Eden's Outcasts

by John Matteson

  Bronson was captivated by Louisa’s creative intensity. He pronounced his daughter’s dedication “fine,” and he brought up “his reddest apples and hardest cider for [Louisa’s] Pegasus to feed upon.” Her headlong, single-minded passion appealed strongly to him, just as her refusals of food and sleep resonated with his ascetic temperament. On those rare occasions when she did come down to supper, he was delighted by the “dashes of wit and amusement” with which she stirred up “us chimney corner-ancients.”5 Louisa wrote that all kinds of fun was going on in Orchard House and that, for all she cared, the world might dissolve into chaos as long as she and her inkstand alit in the same place. Down in his study, Bronson too was writing with purpose. He had begun to conceive a book on the philosophical dimensions of horticulture, in which the garden would serve as an extended metaphor for the fertile and well-cultivated mind. He was in marvelous spirits, for it seemed he had finally found a subject that might satisfy both his philosophical interest and a reading public. Happily, he wrote to May that he was getting something good to show for his season’s work.6

  At the end of her vortex, Louisa was exhausted. She “found that [her] mind was too rampant for [her] body…[her] head was dizzy, legs shaky.”7 There can be no doubt that she saw dramatic similarities between herself and the heroine of her story, Sylvia Yule, an impetuous young woman who seemed incapable of controlling the fits of strong emotion that periodically seized control of her, and whose efforts to fit in were continually thwarted by her rebellious impulses. When Louisa looked over what she had written, she was aware that the manuscript was still not in the shape she wanted and that much more revision was in store. But whereas one vortex was sufficient for many of her books, not even two could do the trick for Moods. Louisa continued to write and rewrite Moods even after its publication in 1864. She was not to publish the last, definitive version of the novel until 1882. It was a project she could neither perfect nor abandon.

  Although the book never completely pleased her—none of her work ever did—Louisa nevertheless felt a sense of achievement when she put down her pen on February 25, 1861. The fact that she had produced a complete manuscript was ample reason to feel satisfied, but her greatest triumph of the winter came when she plucked up her courage and read the manuscript aloud to her family. The reaction was better than she dared hope. The responses of both her mother and Anna were predictably sympathetic; the former pronounced the writing wonderful, and the latter laughed and wept, “as she always does,” Louisa noted. To Louisa’s delight, Bronson’s verdict was the most emphatic of the three. He declared, “Emerson must see this. Where did you get your metaphysics?” Never mind the fact that to live almost thirty years under Bronson Alcott’s roof without acquiring any metaphysics would have required fierce determination. What mattered was that she had spoken a language that had kindled a flame in her father’s mind. Flush with the evening’s success, she told her journal, “I had a good time, even if it never comes to anything, for it was worth something to have my three dearest sit up till midnight listening with wide-open eyes to Lu’s first novel.”8 For the time being, though, she was content to let Moods be a private victory. Although Emerson asked to read it, she was afraid to show it to him. She was still less prepared to look for a publisher.

  Despite the Alcotts’ happiness, the rest of the country was beset with brooding expectation. In late December 1860, South Carolina had seceded from the Union. In the ensuing months, ten more states would follow suit. As war appeared ever more likely, even a seemingly apolitical event like the annual Concord School Exhibition, held in March, could generate controversy. A few days after President Lincoln was inaugurated, Louisa dashed off a set of patriotic lyrics to be sung to the tune of “All the Blue Bonnets Are over the Border.” She included the lines: “Here are our future men, / Here our John Browns again; / Here are young Philipses [sic] eyeing our blunders.” Emerson pronounced the lyrics “very excellent.” Much influenced by his eminent friend’s opinion, Bronson hailed Louisa’s effort as “the pride of his life” and arranged for it to be sung at the exhibition.

  The mention of John Brown was enough to cause a flutter among the “old fogies,” as Louisa called them, and an attempt was made to prevent the offending stanza from being sung. The attempted censorship stunned Bronson, especially because it was leveled at the daughter whose worth he was coming more and more to appreciate. Abba angrily denounced the entire town. Louisa was defiant; if the attendees would not sing the entire song, she would not let them sing any of it. Fortunately, Emerson rescued the situation. When Bronson suggested that it might be prudent to give in, he declared, “No, no, that [stanza] is the best. It must be sung, & not only sung but read. I will read it.” And so he did, to the astonishment of the crowd and to Louisa’s great surprise and pride.9

  The festival was a grand success. Thoreau thought that the speeches and recitations of the young scholars reflected such credit on their superintendent that “Alcott is at present perhaps the most successful man in the town.”10 The gathering ended with a touching scene, orchestrated without the superintendent’s knowledge. Frank Sanborn asked the crowd to stay for a moment while Bronson was invited to the stage. There, he was met by a tall, handsome boy who made a brief speech about the love, respect, and gratitude that the children felt for him. He then presented Bronson with fine new editions of George Herbert’s poems and, inevitably, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Bronson blushed, and his eyes filled with tears. He hugged the beautiful books tightly to his chest and managed a few words of thanks before the children rose to shout and applaud him. In Louisa’s eyes, her father deserved all the adulation and more. She sent Anna a glowing account of the day, at first reporting that the festival had “stirred up the stupid town immensely.” Then, realizing that this was the wrong occasion for pettiness, she crossed out the adjective.11

  Secession brought troubled thoughts to the minds of Bronson’s transcendental brethren. Normally the most peaceful of souls, they now confronted a moral problem whose only apparent solution demanded violence. As the crisis over Fort Sumter neared its decisive moment, Thoreau, who had been so galvanized by the raid on Harpers Ferry, now seemed to wish only that the bad news would go away. He wrote to his abolitionist friend Parker Pillsbury, “I hope [my prospective reader] ignores Fort Sumpter [sic], & Old Abe, & all that…. What business have you, if you are ‘an angel of light’ to be pondering over the deeds of darkness?”12

  Four days after the first shot was fired, Emerson called the war “the most wanton piece of mischief that bad boys ever devised.”13 However, he soon took a more sympathetic view of the war fever. He started keeping a separate journal of his thoughts about the conflict, and in it he wrote, “I do not wish to abdicate so extensive a privilege as the use of the sword or the bullet. For the peace of the man who has forsworn the use of the bullet seems to me not quite peace.” There were invisible scriptures, he said, that could be read only “by the light of war fires.”14

  When the war finally came in April with the firing on Fort Sumter, Bronson recorded the event in his journal with red ink. He believed that the cannonade over Charleston Harbor had done more for abolition in one day than Garrison and Phillips had accomplished in thirty years. Just as the battle at Concord Bridge in 1775 began a war that led to independence, Bronson was confident that Fort Sumter was the first engagement in a fight that “is to give us nationality.”15 Greatly simplifying the actual state of affairs, Bronson commented that the North’s resolve was unanimous, and he pronounced this perceived unity of purpose “a victory in itself.”16 Lest any fool should doubt the Alcotts’ sympathies in the conflict, the family took in John Brown’s daughters as boarders.17

  All at once, the Concord town common was thick with blue-coated recruits, fumbling to obey the orders of sergeants still trying to master the tones of command. Louisa, observing the strange goings-on, was amused by the amateurism of the newly enlisted soldiers. She wrote that the hapless recruits “poke each other’s eyes out
, bang their heads & blow themselves up with gunpowder most valiantly.”18 Although she derided their skill, however, Louisa admired their spirit. She was stirred by emotions both martial and maternal. She longed “to fly at some body & free my mind on several points,” but in a softer moment she wrote: “[I]n a little town like this we all seem like one family in times like these.”19 Almost before anyone knew it, Concord’s young men began to disappear, bound for what many imagined would be a brief summer of adventure and glory.

  The families of the New England literati were by no means exempt from the call of battle. Emerson’s son Edward formed a detachment of soldiers called the Concord Cadets. Garth Wilkinson James, a younger brother of William and Henry James and son of the older Henry, with whom Bronson still traded philosophical ripostes, also enlisted. The Alcott women, too, took up the cause; for the better part of a month after the outbreak of the war, Abba and Louisa could be found at Concord Town Hall, helping out with the sewing of some five hundred “patriotic blue shirts” for the soldiers. Louisa wrote to Alf Whitman that, after having done her share, she was more than happy to put down her needle and take up her pen, since the former tool was her abomination and the latter her delight.20

  During these weeks, Louisa was struggling with a sense of personal insignificance, which her exclusion from the grand events of the war had heightened and which no amount of sewing could diminish. She told her journal, “I long to be a man; but as I can’t fight, I will content myself with working for those who can.” Yearning to do something to help defeat the “saucy southerners,” she started spending her spare time curled up with a medical treatise on gunshot wounds. When she was able, she meant to take a turn at nursing in the Union army hospitals. Such appointments were not freely given and would require appealing to some social connections. Nevertheless, by the time the army had gotten itself into “a comfortably smashed condition,” Louisa hoped she could answer the call.21

  Meanwhile, the days dragged on. During the first winter of the war, still too pinched to refuse work, she took one last stab at teaching, this time at a kindergarten in the Warren Street Chapel in Boston. James T. Fields, publisher of The Atlantic Monthly, graciously lent Louisa forty dollars to outfit her classroom and convinced her to board with his family. Bronson wished her well, but he was privately skeptical. So long as she cared most about her books and studies, he did not see how she could succeed in teaching, “an art that demands the freedom of every gift for attaining its ends.”22 As he feared, the job proved both unpleasant and unprofitable, and Louisa was unable to pay back the cost of her board, let alone Fields’s loan. To trim expenses, she tried moving back home and commuting from Concord. However, the daily round trip of forty miles quickly wore on her, and she was grateful when May agreed to fill in for the last month of the school term. Abba complained that the venture had been a swindle of Louisa’s time and money, and Louisa dubbed it a “wasted winter.”23

  Despite this failure, and despite the fact that he had published “Love and Self-Love,” Mr. Fields affronted Louisa’s pride with a statement she never forgot. “Stick to your teaching,” he bluntly advised her. “You can’t write.” He could hardly have hit on a surer way to stoke her determination. She replied hotly, “I won’t teach, I can write, and I’ll prove it.”24 She also quietly resolved to pay back his loan one day, if she had to sell her hair to do it. The one bright spot in the winter of 1861–62 was the circle of acquaintances Louisa made while residing with the Fields family. As a literary salon, James Fields’s home rivaled the parlors of Concord, and his guests during Louisa’s tenancy included Longfellow, Fanny Kemble, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., and Harriet Beecher Stowe. These were not threadbare, self-denying intellectuals like her father or Thoreau, but popular writers of high quality who had found ways to spin their art into gold. If Fields’s suggestion that she stick to teaching had not confirmed her will to succeed as a writer, the experience of “living in style in a very smart house with very clever people” would probably have served the same end.25

  Bronson found little to do to support the war effort directly. Although he never questioned the need for military force, violence was too foreign to his nature for him to find a place in explosive events of the moment. He found himself an aging pacifist whose theories of life suddenly seemed irrelevant. One morning, he overheard some neighborhood boys marching down Lexington Road like soldiers and declaring that they wished they had a chance to shoot the enemy. He asked them to wait a few minutes and returned with an armload of pumpkins. He invited the boys to gratify their warlike zeal by attacking the pumpkins. When they had worn themselves out with this play, he lectured them on the wickedness of their blood-thirsty passions.26 When a neighborhood woman stitched together an American flag spangled not with stars but with hearts, Alcott assisted at its raising, delivering a little speech on the occasion.27 Having no part to play in the hostilities, Bronson turned to the place where he continued to exert complete control: his garden. During the first winter of the war, he wrote voluminously in his journal on the subject of apple trees and, citing Confucius, argued that one who diligently sows the ground wins more merit than by reciting a thousand prayers.28 It was the work of a man eager to consider himself useful.

  Bronson closely followed the reports of battles, perusing the newspapers “with an avidity unknown before.”29 He agonized with each Union defeat and rejoiced with the victories that, at first, seemed all too few. Through the winter of 1861–62, he was a frequent visitor to Thoreau’s house. Thoreau had gotten over his initial indifference to the war, and the two friends fulminated at what Thoreau called “the temporizing policy of our rulers.” Frustrated by the failure to win a quick victory, Thoreau blamed the people “for their indifference to the true issues of national honor and justice.”30 After these discussions, however, Bronson’s most deeply felt concern was not for the fate of the country but for the health of his comrade. Thoreau was dying.

  His health troubles had begun in December 1860, when he contracted a bad cold that he may well have caught from Bronson. The cold had led to bronchitis. During the first half of 1861, in an attempt to regain his health, he had traveled west to Minnesota but had returned with symptoms of tuberculosis and an acceptance of the likelihood that he would die young. In recent months, the pace of the disease had quickened. Thoreau had last been able to visit Walden Pond in September. He had stopped writing in his journal in November. Now, in the new year, hope had faded entirely. Bronson spent the evening of New Year’s Day 1862 with Thoreau and was “sad to find him failing and feeble.”31 Through the rest of the winter and into the spring, Bronson reported his friend’s condition in his journal. The news was never good. On May 4, Alcott and the poet Ellery Channing, who had traveled with Thoreau on his excursions to Cape Cod and the Maine woods, paid one last visit to the bed from which their friend could no longer stir. Two afternoons later, Channing came to Orchard House with the word that the struggle was over. Soon after, Emerson also came to the Alcott home to commiserate. Bronson went as soon as he could to see Thoreau’s mother, who told him about her son’s last moments. Thoreau’s sister Sophia then took Alcott to his friend’s chamber, where they gazed on the face of the dead man. But for its pallor, the face still looked alive.32

  Emerson scandalized the portion of the town that regarded Henry as an infidel by arranging a church funeral for him. Thoreau had never been a churchgoer, and he himself would very likely have disapproved of Emerson’s decision. Nevertheless, Emerson said his sorrow was so great that he wanted all the world to mourn with him. The day of the ceremony, May 9, was calm and clear, and as the mourners entered the churchyard, they were welcomed by the songs of birds and the sight of early violets blooming in the grass. Bronson, Louisa, and Anna all attended, and Bronson read aloud from Thoreau’s works. Louisa was proud that her father was chosen to give the readings, and she found the church farewell fitting. She told her longtime friend Sophia Foord, “If ever a man was a real Christian it was Henry, & I t
hink his own wise & pious thoughts read by one who loved him & whose own life was a beautiful example of religious faith, convinced many.”33

  Neither Bronson nor Louisa found it comfortable or proper to express their loss with extravagant displays. Although his journal mentions Channing’s sadness, Bronson did not record his own reaction to Thoreau’s death. After the funeral, Louisa kept busy with her stories—a handy reason, perhaps, for avoiding conversation. She asserted that she could never mourn for men like Thoreau “because they never seem lost to me but nearer & dearer for the solemn change.”34 She predicted that his life would blossom and bear fruit long after it was gone. Nevertheless, the void that Thoreau left behind was palpable, and it gave Louisa one less reason for remaining in Concord. Through the summer months, she turned out more of her vivid dramatic tales, which she considered silly but which found an eager reception from magazines like The Monitor and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. For the latter, she submitted a tale called “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment” in hopes of winning a one-hundred-dollar prize.

  As the war entered its second summer, whatever anguish Bronson initially felt about its violence was giving way to his irresistible need to idealize. It was a tendency that people who had seen the war firsthand were likely to find absurd. Fresh from her brilliant literary debut, Life in the Iron-Mills, Rebecca Harding Davis came to Concord to meet Hawthorne. At the Wayside she attended a dinner party with Alcott and Emerson that dimmed her view of transcendentalism in general and Alcott in particular. Before dinner, Alcott stood in front of the fireplace in Hawthorne’s small parlor, proclaiming the war “an armed angel…awakening the nation to a lofty life unknown before.” Waving his hands like the conductor of a one-man orchestra, he chanted his praise of the rifle and the sword, raised in a righteous cause. Davis, who came from Wheeling, Virginia, and was no great enemy of slavery, quietly took offense at Alcott’s words and their “strained, high note of exaltation.” She later wrote: