, had considered it wise to carry weapons on all occasions.65 On May 21, 1856, a mob of about eight hundred proslavery Missourians attacked the free-soil stronghold of Lawrence, looting shops and homes, burning the hotel, and destroying the two newspaper offices. Enraged by this attack and further goaded by news of Preston Brooks’s infamous caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the United States Senate, Brown and his sons swore vengeance. During the night of May 24–25, with the help of three other men, they abducted five proslavery men from their homes near Pottawatomie Creek. Under Brown’s direction, his band then executed their captives with broadswords. Two years later, Brown and his followers gunned down a slaveholder, liberated eleven blacks, and escorted them to Canada.

  The earliest known photograph of Captain John Brown, whom Louisa called “St. John the Just.”

  (Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery)

  At the time of Fruitlands, while Bronson Alcott refused to wear wool for fear of committing an offense against the sheep, John Brown had made his living as a wool trader and had also dabbled in the cattle business. One can only imagine the righteous invectives that Alcott would have spewed forth on hearing of such a man. And yet, when Brown stood before him at Concord Town Hall not as a defrauder of sheep but as a killer of men, Alcott lauded him as a hero. He pasted a large portrait of Brown into his journal and lionized him as “a disciple of the right, an idealist in thought and affairs of state.” Alcott called him “about the manliest man I have ever seen.” If Alcott was at all troubled by Brown’s criminal past, he suppressed his scruples. Such a magnificent child of nature, Alcott concluded, was “superior to legal traditions.”66

  Alcott’s transcendental brethren also worshipped Brown. In the words of Walt Whitman, Emerson came out for Brown “with the power, the overwhelmingness, of an avalanche.”67 Thoreau claimed Brown as a fellow transcendentalist and called his activities in Kansas “the public practice of Humanity.” In Brown’s determination to obey only the law of freedom, Emerson and Thoreau saw their theoretical principles translated into sublime activism. But it was more than this. For long, frustrating years, most opponents of slavery in America had worked within the bounds of the law and followed the meek, forgiving doctrines of Christ. They had always hoped that patience and compromise on their parts would inspire commensurate concessions from the South. Instead, they had seen African Americans yanked from their midst and sent south to be enslaved without having a chance to defend themselves. They had seen a senator beaten senseless in the Capitol. They had watched as a slaveholding chief justice proclaimed that a Negro had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. By 1859, countless despisers of slavery, Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott included, had had enough of turning the other cheek. In Brown, they had an advocate whose religion told him not to forgive, but to strike back in holy vengeance. Where the first wrong was the enslavement of four million Americans, they were prepared to test whether a second wrong could make a right.

  At the town hall, Bronson was proud to shake Brown’s hand. A month later, when Alcott heard rumors that his friend Frank Sanborn was supplying aid to Brown, he noted the fact with approval in his journal. He was not yet aware that Sanborn, Theodore Parker, and Thomas Higginson were all members of the “Secret Six,” the half dozen men who were Brown’s strongest backers.

  Later, in the autumn, Louisa too was eager for a fight. In September, as part of an event called the Great State Encampment, young men in uniform performed military maneuvers and drills near Concord. As she watched them, Louisa grumbled about the limitations of gender that denied her the kind of action she most desired. “I like a camp, and long for a war, to see how it all seems,” she wrote. “I can’t fight, but I can nurse.”68 She did not know that Captain Brown was about to bring her w
ish perilously close to coming true.

  At the head of his journal entry for October 23, 1859, Bronson wrote the words “Capt. John Brown” in red ink.69 It was his first reference to the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, carried out by Brown and a company of twenty-one men on October 16. Brown had planned to seize the town’s arsenal, liberate its slave population, and then lead an ever-increasing force of freed blacks and antislavery sympathizers through the Virginia mountains, cutting a swath of liberty through the southern states. He thought that a sustained campaign of abolitionist violence could break the will of the slaveholding society and bring an end to the hated institution. He miscalculated tragically. When Brown chose Harpers Ferry as the starting point for his revolution, he failed to realize what a series of Civil War generals later discovered: that the town, while easily captured, was virtually impossible to defend. Once federal forces had been summoned to the area—under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee—the fate of the insurrection was sealed. Less than two days after the raid began, it was crushed, and the man whom Bronson had called “the type and synonym of the Just” was a prisoner.70 As soon as he received the news, Alcott grasped “the impossibility of any justice being done” to Brown.”71