Louisa on the Front Lines

by Samantha Seiple

  So Bronson and Lu were able to board the four o’clock train from Boston to Concord, but, as the Alcotts made their way home from the train depot to Orchard House, the pain and uncertainty surrounding Lu’s condition made it seem like a funeral procession. Lu was taken upstairs to her bedroom. But, even at home in her own bed with the fireplace blazing, Lu found no relief or comfort. In the throes of delirium, she was plagued with nightmares, convinced that the house was roofless and no one wanted to see her.

  Her mother was heartbroken at the sight of her daughter teetering on the brink of death, and Abba, whose heart still ached with grief over Lizzie’s death, was overcome with fear that she might lose another beloved daughter. “Poor Louy,” her mother wrote. “She left us a brave handsome woman… and is returned to us almost a wreck of body and mind.”

  Her mother didn’t have a moment’s rest, refusing to leave Lu’s bedside. The next morning, Dr. Bartlett, the teetotaler town doctor, made a house call to check on Lu.

  “All of us are very anxious about Lu as she is exceedingly feverish & her throat seems almost entirely filled up,” May noted.

  The doctor diagnosed her with typhoid and was surprised that Lu wasn’t in worse shape after such a grueling journey. He gave the Alcotts a lifeline of some much-needed hope to cling to. “Dr. Bartlett has seen her,” Bronson wrote, “and thinks, that with quiet and good nursing she will be up again before long. Her trouble is sore throat, with fever at times. She sleeps more or less, and talks at times in her usual lively way.”

  But Lu’s mother didn’t have much faith in doctors or their medicine. “I hate Drs. and all their nonsense,” she wrote. Abba also didn’t want anyone outside of the family to be Lu’s nurse. “The efficacy of good nursing I do know and appreciate. And believe if she is to be saved from violent death or the stern ravages of chronic ailments, it will be by faithful vigilant care.”

  Lu’s parents kept vigil by her bedside, taking turns throughout the day and night. They didn’t want May to be near her too often, as they were afraid their youngest daughter would catch Lu’s illness. “Neither she nor father like to have me about her much as not being very well myself. They think I am very liable to take it, if I am over her too much,” May wrote.

  Lu’s older sister, Anna, who was living eighteen miles away in East Boston, was seven months pregnant, hoping to have a baby girl she planned to name Louisa. Abba wanted to protect her oldest daughter from the truth about Lu’s illness. So, when Bronson wrote to her, he was careful with his choice of words, not wanting to cause her any alarm. “Louisa is here at home again,” Bronson wrote to Anna. “Though much enfeebled by her sickness and the long journey. She was hardly able to come away, but came through with courage, and less harm than I anticipated.… It was most fortunate for her that I went to her as I did. Every thing was against her at the Hospital.”

  As Bronson watched Lu fight to survive the ravages of war, he recognized that what he had previously thought were flaws in Lu were assets. The daughter he called a demon was willing to go to hell and back, while she steered proudly and adventurously toward the heaven of her hopes. The stronger the opposing gale, the more determined she was, willing to sacrifice herself for the greater good. Whether it would cost her life he did not know, but he respected her willingness to put her life on the line, testing her ideals and beliefs.

  For the next few days, delirium continued to plague Lu. With hallucinations haunting and twisting her mind, she barely knew what was going on around her. And, many times, she was furious in her delirium. Her mother, dressed in black, tried to comfort her.

  “Lie still, my dear,” her mother said, touching Lu with her soft hands. But, in Lu’s mind, her mother had been transformed into a menacing Spaniard, who was always chasing and frightening her. In a recurring nightmare, he was Lu’s husband, and he would suddenly walk out of her closet, come in through the window, and torment her all night long.

  Compounding the delirium were the fever fits, a type of seizure triggered by her high temperature. The convulsions sometimes lasted several minutes, causing her bloodshot eyes to look wild with fear. Her cheeks would flush to a mahogany red, while her heart pounded and the pain throughout her body intensified. “She dreads the fever fits which come twice in twenty-four hours, and leave her perplexed and exhausted,” Bronson recorded. “But sleep follows to refresh her wasted spirits and give intervals of comparative ease. We hope the fever has not many days more to run.”

  In the hopes of curing her delirium, Dr. Bartlett blistered Lu’s head by applying a plaster of dried and crushed beetles. He continued to stop by every day to check on her. “The Dr. pronounced her, if no better, not worse,” Bronson informed Anna.

  After nearly a week, Lu’s mother was so run-down that she was forced to leave Lu’s bedside to get some rest. But she would be back by Lu’s side in less than an hour. “Mother giving out as the watching & constant anxiety is too much for her,” May worried. Although Abba wasn’t feeling well, she didn’t consult the doctor. She was taking care of it herself using homeopathic remedies to help alleviate her ailments. But it was also her resolve to keep her daughter alive that kept Abba on her feet, knowing that if Lu were to die, it would be an “insurmountable calamity” for the family. The Alcotts were waging a “fierce campaign, one of the fiercest of the war.”

  Occasionally, Lu seemed awake and aware. She told her parents stories about the hospital and seemed to be able to read Hannah Ropes’s obituary. She was also very interested in how she got home. “She asked me to sit near her bedside, and tell her the adventures of our fearful journey home.… [Lu] enjoyed the story, laughing over the plot and catastrophe, as if it were a tale of her imagining,” Bronson wrote. But afterward, Lu didn’t remember anything, as her fever spiked and the delirium raged. Lu didn’t know where she was and was terrified that she would never get home.

  One night, Lu became so frightened of the sinister Spaniard that she got up and made a plea to the pope while trying to speak Latin. “If you will only take that man away, I can bear the rest,” Lu pleaded.

  She was also reliving disturbing scenes from the hospital. In one, Dr. John Winslow and two other nurses were trying to tempt Lu to worship the devil. In another, Lu was tending to millions of sick and wounded soldiers who never died but also never got better. The nightmare caused Lu such distress that she tried to get out of bed and fell to the floor. Her mother, who had left the room momentarily, was in hysterics while May dragged Lu back to bed.

  “How could you leave me alone when the room was full of men!” Lu exclaimed.

  Her delusions continued, and, at one point, Lu found herself in heaven and saw people flying. Dorothea Dix was among the people there. But Lu didn’t like it, finding it dismal and ordinary, and she wished she wasn’t there. Another time, Lu believed she was being hunted down by an angry mob in Baltimore. They were breaking down the door, accusing her of being a witch. Lu was tortured as they tried to kill her by hanging, burning, and stoning.

  It wasn’t until early February that Lu finally found some relief when her fever abated. Exhausted and weak, she couldn’t remember much of anything that had happened in the past three weeks. But she had recovered some of her senses. Lu was feeling famished and noticed her throat and mouth were painfully sore. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Lu was shocked to discover that her beautiful long hair was gone.

  “WAS TOLD I had had a very bad typhoid fever, had nearly died & was still very sick,” Lu wrote. “All of which seemed rather curious for I remembered nothing of it.”

  But Lu did, in fact, remember her sister’s shocked face and her mother’s look of bewilderment when she arrived home. And the terrifying nightmares were still vivid, lingering in her mind.

  “Never having been sick before it was all new & very interesting when I got quiet enough to understand matters,” Lu wrote.

  When Lu looked in the mirror, a gaunt face and big eyes stared back at her. She didn’t recognize herself. And she was stil
l shocked and upset that Dr. Bartlett had shaved her head to blister her scalp. But Lu tried to make the best of it by wearing a hat along with a frisette, so she would have a little fringe of curls that peeked out along her forehead. Still, she couldn’t help but mourn the loss of her striking chestnut-colored hair. “Had all my hair, 1 1/2 yard long, cut off & went into caps like a grandma. Felt badly about losing my one beauty,” Lu lamented. Trying to cheer herself up nevertheless, she continued, “Never mind, it might have been my head, and a wig outside is better than a loss of wits inside.”

  She asked impatiently for food. But it was too painful to chew and swallow because her tongue was swollen, her throat was ulcerated, and her teeth were achy and sensitive. Dr. Stipp, the head surgeon at the Union Hotel Hospital, had poisoned her by prescribing too much calomel, and Lu was suffering from the toxic effects of the large doses of the mercury-based blue pills. So, for now, she was given beef tea to drink.

  “We trust the main perils are past, and that her recovery dates from this hour, though it will need careful nursing for some weeks to restore her strength and right-mindedness,” Bronson wrote.

  Lu’s entire body was in pain, and she was too weak to walk. Lu was devastated, and she burst into tears. Lu didn’t know herself anymore. Always the caretaker, she was used to being independent and physically active, reveling in her morning runs and long walks. But now if she wanted to sit up, Lu had to be carried to the easy chair. “Active exercise was my delight,” Lu explained. “From the time when a child of six I drove my hoop round the Common without stopping, to the days when I did my twenty miles in five hours and went to a party in the evening.”

  Even though her family still sat vigil by her bedside, Lu’s pain and suffering seemed to make time slow down. “Such long, long nights—such feeble, idle days, dozing, fretting about nothing, longing to eat & no mouth to do it,” Lu recalled. Relentless feelings of gloom and discouragement overwhelmed Lu. “Tried to sew; read & write & found I had to begin all over again.” She didn’t believe she was getting better, convinced that Dr. Bartlett “had not detected the secrets of her malady.” Lu’s suffering was so great that she wanted to die.

  When Lu’s older sister, Anna, was finally told the distressing truth about Lu’s condition, she hurried home to Orchard House. As soon as Anna saw Lu, her first thought was of Lizzie (Beth). Lu looked just like her right before she died.

  Abba Alcott was so upset about her daughter that she confided in her neighbor, Sophia Hawthorne. Sophia was no stranger to life-threatening illnesses. A few years prior, her oldest daughter, Una, had suffered from malaria for several months, and after recuperating, she then contracted typhus. Although she ultimately recovered, she never fully regained her good health.

  Sophia’s own health was delicate. As a devoted mother and wife, she had dedicated herself to her daughter’s recovery at the expense of her own well-being. And it was only recently that her husband, Nathaniel, who had not been feeling well for months, seemed to be “decidedly better.”

  Since Lu’s arrival home, Sophia had done whatever she could to help and had insisted on making meals for May every day. So, as Abba poured out her heart to her friend, expressing her worst fears about Lu, Sophia listened compassionately.

  On February 18, a woman named Mrs. E. A. Bliss showed up at Orchard House. She worked as a maid and companion for the wife of the outspoken abolitionist Horace Greeley. But this was just Bliss’s day job. On the side, she used her “magnetic power” to discover people’s ailments. It isn’t clear who contacted the spiritualist.

  Bliss was taken upstairs to Lu’s bedroom. She didn’t ask Lu any questions. Instead she reached out and held her hands. Closing her eyes, Bliss started “reading” Lu. She told Lu that she had discovered the “internal maladies” plaguing her. No names of the maladies were given.

  Shortly after Bliss left, Lu sat up, swept her legs over the side of her bed, and stood up by herself. Then she walked across the room, without any help. She was able to stand for a few moments, so her sister, Anna, could do a fitting for the flannel dressing gown that she was sewing for her.

  The next day, the excruciating pain in Lu’s back, arms, and legs was gone. Lu climbed out of bed and walked downstairs all by herself. She stayed for an hour.

  On Sunday, February 22, it was a bitterly cold morning when Lu woke up. The fireplaces were burning brightly. Downstairs in the kitchen, a hired servant, whose service was a gift from the Emersons, was cooking breakfast.

  “Louy down stairs & dressed for the first time,” May recorded in her diary. “She is very feeble but entirely herself. She has on her new flannel dressing gown & it is very pleasant to see her about again.”

  A month later, Lu was still a “rack a bones,” but she was eating more regularly and had some more flesh on her body. She could sit up for most of the day and walk a little more around the house. “Falling back in my old ways,” Lu wrote. “My first job was characteristic, I cleaned out my piece bags & dusted my books, feeling as tired as if I’d cleaned the whole house.”

  Among her belongings, Lu found “Thoreau’s Flute,” the few lines of poetry that she had written one night while watching a soldier die at the hospital. She had forgotten about it. Although she didn’t think poetry was her forte, Lu decided she would finish writing it. She still wanted it for her scrapbook.

  With Lu’s improved condition, the anxiety surrounding her recovery faded a bit, and the family focused their attention on Anna and her coming baby. Bronson went to Boston to hold some philosophical conversations and to be near her while everyone waited eagerly for the arrival of good news.

  On Saturday, March 28, snow was falling steadily, and Lu, May, and their mother had given up hope that Bronson would be back from Boston that night. So they made themselves cozy in the parlor and were deeply involved in a novel they were reading out loud when Bronson suddenly burst through the front door. “Good news!” he said, waving his bag in the air. “Anna has a fine boy.”

  There were peals of laughter and tears of joy. “With one accord, we three opened our mouths & screamed for about two minutes,” Lu wrote to her sister Anna. “Then mother began to cry, I to laugh, & May to pour out questions, while Papa beamed upon us all shiny, red & damp yet the image of a proud, old Grandpa.”

  May wasn’t as enthusiastic as Lu, writing in her diary, “Father brought the good news that Annie had a little son.… I think we are rather disappointed that it is not a girl.”

  The following morning, Lu was so anxious for more news about the baby that she “toddled” into town to check the mail. It was the longest distance that she had walked since she had gotten sick, and she didn’t feel worn out. The next day, Lu’s mother went to Boston to see her first grandchild, and Lu started to do some housework, something she usually despised. “I fell to cleaning house as good work for an invalid & and a vent for a happy Aunt,” she wrote.

  By April, Lu was writing again. Frank Sanborn, the coeditor of the Boston Commonwealth, wanted to publish the letters that she had written home while she was working in the hospital. “Sanborn asked me to do what [Moncure] Conway had suggested & teased about… to arrange my letters in a printable shape & put them in the Commonwealth,” Lu noted. “They thought them witty & [sym]pathetic. I didn’t, but I wanted money.”

  Lu’s worry about the family’s debts weighed heavily on her mind. She had only made ten dollars working as a nurse, and now she had a doctor’s bill to pay. But as Lu’s strength returned, allowing her to enjoy longer walks in the springtime air, her spirit felt renewed. “Felt as if born again,” Lu confided in her journal. “Everything seemed so beautiful & new. I hope I was, & that the Washington experience may do me lasting good. To go very near death teaches one the value of life, & this winter will always be a very memorable one to me.”

  Despite nearly losing her life and putting her family into more debt, Lu didn’t regret her decision to fight for liberty and freedom. “I never shall regret the going,” Lu wrote. �
�Though a sharp tussle with typhoid, ten dollars, and a wig, are all the visible results of the experiment; for one may live and learn much in a month. A good fit of illness proves the value of health; real danger tries one’s mettle; and self-sacrifice sweetens one character.”

  Although Lu didn’t have any regrets, her parents did. Realizing too late how dangerous it was for their daughter, her mother and father both lamented encouraging her to go to the front lines. “That was our contribution to the war,” Bronson told his mother in a letter. “And one we should not have made willingly had we known the danger and the sacrifices.” Lu’s idealistic father was shaken to the core by the ruthless reality of what he’d seen at the Union Hotel Hospital and Lu’s struggle to stay alive. The raw and unforgiving nature of war pushed him to realize that his daughter’s rebellious streak was not a flaw but a strength. Although he had always disapproved of his daughter’s motivation to make money, he could not deny what he had witnessed: Lu’s courage and willingness to go to the front lines and risk her life for what she believed was right. He could see clearly the huge sacrifice his daughter had made to drive change and make the world a better place. Bronson could finally behold his wayward daughter’s innate goodness.

  Lu had, at long last, earned her father’s approval, and it was the salve to the hurt and pain in their tenuous relationship. Years later, when it was evident that she would never fully regain her good health, her father would be inspired to write a poem for her, the last line of which was “I press thee to my heart, as Duty’s faithful child.”

  Chapter 10

  A GIFT

  June 1863, Concord, Massachusetts

  Two months later

  UPSTAIRS AT ORCHARD HOUSE, LU WAS IN HER BEDROOM, wrapped in her green and red glory cloak and mostly recovered with her gold and ivory pen in hand. She was sitting at her half-moon desk sandwiched between two windows. Next to Lu’s desk, her sister, May, had recently painted a panel of calla lilies and bright nasturtiums. But Lu didn’t need to look out the windows or at art for inspiration. “People mustn’t talk about genius—for I drove that idea away years ago.… The inspiration of necessity is all I’ve had, & it is a safer help than any other,” Lu penned.