Louisa on the Front Lines

by Samantha Seiple

  Ever since Lu was a teenager, she’d been writing stories and poems and sending them to publishers, which was a respectable way for a woman to earn good money. Her family encouraged her to write. At sixteen, she wrote a book of fairy tales, which was published six years later. “My book came out,” Lu recorded in her journal. “And people began to think that topsy-turvy Louisa would amount to something after all.” Lu didn’t get rich from her book; she made thirty-five dollars, but throughout the years she kept trying to get more work published. Eventually, the most prestigious literary magazine at the time, the Atlantic Monthly, bought a story she’d submitted, called “Love and Self-Love,” and she was paid fifty dollars. Then they bought two more, “A Modern Cinderella” and “Debby’s Debut,” for seventy-five dollars and fifty dollars, respectively. “After ten years of hard climbing I had reached a good perch on the ladder,” Lu wrote.

  In retrospect, Lu knew that getting married could have easily helped her family with its financial struggles. But, at twenty-eight years old, Lu was well past the marrying age and considered herself a spinster. But she was a spinster by choice. She’d had suitors and a marriage proposal, which she turned down, preferring her independence. “I’d rather be a free spinster and paddle my own canoe,” she wrote.

  Her parents’ marriage had soured her on the idea. When Lu was seventeen years old, she wrote about how she believed marriage had affected her mother: “I often think what a hard life she has had since she married—so full of wandering and all sorts of worry! So different from her early easy days, the youngest and most petted of her family. I think she is a very brave, good woman; and my dream is to have a lovely, quiet home for her, with no debts or troubles to burden her. But I’m afraid she will be in heaven before I can do it.”

  SO, ON that cold February morning in 1861 with a slight thaw outside, Lu sat at her desk, wrapped in her glory cloak, and worked as quickly as she could, trying to finish her novel. It was her second try at it. The first novel she wrote, The Inheritance, was gathering dust. But Lu was holding onto the hope that her writing would make her rich. She was completely absorbed in her work, weaving her transcendental ideas into the story line, basing two of her characters on Emerson and Thoreau, both of whom Lu had secretly loved as a girl.

  But she was not completely satisfied with it yet. Trying to maintain her focus on the task at hand, Lu rarely left her chair, and she barely slept or ate. Her mother would quietly bring her cups of tea, and her father would leave her red apples to eat and hard cider to drink, allowing Lu to work until her head was dizzy and her legs were shaky.

  Although, as a rule, Lu didn’t like interruptions when she was writing, she did make an exception when someone was sick. Only then would she drop everything. This happened when her mother fell ill the previous month, after the New Year. “I corked up my inkstand and turned nurse,” Lu wrote. “The dear woman was very ill, but rose up like a phoenix from her ashes.”

  This wasn’t Lu’s first time nursing a sick family member. A few years before, her younger sister Lizzie was stricken with scarlet fever. She couldn’t seem to recover and suffered from a bright red rash all over her body coupled with a fever, sore throat, vomiting, and hair loss. The Alcotts turned to doctors, but none of their diagnoses or medicines helped. “It seems to me that the system of medicine is a prolonged Guess,” Lu’s mother wrote.

  One doctor finally told them there was no hope. “A hard thing to hear,” Lu wrote in her journal. “But if she is only to suffer, I pray she may go soon.” Lu stayed by Lizzie’s bedside during the night, keeping watch and allowing their mother to rest. As the doctor predicted, Lizzie continued to get worse. On March 14, 1858, Lu wrote in her journal, “My dear Beth [Lizzie] died at three this morning.… For two days she suffered much, begging for ether, though its effect gone.… [S]he lay in Father’s arms, and called us round her.… [S]he bid us good-by… held our hands and kissed us tenderly.” Lu and her mother washed and dressed Lizzie’s body for the burial. “She is well at last,” Lu wrote in a letter to a friend.

  It was now nearly three years after Lizzie’s death, and Lu and her family were still trying to pay off the medical bills. But the experience of nursing sick family members had made an impression on Lu. After Lizzie’s death, Lu mused in her journal: “Wonder if I ought not be a nurse, as I seem to have a gift for it. Lizzie, [cousin] L[ouisa] W[illis], and Mother all say so; and I like it. If I couldn’t write or act I’d try it. May yet.”

  Chapter 2

  STITCHES

  April 19, 1861, Concord, Massachusetts

  One week after the start of the Civil War

  A BLANKET OF DARK CLOUDS HUNG IN THE SKY, BUT THE threat of a storm didn’t stop Lu, or the entire village of Concord for that matter, from swarming outside Town Hall in Monument Square, across from Wright’s Tavern, on the corner where Main Street and Lexington Road meet.

  Seven days prior, on April 12, the first shots of the Civil War had been fired at Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina. “The Confederate Traitors have commenced the war… and their first prize in [the] fight… has been the capture of Fort Sumter and sixty men.… This inglorious success will cost them,” the Evening Star in Washington, DC, declared.

  When the details of the fight were first telegraphed to Washington, President Abraham Lincoln ordered the Second Cavalry to protect the capital against a surprise attack, stopping just short of martial law. The threat that the city might fall into the hands of the Confederacy prompted Lincoln to issue a proclamation calling for a force of 75,000 volunteers. “The call for troops will be zealously responded to.… The war, which the rebels have insanely begun, is a terrible necessity. Let it be as short as possible,” the newspaper reported.

  Soon after Lincoln called for volunteers, the town of Concord organized the Concord Artillery of the Fifth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, and started to collect money to support the soldiers in the field and their families left behind at home. Within twenty-four hours, they raised $5,000, exceeding their expectations. Some couldn’t believe it. Emerson’s daughter Ellen wrote that she’d heard “Concord had raised $4,000 for the families of the company. I suppose that is an exaggeration, for $2,000 was thought a wonderful sum.” But the start of the war had “kindled a patriotic rage that envelopes all parties and all classes throughout the Union States.”

  Lu was no different. While she watched the Concord Artillery, she wished she could join them. “I long to be a man, but as I can’t fight, I will content myself with working for those who can,” Lu wrote. She worked alongside the other women in Concord knitting socks and sewing uniforms. “A busy time getting them ready, and a sad day seeing them off, for in a little town like this we all seem like one family in times like these.”

  While the American flag was raised and securely attached to a flagstaff made from a tree from the forest made famous by Thoreau’s Walden, the crowd sang “The Star Spangled Banner.” There was a feeling like bottled lightning electrifying the crowd. A prayer was said, the cannon was fired, and bells rang out. People were cheering and crying.

  It was half past one o’clock when the train whistled, signaling everyone that it was time to say good-bye to the forty-five men and boys who made up the Concord Artillery. The newly enlisted soldiers fell in line, ready to march to Concord’s rather plain-looking train depot, near Henry David Thoreau’s home in town.

  Standing in the crowd, Lu watched as their captain, George Prescott, who was born and raised in Concord, lifted his sword. But before he could shout his marching order, his wife broke free from the crowd and rushed toward him, kissing him good-bye. When the Concord Artillery started marching, kicking up dust on Main Street, everyone followed. “At the station the scene was very dramatic, as the brave boys went away perhaps never to come back again,” Lu wrote.

  Stuck at home, Lu tried to return to her writing but was soon distracted. “John Brown’s daughters came to board, and upset my plans of rest and writing.… I had my fit of wo
e… then put my papers away, and fell to work at housekeeping. I think disappointment must be good for me, I get so much of it,” Lu noted. Eighteen-year-old Annie and fifteen-year-old Sarah Brown were in Concord to attend a school run by a fervent abolitionist named Frank Sanborn, who had been arrested after John Brown’s raid at Harpers Ferry. He was accused of being one of the “Secret Six” who helped finance Brown’s raid. But Sanborn’s neighbors and friends, many part of the Underground Railroad, rallied around him, and with the help of Senator Rockwood Hoar, he was released from custody.

  The Alcotts were among Sanborn’s supporters, considering his actions heroic. And Sanborn had a great respect for Bronson and his principles. He used his influence as the head of the Concord school board to offer Bronson the job of school superintendent. Bronson accepted the job but only after the school board agreed to afford him the freedom to instill his progressive ideas. He visited the schools and wrote reports for the school board, expressing his forward-thinking ideas, such as the belief that girls should have an equal chance at education like boys. But the pay was meager at one hundred dollars a year, not enough to support his family. So, the Alcotts occasionally took in boarders to earn additional money.

  Since Lu’s youngest sister, May, was teaching in Syracuse, New York, and her older sister, Anna, was married and living in Cambridge, Lu helped her mother with the domestic chores. But she hated doing housework. “They are good for me I’ve no doubt but… [i]f I lived alone I should make the beds once a week, clean house every ten years, & never cook at all which would simplify things grandly,” Lu revealed. Lu and her mother did have help with the laundry, but they did the ironing themselves, which usually meant folding the clothes with a “brush and a promise”—unless it was one of Bronson’s shirts. Lu’s mother always made sure that her husband’s shirts were neatly pressed, just how he liked them. This left a lasting impression on Annie Brown. “I used to think that if Mr. Alcott’s philosophy had made him wear a few less clean shirts, that his wife might have rested instead of toiling and sweating over the ironing board so long to pamper his fastidious notions,” she wrote.

  In the evenings, after dinner was served and the dishes were washed, Lu and her mother would have lively discussions with Annie and Sarah while playing games. Some of their favorites were cribbage, chess, casino, and old maid. One time during the discussions, Annie asked Lu why she hadn’t married a man who was obviously interested in her. “Ah, he is too blue [puritanical] and too prudent for me, I should shock him constantly,” Lu replied.

  On Monday evenings, the Alcott home was open to their friends, and many times students from Sanborn’s school, like Emerson’s son, Edward, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, Julian, stopped by. They would join in on the parlor games and discussions, and just after ten o’clock, Bronson would send everyone off with apples from his orchard.

  During the day, when Lu wasn’t doing housework, she spent much of her time “sewing violently” by hand and knitting. She worked hard trying to make nice, hand-stitched summer clothes for her sister May. “She sent for me to make and mend and buy and send her (an) outfit,” Lu wrote. But when Lu’s older sister, Anna, learned that Lu was wearing the old clothes that she and May had left behind, Lu’s sisters pooled their money and sent her a new dress to wear. “The great parcel, with a loving letter, came to me as a beautiful surprise,” Lu noted.

  In addition to making clothes for her family, Lu joined the women in Concord in their organized sewing bees. “Spent our May-day working for our men,” Lu recorded. “Three hundred women all sewing together in the hall for two days.” At the start of the Civil War the government was unable to provide enough clothing, food, shelter, and health care for the soldiers, which created a tremendous demand for uniforms, blankets, tents, and bandages. It was up to the soldiers’ families and community to provide what the government couldn’t. So women came together to form local Soldiers’ Aid Societies, organizing sewing bees, lint picks (scraping piles of lint off material, which was used to pack wounds), fund-raisers, and food and supply drives. Joining a Soldiers’ Aid Society was the socially acceptable and extremely valuable way for women to participate in the war. But for Lu, it wasn’t enough. She wanted to do more.

  By the end of the year, Lu was able to turn her attention to her writing, but she was restless. “Wrote, read, sewed, and wanted something to do,” Lu penned in her journal. One of the pieces Lu was working on was called “How I Went Out to Service.” It was a story about her bad experience working as a domestic servant. She sent it to the Atlantic Monthly, but the new publisher, James Fields, who was married to her distant cousin, rejected it, and told her to “stick to your teaching; you can’t write.” Lu understood that rejection was part of the publishing process, but she also understood that female writers didn’t garner the same respect, status, and prestige as their male counterparts. Publishers and critics didn’t consider women’s literary works as “significant or as worthy.” Successful female writers were criticized for being opinionated and scholarly, and stereotyped as “brainy, selfish, unladylike, and unattractive.”

  Despite Fields’s harsh words, Lu wasn’t going to give up. “Being willful, I said, ‘I won’t teach; and I can write, and I’ll prove it.” Fields told Lu that he had more manuscripts than he could publish, and he was choosing the war stories to “suit the times.” “I will write ‘great guns’ Hail Columbia & Concord fight, if he’ll only take it,” Lu wrote. “For money is the staff of life & without, one falls flat no matter how much genius he may carry.”

  First she needed to focus on making some fast money to pay the bills. Lu didn’t want to spiral down too far into financial despair. When Lu was twenty-five, the financial burden of caring for her family had almost overwhelmed her. She had no job prospects in sight, and Lu thought about jumping off a bridge to her death. “Last week was a busy, anxious time, & my courage most gave out,” Lu told her family in a letter in October 1858. “For every one was so busy, & cared so little whether I got work or jumped into the river that I thought seriously of doing the latter. In fact did go over the Mill Dam & look at the water. But it seemed so mean to turn & run away before the battle was over that I went home, set my teeth & vowed I’d make things work in spite of the world.” Luckily, Lu soon found work as a governess, much to the relief of her worried family. But she was left wary of ever reaching that point again.

  So, in January 1862, when Elizabeth Peabody, a family friend who ran a successful school in Boston, asked Lu to open a kindergarten and James Fields encouraged her by offering a loan of forty dollars to set it up, Lu accepted. “Miss Peabody has opened a ‘Kinder Garten.’… She has more babes than she wants… as it’s hard times for story writers [I] shall be glad to lay hold of a few hundred in this way. Miss P expects to make $2,000 this year & if I can pick up a quarter of that I shall be contented,” Lu explained.

  Sadly, within a month, Lu was miserable with her new situation. “Very tired of this wandering life and distasteful work; but kept my word and tugged on.… I never knew before… what false positions poverty can push one into,” Lu noted. By May, the school had failed, and Louisa was in debt. “I gave it up, as I could do much better at something else.… I wrote a story which made more than all my months of teaching… a wasted winter and a debt of $40—to be paid if I sell my hair to do it,” Lu wrote.

  During the summer of 1862 Lu turned her attention back to her writing and sent her stories to newspaper mogul Frank Leslie, the publisher of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, which wasn’t considered highbrow like the Atlantic. Leslie knew that women readers enjoyed sensational thrillers, so he gave them what they wanted to read—thrilling tales full of passion, jealousy, and revenge.

  “Though my tales are silly,” Lu described in her journal, “they are not bad; and my sinners always have a good spot somewhere.… Mr. L[eslie] says my tales are so ‘dramatic, vivid, and full of plot,’ they are just what he wants.” Besides her family and close friends, few people
knew Lu wrote what she called her “blood and thunder” tales. It was looked down on and not respectable, but she chose to write the tales because she could write them quickly. “They are easier to ‘compoze’ & are better paid than moral and elaborate works of Shakespeare,” she confessed to her friend Alf Whitman (no relation to Walt). “So don’t be shocked if I send you a paper containing a picture of Indians, pirates, wolves, bears & distressed damsels in a grand tableau over a title like this ‘The Maniac Bride’ or ‘The Bath of Blood.’ A thrilling tale of passion.”

  Lu didn’t use her real name for the byline. Instead, she either used the nom de plume A. M. Bernard or no name at all. Not only did she want to avoid shocking her neighbors, but Lu also knew from experience that it was better to let the editor think she was a man. “A dozen [stories] a month were easily turned off, and well paid for,” she recounted, “especially while a certain editor labored under the delusion that the writer was a man. The moment the truth was known the price was lowered; but the girl had learned the worth of her wares, and would not write for less, so continued to earn her fair wages in spite of sex.”

  Lu’s thrillers tapped into her flair for the dramatic. Ever since she was a child, Lu liked to write and act in plays with her sisters and friends. “Louisa and her sister Annie [Anna]… were excellent actresses, and always in demand when private theatricals were on foot,” as Frank Stearns, a friend and student at Sanborn’s school, described them. “To see them perform… was a treat in the first order.… Her acting had this peculiarity, that she seemed to always be herself and the character she was representing at the same time.” Edward Emerson agreed, writing that Louisa had “a great taste for acting and skill in devising and producing wonderful romantic plays.… Love, despair, witchcraft, villainy, fairy intervention, triumphant right, held sway in turn.”