Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Brown’s capture touched off a whirlwind of activity in Concord. Louisa wrote to Alf Whitman, now living in Kansas, “We are boiling over with excitement here for many of our people…are concerned in it.”72 Each night there was a meeting to express indignation at the wickedness of the country and the frailty of human courage. Abba was perhaps the most agitated of the family; Louisa was afraid she would “die of spontaneous combustion” if things were not set right soon.73 But setting things right was impossible. Alcott, Thoreau, and Sanborn racked their brains to determine what, if anything, could be done for the captive. Thoreau wrote an eloquent speech, which he called “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Alcott initially favored a dramatic covert operation. He calculated that there was enough courage and intrepidity among Massachusetts men that one could muster a band “to steal South, since they cannot march openly there, and rescue him from the slaveholders, the states and the United States Courts, and save him from the impending crisis.”74 After reflection, however, he changed his mind. Not only would it be virtually impossible to penetrate the armory where Brown was being held, but it was by no means sure that Brown, who had long ago accepted the possibility of martyrdom, would consent to being liberated. Furthermore, Alcott reasoned, “the spectacle of a martyrdom such as his must needs be…of greater service to the country, and to the coming in of a righteous rule, than years and tens of years of agitation by the press.”75

  Thoreau and Sanborn both advised diplomacy. They talked of sending an emissary to Virginia to seek an interview with Governor Wise. Sanborn in particular thought Bronson possessed “some advantages” that made him the man for this work.76 Presumably, Sanborn was thinking of the mildness of Alcott’s demeanor, which might mitigate the impression created by Brown’s fiery words and countenance. In addition, Alcott’s experience in the ways of southern gentility might help to sway the governor. Sanborn even entertained the outlandish idea that, while dealing with Wise, Alcott might simultaneously contact Brown and hatch an escape plot. There was much talking and planning. There was no action. All they were finally able to agree on was an impressive memorial service on December 2, the day of Brown’s execution. Sanborn read a dirge that he had written, Thoreau read poetry, Alcott read from the Bible and from Plato, and Emerson read from Brown’s own writings. Never at a loss for words, they seemed at a loss for anything else.

  From the career and martyrdom of John Brown, Bronson took important lessons, both political and personal. They reminded him that one might more effectively change the world by acting in it instead of writing, talking, or withdrawing into a position of ascetic refusal. They also proved that, despite their contradictions, a righteous spirit and a violent nature might exist within the same person. The warrior spirit had always struck Bronson as a primitive trait, needing to be mastered as one strove upward from humanness to a more angelic form. He found it hard to believe that the most important struggle in a life might be against an outward enemy rather than an inner one. Nevertheless, Brown showed him that the fighter, just as much as the self-denying saint, could deserve respect and love.

  Bronson’s feelings toward a fighter in his own family can be seen in a journal entry he wrote later that winter. On February 17, he brought home the March issue of The Atlantic Monthly, which included “Love and Self-Love.” He gave it to Louisa, he said, “to encourage and lead her to some appreciation of the fair destiny that awaits her if she will be true to her gifts as she has begun.” His delight, of course, was shared by Abba. Bronson seemed to sense that, somehow, the character and struggles of his wife would figure largely in Louisa’s prose. In the same entry, he wrote that Abba was “a heroine in her ways, and with a deep experience, all tested and awaiting her daughter’s pen.” Before closing up his diary for the night, he added, thinking of Louisa, “I am pleased, and proud of thee.”77

  Five months after Brown’s execution, Brown’s widow came to Concord, and the Alcotts held a reception for her at Orchard House. She arrived with her daughter-in-law, whose husband Watson Brown had been killed while fighting alongside his father at Harpers Ferry. The younger woman also brought her infant son, Frederick Watson Brown, who Louisa thought was “a fair, heroic-looking baby” as befitted his lineage. Louisa kissed the child as she would have greeted a little saint, and she felt honored when he sucked her fingers. In the face of Watson Brown’s widow, Louisa saw all the heartbreak of bitter sacrifice.

  The homespun dignity of the guests of honor clashed absurdly with the unexpected chaos of the event. Word of the visit had leaked to the community, and the house was soon crammed with twice the number of the invited guests. As the polite supper transformed into a “tea fight,” Louisa bravely marshaled the cake and tea, making sure that the regular antislavery stalwarts were served first. She would have gladly done much more to honor the memory of the man she called St. John the Just.

  Only a few days before the reception for Mrs. Brown, the parlor of Orchard House had been the scene of a more sedate and far happier occasion. On May 23, thirty years to the day after her father and mother were wed, Anna had married John Pratt. Bronson was pleased to record that the day was “all grace and becomingness,” and he took both the sunshine and the luxuriant blossoms in his apple orchard as strong omens for the couple’s happiness.78 Orchard House was filled with “flowers, friends and happiness,” as Louisa put it.79 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, her quarrels with Bronson now a distant memory, was in attendance. Sanborn, Thoreau, and the Emersons were all present to hear Uncle Samuel May offer a prayer and join the couple in matrimony. Louisa recalled that he performed the rites “with no fuss, but much love, and we all stood round her.”80 Anna wore a silver-gray silk dress, and her bodice and hair were adorned with lilies of the valley, her new husband’s favorite flower. Louisa, also in gray and bedecked with roses, humorously likened her costume to sackcloth and ashes; she still could not think of the day as entirely joyous. “I mourn the loss of my Nan,” she wrote, “and am not comforted.”81 The wedding party enjoyed a feast sent by Hope Shaw, the wife of the chief justice. Then, on the front lawn, beneath the ancient elms, the assembled relatives and heroes of transcendentalism danced in a circle around the newlyweds. Louisa called it a pretty picture to remember. As Anna and John were preparing to leave, Emerson begged permission to kiss the bride. To Louisa, it seemed that a kiss from such a man, who remained the god of her idolatry, would make even matrimony worthwhile.82 Bronson also felt profoundly the alteration of his family circle. In his mind, joy and sorrow, hope and fear for his good child mingled in a befuddling fashion. “I cannot yet write about it,” he told his journal. All the conflicting emotions that he wanted to put onto paper came out only as, “Ah! Anna.”83 The couple set up housekeeping in Chelsea, north of Boston, though Anna was never away from Concord for very long.

  The next month was marked by a farewell. On June 17, Louisa attended a memorial service in Boston for Theodore Parker, who had lost his battle with tuberculosis in Florence, Italy, a few weeks earlier. There was no man apart from Emerson and Thoreau whom Louisa admired more, and she was grateful that he had called her his friend. Bronson, too, felt the loss, for he knew of no one who could take up the minister’s work and carry it forward. June was also the time of a return. On the twenty-eighth, the Hawthornes came back to Concord, and the Alcotts soon had to accustom themselves to the strange habits of the author whose compulsive interest in observing human behavior verged on the voyeuristic. To Louisa, Hawthorne seemed as queer as ever. It was certainly unnerving to catch glimpses of him darting through the hills or skimming by as if he expected the House of Alcott to reach out and clutch him. For his part, the novelist was too shy and introspective to share Bronson’s inexhaustible love of conversation. He also could not have felt entirely at ease in the radical political atmosphere of Lexington Road. Since his college days at Bowdoin, Hawthorne had been a bosom friend of Franklin Pierce, who had occupied the White House for four years as a proslavery Democrat. Like Pierce, whose friendship certainly
colored his own political views, Hawthorne felt it was wrong to jeopardize the Union over the question of emancipation, which he viewed as a local issue. As for John Brown, Hawthorne thought no man had ever been more justly hanged. It is likely that, in his conversations with the other literary lions of the town, he acquired some practice in biting his tongue.

  He was less guarded as to his opinions within his own family. Once, at the behest of his children, Hawthorne poked fun at his neighbor in a poem aping the style of Edward Lear:

  There lived a Sage at Appleslump

  Whose dinner never made him plump;

  Give him carrots, potatoes, squash, turnips and peas,

  And a handful of crackers without any cheese,

  And a cup of cold water to wash down all these,

  And he’d prate of the Spirit as long as you please,

  This airy Sage of Appleslump.84

  Hawthorne’s wife, the former Sophia Peabody, made periodic social overtures to Abba and always seemed to be on the scene when the Alcotts most needed a helpful neighbor. However, she could hardly have forgotten that she was dealing with the man and woman who had pried into her sister Elizabeth’s private correspondence, and she was less than fond of Abba’s notorious temper. The Hawthorne children were a mixed lot in Louisa’s eyes. She had little good to say about sixteen-year-old Una, whose only talent seemed to be horseback riding. She regarded Rose, the baby of the family, as an attractive child with an artistic look. Since she always liked boys best, it is not surprising that Louisa saved her warmest regards for Julian, “a worthy boy full of pictures, fishing rods and fun.”85 As she was forming her opinions of the Hawthorne children, they were looking back at her, and not without discernment.

  More than sixty years later, Julian Hawthorne wrote a pair of short memoirs of the days when his family and the Alcotts were neighbors. Somewhat distorted by a fading memory and still more by an inclination to fictionalize, Julian’s recollections are only intermittently reliable. However, his mental image of Louisa remained clear. When he first met her, she was “a black-haired, red-cheeked, long-legged hobbledehoy of 28,” though she seemed much younger to him. He observed “power in her jaw and control in her black eyes,” and he considered her a natural leader. He recalled her honesty, her common sense, and her inherent grasp of comedy and humor. Like her sisters, she was jolly and wholly un-Platonic. How she had come from a father like Bronson, he could not imagine.86 Especially dear to Julian’s memory was the mildly racy practice of coed swimming in Walden Pond, in which he and his sisters indulged with Louisa, Abby May, and the Emerson children. These encounters stirred his romantic interest in Abby, and some rather restricted Victorian lovemaking reportedly ensued. The young Hawthorne felt no romantic yearnings for Louisa, who was fourteen years his senior, though it puzzled him that, to his knowledge, she had never had a love affair. The only explanation he could give was that her self-control was even greater than her capacity for passion, and that she could set aside personal happiness “for what she deemed just cause.”87

  More and more often, the cause for which Louisa put aside more carefree amusements was her writing, an activity that now sometimes absorbed her to an almost alarming degree. Louisa had a name for the kind of creative fit that enabled her to produce prodigious amounts of writing in compressed periods of time. Such a mood, she said, was a “vortex,” a revealing term for the state into which she periodically descended. Louisa’s most detailed description of this descent came in an intensely autobiographical chapter in Little Women. In the passage below, Louisa’s fictitious counterpart Jo March flings herself into her first novel with single-minded fury:

  Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and “fall into a vortex,” as she expressed it, writing away at her novel with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace…. When the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh. Sleep forsook her eyes, meals stood untasted, day and night were all too short to enjoy the happiness which blessed her only at such times…. The divine afflatus usually lasted a week or two, and then she emerged from her “vortex” hungry, sleepy, cross, or despondent.88

  To describe her creative process, Louisa used the imagery of a whirlpool, with its connotations of downward spiral and chaos. Time and again in the western literary tradition, wandering seekers after truth and love—Orpheus, Odysseus, Aeneas, Dante—must descend into Hell before their quests can be fulfilled. For Louisa, the search for artistic excellence also involved a chaotic descent. In her downward plunges, however, she did not experience feelings of anguish or torment. Falling into the vortex was, for her, a lone but exhilarating mental journey into the heart of wonder.

  Louisa’s headlong rushes into creativity, followed by periods of irritable despondency, seem to have been the pattern of activity that she found most conducive to her art. However, they also signified a turbulence that would express itself again and again through the course of her career. She found it impossible to do anything by half measures. At this early moment in her creative life, when she was young and strong, she could manage these vortices without ill consequences. She would not always be able to make such demands on herself without paying the price.

  In December 1860, May’s zeal for independence led her to look beyond Massachusetts. Like Anna before her, she went to Syracuse to live with her Uncle Samuel and, like a good Alcott, take her turn as a schoolmistress. Louisa escorted her to Boston on the first leg of her journey. The lonesome feeling of watching this youngest bird leave the nest was relieved somewhat when Emerson invited Louisa to hear him speak on the subject of Genius—a clear indication that he regarded her as a respectable intellect. Nevertheless, a palpable dreariness descended over Orchard House. In May’s absence, Louisa and her parents passed a quiet Christmas, having only flowers and apples to exchange as gifts. There was no merrymaking, with Anna and May both elsewhere and Lizzie resting under the snow. Ironically, her parents had finally found a permanent family home, just in time to watch that family disperse. Louisa’s own irony was still sharper. The sister with the deepest talents and the fiercest ambition, she was finding it hardest to claim an independent life in the world.

  As Louisa closed her journal for the year 1860 and wondered whether greater chances would come her way, Bronson wrote to his mother about her, observing, “She is not wanting in Talent and Character. I see nothing to prevent her becoming a favorite with the public, as she becomes generally known. Her mother hopes good things of her,—in which hope her father certainly joins.” And he wrote that her book was nearly ready.89

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  WAR

  “Action and blood now get the game.

  Disdain treads on the peaceful name.”

  —A. BRONSON ALCOTT, Journals, 1863

  THE YEAR 1861, WHICH WAS TO MARK A CATACLYSM IN American history, began quietly at Orchard House. Upstairs, Louisa busied herself with the manuscript of a full-length novel that she had provisionally called “Success,” a title she no doubt hoped would prove prophetic. After sending Anna and her husband a book on marriage titled Faithful Forever, Bronson sampled his home-brewed hard cider and brought bottles around to the neighbors. The Hawthornes marked the new year by giving Bronson and Abba a wooden bread dish, which Bronson described as “ornamented with wheat ears and very pretty.”1 Louisa herself received thirteen New Year’s gifts, including a pen, a mince pie, and a bonnet. She was moved to remark on the “most uncommon fit of generosity [that has] seemed to seize people on my behalf.”2 Emerson, too, continued in his generous ways. Whenever the family seemed more pinched than usual, a small sum would magically appear from under a book or behind a candlestick. Although Emerson tried to keep his contributions to the Alcotts’ fortunes anonymous, Louisa was not fooled for a se
cond. Of the thirty dollars that Bronson earned that January from a series of conversations at Emerson’s house, she guessed that twenty had been slipped into the till by Emerson himself. Louisa was grateful for Emerson’s “sweet way of bestowing gifts,” and she wrote admiringly, “A true friend is this tender and illustrious man.”3

  Louisa had to break off her work on “Success” when her mother became briefly but seriously ill. When she got back to writing in February, it was not “Success” but the manuscript of another embryonic novel, Moods, that absorbed her attention. Nothing else that Louisa ever wrote seized her imagination and energies as much as Moods. When writing the first draft of the novel the previous August, she confessed to being “quite possessed by my work.” She descended into her “vortex” on February 2 and remained there twenty-three days, during which time she found sleep almost impossible. Except for a daily run on the country roads at dusk, Louisa barely rose from her writing desk. Abba, initially stirred by Louisa’s excitement, made her daughter an actual thinking cap out of green silk and red ribbon. Later, however, Abba came to view her daughter’s single-mindedness with anxious concern. Thirty years of marriage to a compulsive writer had not prepared her for a daughter who almost forgot to eat when her muse was in view. Abba tried to be helpful, making sure, for instance, that a steady supply of tea made its way upstairs, but her requests that Louisa join the family for meals were seldom granted. Midway between admiration and sarcasm, May observed from a distance that her sister was “living for immortality.”4