Louisa on the Front Lines

by Samantha Seiple

  Lu was diagnosed with pneumonia. From her sickbed, Hannah ordered Lu to stay in her room and put a mustard plaster on her chest. While Lu carefully did so, Hannah wrote an overdue letter to her son. “I have been sick, or you should have heard from me sooner.… Miss Alcott and I worked together over four dying men and saved all but one, the finest of the four, but whether [due to] our sympathy for the poor fellows, or we took cold, I know not, but we both have pneumonia and have suffered terribly. She is a splendid young woman.”

  STUCK IN her dreary room, Lu passed the days writing letters to her worried family, sleeping, reading, and trying to “keep merry,” but that was proving to be difficult. Lu still wanted to do whatever she could to help win the war. So, she started patching and repairing the soldiers’ cotton clothes. Sometimes, while she was sewing for the patients, Lu sat by the drafty window, looking out and taking notes when something captured her interest.

  A continuous stream of army carts, each pulled by six mules, rattled through the muddy street. Sometimes the carts were ambulances full of wounded men, and other times they were filled with the dead inside coffins. Officers rode by on horseback, outfitted in uniforms that were occasionally too tight, making them look like “stuffed fowls” to Lu. She thought the women who wore sweeping hoop skirts and big bonnets weighed down with brightly colored flowers looked like a “perambulating flower-bed.” And then there were the rowdy pigs that ran free, knocking passersby into the muddy road.

  Beyond her view, near Fredericksburg, General Burnside was preparing to cross the Rappahannock River once again and attack General Lee’s army. Almost all of Burnside’s subordinates were opposed to his new plan, but Lincoln approved it. Regardless, another battle meant more wounded would arrive at the Union Hotel Hospital.

  Eight of the ten nurses were sick and off duty. Now that Lu was no longer a nurse but a patient, she had a deeper understanding of how the soldiers felt at the hospital. “I was learning… what the men suffer and sigh for,” Lu wrote. “How acts of kindness touch and win; how much or little we are to those about us; and for the first time really see that in coming there we have taken our lives in our hands, and may have to pay dearly for a brief experience.”

  Every day, the doctors walked up the creaky stairs to check on Lu. She was still suffering from a headache, cough, fever, achiness, and fatigue. And with every breath and cough, she felt a sharp, stabbing pain in her chest. The doctors carefully checked her pulse and tapped her lungs, and they always looked somber, which was not encouraging to Lu.

  Dr. John tried to make her feel better by giving her one of his favorite books by English poet Robert Browning. He also sprinkled her with sweet-smelling cologne and stoked the fire to keep her warm. The one doctor who didn’t check on Lu was Dr. Fitzpatrick. He had been demoted and transferred elsewhere for drinking on the job.

  After the doctors left, the attendants from her ward would stop by to try to cheer her up with news, notes, and presents from her patients. The two nurses who were still on duty would also come by to rest their tired feet by the fireside, chatting and trying to make her comfortable for the night. They also brought meals to her. “My sister nurses fed me,” Lu related appreciatively. “Not only with food for the body, but kind words for the mind; and soon from being half starved, I found myself beteaed and betoasted, petted and served.”

  With a shortage of nurses, the Union Hotel Hospital made an exception and hired a thirty-one-year-old free black nurse, Matilda Cleaver John. And Hannah Ropes’s daughter, Alice, was contacted to come to the hospital to help take care of her mother. Alice was glad to be there but not sure what to think of Dorothea Dix and her rules. “Miss Dix does not allow young people in the hospital unless very ugly,” Alice wrote to her brother. “But she lets me stay during the daytime, which is not very complimentary to my good looks.” Despite the tender care of Alice, the nurses, and the doctors, as each day passed neither Lu nor Hannah improved.

  Lu felt as if she were losing track of time, and people started to look strange to her. She struggled to sleep during the night, which was “one long fight with weariness and pain.” It was worse if the fire died out, making her room unbearably cold. One wintery night Lu saw Dr. John kneeling in front of the fire, whittling wood shavings and adding logs that he had chopped himself. “I ought to have risen up and thanked him on the spot. But, knowing that he was one of those who liked to do good by stealth, I only peeped at him as if he were a friendly ghost; till, having made things as cozy as the most motherly of nurses could have done, he crept away, leaving me to feel… ‘as if angels were a watching of me in my sleep,’ though… [they] do not usually descend in broadcloth and glasses.”

  With the worsening of their symptoms, the doctors determined that Lu and Hannah weren’t just suffering from pneumonia. The pneumonia was a secondary complication to typhoid fever. Dr. Stipp, the head surgeon Lu trusted most, prescribed them both his favorite “cure-all” medicine—calomel—which was one of the recommended treatments for typhoid. Dr. Stipp hoped that the mercury-based “medicine” would cause Lu and Hannah to vomit, purging any illness from their bodies. But the poisonous blue pills didn’t help.

  “I feel no better,” Lu wrote in her journal. “Dream awfully, & wake unrefreshed, think of home & wonder if I am to die here as Mrs. Ropes the matron is likely to do. Feel too miserable to care much what becomes of me.”

  With Lu’s worsening symptoms, the doctors and nurses urged her to go home while she still had the strength to travel. But she refused. “The idea of giving up so soon was proclaiming a defeat before I was fairly routed,” Lu explained. “So to all the ‘Don’t stays,’ I opposed ‘I will.’” Despite Lu’s unwavering resolve, Hannah decided to take matters into her own hands. She agreed with the doctors that Lu should go home. So, without Lu’s knowledge, Hannah gave one more order from her sickbed, determined to help one more patient and possibly save one more life.

  A few days later, on January 16, Lu was lying in her bed when she saw a gentleman with snow-white hair walk into her room “like a welcome ghost on my hearth.” It was Lu’s father, Bronson. Hannah had given the order that a telegram be sent posthaste to the Alcotts, informing them that Lu was deathly ill. Once the news arrived, Bronson cancelled his speaking engagements and caught the first train to Washington. “Was amazed to see Father enter the room that morning.… I was very angry at first, though glad to see him,” Lu revealed.

  Even though it was difficult, when Bronson saw his daughter lying on her deathbed, he maintained his composure, doing his best to hide his shock. Lu was nearly unrecognizable. The typhoid-pneumonia had ravaged his high-spirited and robust daughter into a weak and hollow-cheeked waif. Ever since her last letter home, he’d been worried about her health, and his worst fear had come true. “Letters come from Louisa, giving lively descriptions of hospital scenes,” Bronson recorded in his journal. “She seems active, interested, and, if her strength is adequate to the task, could not better serve herself or the country. But I fear this will end in her breaking down.” As soon as Bronson saw his daughter, however, he was ready to take her home and “out of the dangers of that infected place.” Deep down, Lu wanted to go home. She knew she should go home. But she felt it was a disgrace to leave her post. So Lu refused.

  Upon Bronson’s arrival, Dorothea Dix stopped by Lu’s room. She wanted Lu to leave the hospital and recover at a nearby hotel. But Lu felt too sick to even think about moving from her bed, and although she thought Dragon Dix a “kind soul,” she didn’t like her. “No one likes her & I don’t wonder,” Lu wrote in her journal, before crossing it out.

  The next day, there was a sudden change in the weather, and the bitter cold was blamed for causing Hannah to take a turn for the worse. She was experiencing a violent pain in her chest, making it even harder for her to breathe and talk. The doctors tried to give her relief with a counterirritant. They blistered the skin on her chest, then cut the blisters open, drained them, and added more of the powdered irritan
t. They hoped this procedure would pull the infection toward the blistered area and away from her lungs, making it easier for her to breathe. But Hannah didn’t feel any better.

  For the next few days, Bronson waited anxiously for Lu’s condition to show any sign of improvement. While he spent time by her bedside in the hospital, he made a point to take a break and visit Lu’s ward, wanting to meet the patients that she had written about in her letters. Bronson was in for another shock. Nothing could have prepared the serene and starry-eyed philosopher for the savage and gruesome sights of the wounded soldiers that his daughter had been taking care of. “Horrid war,” Bronson wrote. “And one sees its horrors in hospitals if any where.”

  Bronson also went to the Senate Chamber one evening to hear a speaker. His timing was good, as President Lincoln was there. But Bronson was too worried about Lu to enjoy himself. “I sit near the President,” Bronson recorded in his journal. “He has a strong face, and is more comely than the papers and portraits have shown him. His behavior was good, and I respected his honest bearings. I wished to have had an interview, but am too anxious about Louisa, and without time to seek it, nor has he to give. This is not the moment for seeing any one, nor the Capitol to advantage.”

  On the following day, Hannah was able to get out of bed and, with assistance, walk over to a large chair where she sat down. The change of position seemed to help relieve some of her pain. She looked tranquil while someone lovingly combed her hair.

  Although Lu wasn’t feeling any better, Bronson wanted her to make the journey home. But rain was coming down hard, and an even fiercer storm was brewing on the horizon, delaying his plans. The doctors didn’t want Lu traveling anyway. They thought she was now too sick and weak to make it home.

  But later that evening, Hannah died, and the doctors and Lu both suddenly changed their minds.

  GLOOM DESCENDED on the Union Hotel Hospital along with the relentless rain, intensifying the grief and suffering at Hannah Ropes’s funeral the next day. Usually, when someone died at the hospital, the body was unceremoniously whisked away to the “dead house.” And Reverend Snyder, the hospital chaplain, rarely offered any prayers for the dead.

  But Hannah’s prominent friend, Senator Charles Sumner, who was well known to the public as an ambitious and cold-hearted politician, was devastated by her death. “Mrs. Ropes was a remarkable character,” Senator Sumner declared in a letter to his brother. “Noble & beautiful, & I doubt if she has ever appeared more so than while she has been here in Washington, nursing soldiers.” Senator Sumner made all the arrangements for her funeral and to send her remains home. Her wooden coffin was placed in the large hall at the hospital, and the patients whom Hannah had so compassionately cared for gathered around it along with her grief-stricken daughter, friends, and hospital staff. One notable exception was Lu. She was too sick to attend.

  The hospital chaplain, whom Lu suspected was a Southern sympathizer, gave the elegy, highlighting Hannah Ropes’s many virtues. Among the mourners at the funeral was Hannah’s dear friend Mary Boyce. “Everyone about the place looked up to her with affection & reverence, & her influence over the roughest even, among, ‘her boys,’ as she loved to call them, was remarkable,” Mary described the scene. “Whether the great fatigue & privation of comfort during the last six months of her precious life made her less able to resist such an attack no one would like to decide. I shall always feel that she has given up her life to her country, as freely as anyone who died on the field. ‘True soldier of the Lord!’” Mary had been agonizing over whether she should have tried harder to persuade Hannah to come home with her to recover. “I have been unhappy at not having Mrs. Ropes under my own roof. But this feeling has changed since conversing with the kind surgeon who attended her so faithfully. He said there was a peculiar fitness in her dying at her post of duty, surrounded by the associations endeared to her.”

  This was cold comfort for Alice. Her mother’s quick demise had caught her off guard. Alice didn’t think her mother was dangerously ill until the day before she died, and, even then, she thought her mother was still strong enough to keep fighting. But, as Alice watched her struggling in pain, she was almost relieved when her mother took her final breath and was released from suffering. Even so, the moment her beloved mother died, the loss was too much to bear, and grief overwhelmed Alice, causing her to fall into a violent paroxysm. The doctors gave her a painkiller to help calm her down, but Alice was inconsolable. After Alice’s mother’s funeral, Julia Kendall held her tightly in her arms, trying to give comfort while sharing the burden of her grief.

  Hannah’s son, Ned, was also flooded with grief as well as regret. His mother’s last wish had been to see him one more time. Senator Sumner had sent a telegram to Ned’s commanding officer of the Second Massachusetts Regiment, telling Ned to hurry to his dying mother’s bedside. But it arrived too late.

  Alice was worried about her brother, fearing he would think he had nothing to live for now. She composed a letter, trying to give him comfort. “I love you very much but feel that that will be but small comfort to you and will poorly fill the void created by our dear mother’s passing from our bodily vision. But, darling, she is with us all the time, and can tell us our duty and see how much we love her without the use of words.… Our love for her will take us to her, and her great and now divine love for us will be leading us up.”

  Alice’s words did help soothe his pain, and he replied, “Mother was near me last night. It seemed as if I was a little boy, playing on the floor, and mother was sitting, as if knitting, and looking at me very thoughtfully. It seemed also as if she was needed somewhere else, for she did not stay long. It does seem as if mother was nearer to me now than ever before.”

  Not long after Hannah’s coffin was carried out of the hospital and loaded onto the three o’clock train heading to Boston, Lu was carried out. Her patients rallied around her to say good-bye. But Lu was barely aware of them, and she had just a faint idea that she was going home. Lifeless and bone tired, her eyes were half closed. Lu had slipped into a “typhoid state,” one of the advanced stages of typhoid fever, as she spiraled closer and closer to death.

  At the train station, Dorothea Dix met Bronson and Lu to see them off. She was carrying a basket filled with bottles of wine, tea, medicine, cologne, a small blanket, a pillow, a fan, and a Bible. Before bidding them farewell, Dix gave it to Bronson, hoping it would provide some comfort to Lu.

  At six o’clock, the train whistle blew, the engine roared to life, and the iron horse thundered toward Boston, following in the tracks of Hannah Ropes on the long journey home.

  Chapter 9

  DUTY’S FAITHFUL DAUGHTER

  January 24, 1863, Concord, Massachusetts

  Three days later

  THE SUNLIGHT WAS DYING ON THE HORIZON WHEN THE five o’clock train from Boston steamed past Walden Pond and screeched to a halt at the Concord depot. Lu’s younger sister, May, was waiting on the platform. She and her mother hadn’t received any news about Lu in a few days, and this was the third evening in a row that May had waited at the train station to see whether her father and sister would be among the passengers.

  Ten days earlier, when her father had come home from town with the telegram telling them that Lu was seriously ill of pneumonia, the family was immediately consumed with worry, and Bronson left for Washington. But, the next day, May and her mother received a letter and telegram from Miss Hannah Stevenson, the former matron of the Union Hotel Hospital, who had helped Lu secure her nursing position. Miss Stevenson assured them that Lu was not as ill as they first thought, so they shouldn’t worry.

  When Bronson arrived at the hospital, he had also sent a telegram with reassuring news about Lu.

  “Father is there & she is recovering,” May chronicled in her diary. And the letters they kept receiving from Lu also cheered May up. “She is very cross so it’s a good sign,” May wrote, after reading the letter Lu sent when Bronson showed up at the hospital to bring her home.


  May herself hadn’t been feeling well for the past week. She had gone ice skating on Walden Pond with Julian Hawthorne and afterward was very sick. But, today after lunch, she was feeling well enough to go to the Emerson’s home to read Lu’s latest letter.

  She always enjoyed reading Lu’s letters to friends. Even Moncure Conway, the coeditor of the Boston Commonwealth, an antislavery newspaper, had recently stopped by with his wife to hear May read. Afterward, he asked to have the letters copied so he could publish them. May was going to tell Lu this when she saw her.

  As the passengers began exiting the train, May searched for the familiar faces of her father and Lu. At last, she spotted them and noticed that her sister was being carried from the train. She rushed over and saw Lu’s deathly white face with her eyes rolling up in the back of her head. May was so shaken that she couldn’t hide her look of horror and surprise. “I was greatly shocked to find Louy so pale & weak for I had no idea she was so sick,” May detailed in her diary.

  The long journey had been punishing, worsening Lu’s already fragile condition. Bronson had tried to arrive home earlier, but they had missed the previous day’s train to Concord by just a few minutes.

  Lu remembered little of the past few days. She was only half conscious when they finally reached Boston. But she did notice that, when she was carried off the train, people were staring at her, as if she were a sideshow spectacle. “Louisa was faint and overcome by the long ride,” Bronson wrote.

  They spent the night in Boston at a friend’s house, where Lu “had a sort of fit,” prompting a call for a doctor. Lu finally settled down and got some rest, but she was in the vicelike grip of delirium, an advanced stage of typhoid fever. And Lu was having “a dreadful time of it.” By morning, however, she seemed a bit better. “Louisa was communicative, and though much spent, seemed far better than I feared,” Bronson revealed.