Louisa on the Front Lines

by Samantha Seiple

  Julian was shocked, recalling, “My conceptions of bathing had till then been confined to the severe isolation of bathrooms, or to hardly less unsocial English sea beaches, where the sexes were rigorously segregated.… I glanced at Abby’s [May’s] well-turned figure, her clustered yellow ringlets, her cheerful and inviting expression.… I stammered, blushed.”

  May explained to him, “We and the Emersons often go over to Walden [Pond in] this hot weather to the cove where Thoreau used to live; there’s a tent for the girls. We’re going next Thursday; you could have John’s bathing dress; It would be awfully nice!”

  Julian couldn’t remember the rest of the conversation, but he would never forget swimming at Walden Pond. Except for Lu, who let her long hair down, everyone was wrapped like mummies, from head to ankle, bobbing up and down in their dark-blue flannel swimming suits. “The Alcott girls were society in themselves and Concord would have been crippled without them,” Julian recounted. “Anne [Anna], when she could be spared from her own married sphere, was a precious element; Abby’s [May’s] enjoyment gave to others; and Louisa was the hub of the little universe and kept the wheel in constant activity.”

  Lu tried to stay busy to combat her feelings of restlessness while she waited each day for the mail to arrive. She continued to do whatever she could from the sidelines to help the soldiers. When she found out that a care package was being sent to some of the soldiers from Concord, Lu quickly filled two bags with nuts and apples for her dear “Old Boys,” Edward “Ned” Bartlett and Garth Wilkinson “Wilkie” James.

  Ned and Wilkie had been students at Frank Sanborn’s school, and although they were only seventeen years old, they decided to quit school to join the Forty-Fourth Regiment of the Massachusetts Volunteers. Ned was the son of Concord’s doctor, Josiah Bartlett. Although Dr. Bartlett treated both rich and poor and always made house calls no matter the time, distance, or weather, he wasn’t always popular with the townsfolk. Dr. Bartlett was the founder of Concord’s Total Abstinence Society, and his crusade against drinking resulted in his apple trees getting girdled so they’d die, his horse’s tail getting cut, and the roof of his buggy getting slashed.

  Despite his father’s unpopular stance with the tavern keepers and farmers, both Ned and Wilkie were sorely missed, especially at the social gatherings. Wilkie, who was known for wearing the widest peg-top trousers and a muffin-shaped hat, was the most popular and fashionable at school. “Wilkie was incomparable,” Julian, who was his schoolmate, wrote. “Besides the best dressed boy in the school, and in manners and talk the most engaging, his good humor was inexhaustible.” Wilkie was the third son of the wealthy and prominent James family. His older brother, Henry, an aspiring novelist, was away at Harvard University, devouring Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter and The House of Seven Gables. Unlike his older brother, Wilkie preferred action to studying, and he wanted to fight for his ideals. “I had been brought up in the belief that slavery was a monstrous wrong, its destruction worthy of a man’s best effort, even unto the laying down of life,” Wilkie said.

  Since joining the Union army in August, Wilkie and Ned had already fought in the Battle of Rawl’s Mill in North Carolina, driving back the Confederate soldiers. But the surprise attack from the rebels had been a trying ordeal for their inexperienced regiment, which had only been together for sixty days.

  So the care package from home, which was to be sent for their “jollification & comfort” would, no doubt, be greatly appreciated. Along with the apples and nuts, Lu enclosed a letter: “Ned! Your sisters say you like apple sauce so I beg you’ll have as many messes as you like out of the apples that grew in the old trees by the straw-berry bed where Wilkie stood one day with his hands in his pockets while we fed him with berries till he was moved to remark, with a luxurious condescension, ‘hell this is rather a nice way of eating fruit isn’t it?’ You don’t have time for that sort of amusement now, do you Sergeant?” Before signing off, she gave them some advice. “Now boys,” Lu advised. “If you intend to be smashed in any way just put it off till I get to Washington to mend you up, for I have enlisted & am only waiting for my commission to appear as nurse at the ‘Armory’ Something Hospital, so be sure you are taken there, if your arms or legs fly away, some day (which the Lord forbid!) & we will have good times in spite of breakages & come out jolly under creditable circumstances.”

  A week after sending the care package, Lu’s unbearable wait was finally over. On December 11, 1862, almost two weeks after her thirtieth birthday, Lu received a note in the mail from her friend Hannah Stevenson. An outspoken abolitionist like Lu and her family, Stevenson had helped Lu when she was at her lowest point of despair and was considering jumping from a bridge—it was Hannah Stevenson who had helped bring Lu from the brink by finding her work as a seamstress before the governess position was offered.

  Shortly after the war began, fifty-three-year-old Stevenson was the first woman from Massachusetts to volunteer as a nurse. For the past year, she had worked in various Union hospitals. “The work is immensely hard, but I get used to it,” Stevenson wrote to her family. “If we could do it as citizens, instead of soldiers, it would be easy.” She found it especially difficult working with the doctors. “I cannot get over my surprise of being ordered about by these doctors as they order the privates,” she explained further. “They recognize nothing of the peculiarity of the position; we have not been put under arrest yet, nor deprived of our rations, but scolded plentifully for not always obeying exactly minute contradictory orders. The army is an awful school in some respects, & few men have the self-control to use power well.”

  Stevenson also found Dix, the superintendent of female nurses for the Union army, very prickly, living up to her nickname, Dragon Dix. Dix had advised Stevenson “to be very careful, for you talk & laugh very loud and you talk a great deal. I want you to remember that you are nothing but a nurse & to have nothing whatever, to say to Dr. Crosby.” Stevenson and Crosby “had a great laugh over” this advice. The doctors didn’t like Dix’s authority over them in the hiring of female nurses, but they found a loophole when the assistant surgeon general, Dr. Robert Wood, told them, “Miss Dix has nothing to do with volunteer nurses… her work is to get nurses who are paid.”

  When Miss Dix discovered that the head doctor had allowed “volunteer” nurses in the newly converted and very crowded Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown, she was furious that her authority had been challenged. Dix raged against the doctor and Stevenson, causing an unpaid nurse named Sarah Low to wonder how Stevenson could endure being spoken to in such a nasty way. “Miss Dix has always been very insolent to Miss S[tevenson]. She is arbitrary to them all. ‘My nurses,’ she calls them & does not look out for their comfort in the least. She wanted Miss Stevenson to send to Mass[achusetts] for one hundred nurses, but she would not because she knew they would not be treated decently if they came.”

  Unfortunately, Hannah Stevenson had become used to it.

  Despite Dix’s rants and raves, Stevenson was good at her job as the matron in charge of the Union Hotel Hospital, and her patients respected her. “They think so highly of Miss Stevenson, & well they may. It makes an immense difference to a soldier whether he gets into a hospital where there are women nurses or not, no one can tell how much, who has not lived in a hospital,” Sarah Low wrote.

  When Dix offered Stevenson a nursing position in a field hospital, however, she turned her down. She was suffering from neuralgia, rheumatism, and a toothache, and the pain fueled her worry that she might have to give up nursing. “My old ankle will give out every few days, and send me limping about, & to get off there, & find myself incompetent would be horrifying.”

  Stevenson was home on furlough when Lu received her letter calling her to report for duty as a nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital, where they desperately needed a nurse since she left. Lu was to be there in two days.

  Although excited, Lu felt a pang of disappointment that she wouldn’t be working at the Armory Square
Hospital, in Washington, which was her first choice. The Armory was known to be one of the best, a benchmark for all the other hospitals, unlike the Union Hotel Hospital, which Lu knew was “a hard place.” But her mind was made up. “Decided to go to Washington as nurse.… Help needed and I love nursing, and must let out my pent-up energy in some new way. Winter is always a hard and a dull time, and if I am away there is one less to feed and warm and worry over,” Lu recorded in her journal.

  Her family and friends supported her decision. “The Civil War so kindled her that no one was astonished, or ventured to remonstrate, when she took the almost unheard decision to volunteer as (a) nurse behind the lines,” her friend Julian wrote.

  Lu only had a few hours to get ready if she was to make the train to Boston, the first leg of her journey. Although she had her clothes picked out, Lu needed to write her name in them, and she also needed to pack—there was too much to be done in the short window of time.

  Lu’s mother rushed next door to the Hawthornes’ home for help. Although Julian was a fixture at the Alcotts’ home, they rarely saw his father, Nathaniel. He was a shy man, and he didn’t care much for Bronson, especially when Bronson went on and on about the virtues of pears.

  “You may begin at Plato or the day’s news,” Nathaniel said, “and he will come around to pears. He is now convinced… that pears exercise a more direct and ennobling influence on us than any other vegetable or fruit.”

  Although he hadn’t been feeling well recently, Nathaniel was locked away in his library with the blinds pulled down, trying to write another best seller. Occasionally, Lu would see him leave the house.

  “We catch glimpses of a dark mysterious looking man in a big hat and red slippers darting over the hills or skimming by as if he expected the house of Alcott were about to rush out and clutch him,” Lu wrote.

  But Lu’s mother wasn’t there to see Nathaniel. She was there to seek out Nathaniel’s wife, Sophia, who had offered to help Lu in any way she could. It was a whirlwind of activity. Sophia was carefully writing Lu’s name in her clothes, while Louisa and her family raced around trying to help her get ready. Along with her dark and drab dresses, Lu packed her hairbrush, books by Charles Dickens, games, a copper teakettle, and her inkstand. “I packed my ‘go-abroady’ possessions, tumbled the rest into two big boxes, danced on the lids till they shut… then I choked down a cup of tea, generously salted instead of sugared by some agitated relative,” Lu wrote.

  She was also given sandwiches, gingerbread, and pears for the long journey to Washington, DC. Julian and May offered to walk Lu to the train depot. By now, daylight had turned to twilight, and Lu was ready to go “to the very mouth of the war.”

  Wearing a big black bonnet, a fuzzy brown coat, and a brave face, Lu hugged her family. Her father felt like he was sending his only son off to war. Lu felt the same way. Maintaining her composure, Lu didn’t shed a tear until she heard her mother let out a despairing sob. Lu felt her courage slip away, and doubt bubbled up inside her. Everyone was crying, including Lu. “I realized that I had taken my life in my hand, and might never see them all again,” Lu wrote. She hugged her mother close and asked, “Shall I stay?”

  Although Lu’s mother had told Sophia that she would feel helpless without Lu, she pushed the thought aside. “No, go!” her mother said, clasping her wet handkerchief and smiling bravely. It was an answer that Abba would later regret.

  Chapter 5

  GEORGETOWN OR BUST

  One day later, December 12, 1862

  On the train to Washington, DC

  IT WAS SEVEN O’CLOCK AT NIGHT. THE TRAIN WAS RUMBLING down the tracks, southward to New London, Connecticut, a port town that notorious traitor Benedict Arnold had looted and burned to the ground during the Revolutionary War. Once there, Lu planned on catching an overnight steamboat to Jersey City, where she would board another train.

  Looking out the window, there was nothing to see but the dark night. Inside the passenger car, the gas lamps glowed. Lu was comfortable in her seat, but feelings of loneliness stirred. She reached into her coat pocket for a piece of carefully wrapped gingerbread and the pear from home. She munched her food, trying to comfort herself.

  Lu was worried about misplacing her ticket, so she had pinned it to the seat in front of her and was keeping a close eye on it. The free ticket hadn’t been easy to obtain, and she’d spent the day running all over Boston trying to navigate the government bureaucracy.

  A typical train ticket from Boston to Washington, DC, cost nearly twelve dollars, a whole month’s salary for a female Army nurse and more than Lu’s father made in a month as the superintendent of the Concord schools. So Lu was determined to procure the free ticket even though she needed to ask Ginery Twichell, the clean-shaven, ruddy-faced president of the Boston and Worcester Railroad company. “I’m a bashful individual, though I can’t get any one to believe it,” Lu confessed. “So it cost me a great effort to poke about the Worcester depot till the right door appeared, then walk into a room containing several gentlemen, and blunder out my request in a high state of stammer and blush.”

  Twichell, who first made a name for himself as a whip-fast stagecoach driver, was a self-made, shrewd businessman, with a seemingly endless supply of jokes. His competitive drive to be the first stagecoach driver to deliver a dispatch, which usually arrived at night, led him to sleep in his clothes with his buckskin underwear on. That way, he was not only ready to go but, during the long horse rides in the snowy, cold winter months, the buckskin underwear was advertised to give him the best “protection against pneumonia, rheumatism, and lung diseases.” Despite Twichell’s penchant for telling racy anecdotes, he was very courteous to Lu, but he had no idea what she was talking about. “It was evident that I had made as absurd a demand as if I had asked for the nose off his respectable face,” Lu noted.

  Speaking in a clear and low voice, Twichell, who had the nervous habit of briskly rubbing his hands together whenever he spoke in earnest, suggested that Lu talk to John Andrew, the governor of Massachusetts. Lu backed out of the room and soon found herself outside the Worcester depot on the corner of Lincoln and Beach Streets, across the muddy road from the grand United States Hotel.

  Initially, Lu didn’t think she had the nerve to pursue it any further. But Governor Andrew had a reputation for being genial and good natured, and Lu, who had lived in Boston, remembered seeing him once, eating oysters and laughing as if he didn’t have a care in the world. She began walking toward the State House.

  She passed through Boston Common, the seventy-five-acre, tree-lined public park where pirates and accused witches were once hanged from a large elm tree. For many years, people also used the Common for a cow pasture, which came in very handy for Lu’s great-aunt Dorothy, who lived in a mansion across the street from the park, next to the State House.

  Dorothy, who was married to Boston’s one-time governor John Hancock, didn’t have enough milk to serve the nearly two hundred French naval officers who arrived unexpectedly at her doorstep for breakfast one morning in 1778. She quickly sent her servants across the street to milk her neighbors’ cows in the Common and told them that if anyone complained, she would explain everything to them. But no one did. Dorothy and John were popular with the people of Boston, and her husband had, after all, donated the wine and fireworks for the celebration in the Common when the Stamp Act was repealed in 1765.

  When Lu finally reached the end of Boston Common, she was at the top of Beacon Hill, in front of the State House, which just happened to be built on the land that was once John Hancock’s very own cow pasture. The brick, Federal-style building, with its row of imposing white pillars, was hard to miss. The shiny copper dome, which was made by silversmith Paul Revere, was like a beacon.

  Lu climbed the mountain of steps and walked inside the State House, where she knocked on all the wrong doors, having no idea where to find the governor. “I turned desperate,” Lu wrote. “And went into one, resolving not to come out till I�
��d made somebody hear and answer me.”

  The room was crowded with people, including soldiers and surgeons. Lu approached a man and asked whether he knew where she could find the governor or whether he knew anything about the free train passes for nurses. He said he didn’t, but she had him cornered and continued prodding the “animated wet blanket” until he finally remembered that there was a sergeant somewhere on Milk Street in the financial district who might be able to help her.

  Lu made her way to Milk Street, where she asked a gentleman who was passing by where she might find the elusive sergeant who knew about the free train pass. He didn’t know, so she asked several more people before one suggested she look for the sergeant in Haymarket Square, near Faneuil Hall.

  Lu raced to the open-air market, crossing more muddy roads, her shoes and the hem of her dress becoming caked with mud. She looked hard for a posted sign, stopped in shops and asked storekeepers, and even went into a restaurant, where women weren’t supposed to go alone, and stopped by a recruiting tent. No one seemed to know or want to help her until she happened to run into her brother-in-law, John Pratt. She hurriedly told him her troubles. “I’m going to Washington at five, and I can’t find the free ticket man.… I’m so tired and cross I don’t know what to do,” Lu said.

  Then she asked him for his help even though she would later explain, “I’m a woman’s rights woman, and if any man had offered help in the morning, I should have condescendingly refused it, sure that I could do everything as well, if not better myself. My strong-mindedness had rather abated since then, and I was now quite ready to be a ‘timid trembler,’ if necessary.”