Louisa on the Front Lines

by Samantha Seiple

  Now all she had to do was look around her bedroom. It was decorated with new furniture, and, best of all, Lu had not only bought it herself but also for her family. Their bedchambers were now furnished with new bureaus, mirrors, and sleigh beds adorned with colorful handmade quilts. Her mother also received a new worktable for her needlework.

  The redecorating wasn’t just in their bedrooms. For the downstairs parlor, Lu had purchased new green-patterned carpet as a nice contrast to Bronson’s burgundy-colored study across from it. The pretty muslin curtains, which were made from old party dresses, danced lazily over the windows.

  May had been busy hanging earth-toned wallpaper, so the paintings, which included some of her own, would stand out. She had also painted murals in some of the rooms, favoring Greek and biblical images.

  For years, Lu and her family had talked wistfully about new furnishings for Orchard House, or, as Lu liked to call it, “Apple Slump.” So, when she received the one-hundred-dollar prize money from Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper for her story “Pauline’s Passion and Punishment,” Lu paid her family’s debts and then splurged on the new furnishings and redecorating.

  Lu was feeling hopeful, so she went back to work on her love-triangle novel called Moods. She was encouraged by readers’ responses to the four “Hospital Sketches” she had written for the Boston Commonwealth. They were showering her with praise.

  David Atwood Wasson, a transcendentalist writer and minister, had written to her, “Let me tell you what extreme pleasure I have taken in reading ‘Hospital Sketches.’ Written with such extraordinary wit & felicity of style, & showing such power to portray character!” And Lu was thrilled when she received a letter from the father of Wilkie and Henry James. The prominent theologian found her stories of hospital service “charming.” He went further to say, “I am so delighted with your beautiful papers, and the evidence they afford of your exquisite humanity, that I have the greatest desire to enroll myself among your friends.”

  No one was more astonished by the success and popularity of her work than Lu herself. “Much to my surprise they made a great hit, & people bought the papers faster than they could be supplied,” Lu recounted.

  The public was hungry for stories about the war from the front lines, especially after another morale-crushing Union defeat at Chancellorsville in May 1863. Lu’s “Hospital Sketches” were some of the first published stories about the soldiers wounded in battle and their medical care. It was a grim and somber subject, but Lu’s natural ability to bring cheerfulness and humor to the most heartbreaking situations made her readers laugh and cry. Lu’s firsthand experience of the casualties of war gave a fresh perspective from a female nurse’s point of view, and, through her writing, Lu expressed her beliefs about slavery and women’s rights. “I find I’ve done a good thing without knowing it,” Lu noted.

  When Lu wrote about dying soldier John Suhre, readers and critics were moved to tears, calling it unforgettable. “The contrast between comic incidents and the tragic experience of a single night… is portrayed with singular power and effectiveness. ‘The death of John’ is a noble and touching feature,” the Boston Transcript reported. After reading the review, Lu revealed in her journal, “‘A Night’ was much liked, & I was glad, for my beautiful ‘John Suhre’ was the hero, & praise belonged to him.”

  John Suhre had left an indelible mark on Lu’s heart and writing. Together, Lu and John had been two soldiers on the front lines, fighting side-by-side to the death for a greater good. He provided a male contrast to Bronson’s presence in her life, one that was more similar to her own traits and values. In her writing, her characters would consistently embody the qualities she and John shared—courage and kindness. In their intimate moments, he taught her the importance of humane and loving relationships, and how they affect a person’s well-being. Drawing from her deep well of empathy, Lu could create realistic and relatable characters that sparked lasting emotional responses from her readers.

  Lu was also daring to reveal more of herself through her writing. When Lu was working in the hospital and hurriedly wrote letters home to her family on “inverted tin kettles” while waiting for gruel to warm and poultices to cool for her patients, she wasn’t thinking about getting the letters published. Her intention was not about money but to communicate honestly with her loved ones. Lu didn’t hide behind a pen name; she was showing and expressing her true self. Her hospital stories were unfiltered Lu, and the readers, including her family, responded positively. “One gets acquainted with her more from her stories than by being with her, & finds what her real character is,” shared her sister May.

  “Hospital Sketches” were so popular that two publishers wanted to make a book of them. She had to choose between Roberts Brothers and James Redpath, a journalist and fierce abolitionist who had been a friend of John Brown. “I preferred Redpath & said yes, so he fell to work with all his might,” Lu explained. Mr. Redpath planned to help victims of the war by donating a portion of the book’s profits to the children who were left fatherless or homeless. Lu also thought about giving some of her earnings to the war orphans, but she knew it wasn’t practical. Feeling ungenerous, Lu explained her circumstances to Mr. Redpath: “I too am sure the ‘he who giveth to the poor lendeth to the Lord’ & on that principle devote time & earning to the care of my father & mother, for one possesses no gift for money making & the other is now too old to work any longer for those who are happy & able to work for her.… All that is rightly mine I prefer to use for them much as I should like to help the orphans.”

  To Lu’s surprise, “Hospital Sketches” wasn’t her only literary success. Without her knowledge, Bronson had shown her poem, “Thoreau’s Flute,” to neighbor Sophia Hawthorne. Sophia was very knowledgeable about literature and art, and not just because she was the wife to best-selling writer Nathaniel. She herself had once shown great promise as a writer and artist. But she had given it up to devote herself to raising her children and caring for her family. Even though her husband wrote compassionately about the rigid roles society defined for women, he didn’t always encourage Sophia to develop her artistic talents.

  Nevertheless, Sophia was so moved by the poem that she felt compelled to tell her friend Annie, who was married to James Fields, the editor of the Atlantic, even though Fields had unceremoniously dismissed Lu’s talent and ambition, telling her to stick to her teaching. In a letter to Annie, Sophia wrote, “Upon quietly reading it to myself, I find it really emotionally beautiful in form, expression and thought.… It is altogether in a superior tone to any thing I have ever seen of her—so sweet, majestic and calm and serious.”

  Sophia found Lu’s poem so inspiring, she drew a pen-and-ink sketch related to it. Sophia also asked Annie to read it out loud to her husband. As a result, James Fields decided he wanted to publish it.

  “Of course I didn’t say No,” Lu wrote. “It was printed, copied, praised & glorified—also paid for, & being a mercenary creature I liked the $10 nearly as well as the honor of being a ‘new star’ & ‘a literary celebrity.’” Lu had the additional satisfaction of Mr. Fields eating his words once more. As it so happened, he liked not only her poem but also her “Hospital Sketches” and wanted her to write an original war story for the Atlantic. Lu didn’t say no to that either and wrote “My Contraband,” an antislavery story set in a hospital.

  In August, Lu’s younger sister, May, left home and traveled to Clark’s Island in Plymouth Bay. May had been feeling very lonely. Many of her friends were away on vacation. Her near-constant companion, Julian Hawthorne, had been spending more time in Cambridge, preparing to enter Harvard. And his sister, Una, and May weren’t getting along. May wasn’t sure why, but she’d been excluded from Una’s birthday celebration.

  May felt very conflicted and unhappy. She was struggling with feelings of envy and guilt for feeling envious.

  “I have every blessing,” May confessed. “Yet I am a discontent, selfish, ambitious girl, envious of my neighbors�
� wealth and position, not realizing we are better off ourselves than we ever have been before. I seem to have lost all my good spirits & don’t know what to think of myself.”

  May had also turned twenty-two years old, and although she had ambition to become an artist, she was aware that spinsterhood was fast approaching.

  “I am growing very old & feel it too which is silly I know,” May wrote the night before her birthday.

  Lu offered to treat her sister to a trip, so May could spend time with “pleasant people” and have fun “boating, singing, dancing, croqueting & captivating.” May was grateful to her older sister, writing in her diary, “How generous Louisa is to so willingly pay my expenses.… It takes a great deal of pluck to earn money & then hand to another person to spend, but I think her very noble.”

  Lu spent most of her waking hours at her desk, writing more stories and proofreading her manuscript for Mr. Redpath. Her family was worried she was working too hard, and they feared the worst, with good reason. “I cannot work very steadily without my poor old head beginning to ache & my family to predict relapses,” Lu wrote. Despite this, Lu wanted to “be ready in case a discerning public demand further gems from my illustrious pen.”

  On August 28, Lu’s hard work paid off when Hospital Sketches was published in book form. “My first morning glory bloomed in my room, a hopeful blue, & at night up came my book in its new dress,” Lu noted.

  Lu’s family shared in her glory. “I see nothing in the way of a good appreciation of Louisa’s merits as a woman and a writer. Nothing could be more surprising to her or agreeable to us,” her father wrote.

  Hospital Sketches also received rave reviews. The New York Independent praised it: “The wealth of curious humor, graphic picturings of hospital life, strong good sense, and thorough good-heartedness, took such entire possession of their readers.… Buy it; it is wonderfully enjoyable.”

  Much to Lu’s delight, her book was selling quickly. “I have the satisfaction of seeing my town folk buying, reading, laughing & crying over it wherever I go,” Lu recounted. “One rash youth bought eight copies at a blow & my dozen would have gone rapidly if I had not locked them up.” Lu gave away three of her personal copies, one of which went to her second-favorite patient, Sergeant Robert Bain (a.k.a. “Baby B.”).

  Baby B. was now wearing a false right arm, and he was “as jolly as ever” in his letters to Lu. He still wasn’t married, despite pouring his heart out to his “Dearest Jane” when he first arrived at the hospital. Instead, he was attending Oberlin College even though he’d rather grab his rifle and go back to his regiment for “another dig at those thundering rebs.”

  Lu also received a letter from one of the Union Hotel Hospital’s surgeons after he read Hospital Sketches:

  To say that I thank you for writing them from the bottom of my heart, would but poorly express the sentiment which dictates to me this minute, & to say that I feel humbled by the lesson which they teach me is to pay a tribute to them which I fancy will be rather unexpected.… These papers have revealed to me much that is elevated and pure, and refined in the soldiers’ character which I never before suspected. It is humiliating to me to think that I have been so long among them with such mental or moral obtuseness that I never discovered it for myself, and I thank you for showing me with how different eyes and ears you have striven among “the men” from the organs which I used on the very same cases and at the same time.

  Even though Lu was enjoying more success with her writing, she yearned to advance the cause of human rights. She considered traveling to Port Royal in South Carolina, a Union-held territory, where former slaves, or “contrabands,” were being educated and trained for jobs. Lu hoped to be a teacher there and to write about her experience in another series of sketches. Based on the success of Hospital Sketches, Mr. Fields expressed an interest in publishing them. “I should like of all things to go South & help the blacks as I am no longer allowed to nurse the whites,” Lu penned in a letter. “The former seems the greater work, & would be most interesting to me.”

  But, because Lu wasn’t married, she was turned down by Edward Philbrick, a fellow Bostonian and abolitionist who was a superintendent with the Port Royal Experiment. “Mr. Philbrick objected because I had no natural protector to go with me, so I was obliged to give that up.… I was much disappointed as I was willing to rough it anywhere for a time both for the sake of the help it would be to me in many ways, & the hope that I might be of use to others.”

  So, armed with her gold and ivory pen, Lu supported her causes through her storytelling. By November the trees were shedding their leaves, and Lu was no longer wearing a wig. Her father had harvested the apples from his beloved orchard and stored them in the cellar for winter along with his barrels of hard cider. Lu paid to have the roof shingled and repairs made to the house. “I proudly paid out of my story money,” Lu noted, then joked, “I call the old house ‘the sinking fund’ as it swallows up all I can earn.”

  Lu was trying to finish two novels, Moods and Success, a story about her own oppressive experiences as a woman trying to break into the workforce. Mr. Redpath and Mr. Fields were interested in both novels. Lu thought the world must be coming to an end as her dreams started to come true:

  If ever there was an astonished young woman it is myself, for things have gone on so swimmingly of late I don’t know who I am. A year ago I had no publisher & went begging with my wares.… There is a sudden hoist for a meek & lowly scribbler who was told to “stick to her teaching,” & never had a literary friend to lend a helping hand! Fifteen years of hard grubbing may be coming to something after all & I may yet “pay all the debts, fix the house, send May to Italy & keep the old folks cosy,” as I’ve said I would so long yet so hopelessly.

  When she wasn’t writing, Lu still found time to attend antislavery meetings and help with the Soldiers’ Aid. One year earlier, Lu had sent Wilkie James a care package for his “jollification & comfort.” This time, she was helping make an afghan for him.

  Wilkie had joined Colonel Robert Shaw’s Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, the first of two black regiments. Wilkie was an officer and had fought heroically in a deadly and unsuccessful charge on Fort Wagner in South Carolina. He was severely injured with near-fatal wounds in his legs and feet. But he was home now, recovering. “He now lies on a sofa & needs a pretty blanket to cover him,” Lu reasoned.

  While Wilkie was recovering on the couch, he read Hospital Sketches. Like his father, who had written to Lu after reading it, telling her it was “charming,” Wilkie also felt compelled to write Lu. “Your wonderful little book was received while suffering much from my wounds. Greatly am I indebted to you for it, it has whiled away several otherwise weary hours & I have enjoyed it exceedingly.”

  At the end of November, Lu had a birthday. It was only the year before that she had waited anxiously to turn thirty so she could enlist in the army. This year’s birthday proved to be a disappointment. “Was 31 on the 29th, only one or two presents & a dull day as usual.” Christmas proved to be an even bigger disappointment.

  Or so she thought. There was one gift, but she wouldn’t realize it until many years later when she came across a diary entry she had written in 1863 about Hospital Sketches. Now mature from all her life experiences, she wrote to her younger self: “Short-sighted, Louisa! Little did you dream that… you [were] to make your fortune a few years later. The ‘Sketches’ never made much money, but showed me ‘my style,’ & taking the hint I went where glory waited me.”

  Part Two

  WHERE GLORY WAITS

  Chapter 11

  UNFULFILLED DESTINY

  November 1865, La Tour de Peilz, Switzerland

  Seven months after the end of the Civil War

  ON A WINDY NOVEMBER MORNING IN THE SMALL SWISS village of La Tour de Peilz, Lu was in the dining room of the Pension Victoria, an elegant boardinghouse on the shores of Lake Geneva. Although she was eating breakfast by herself, Lu wasn’t traveling thro
ugh Europe alone. About three months ago, in July, William Weld, a shipping, railroad, and real estate tycoon, had hired Lu to travel with his invalid daughter, Anna, as her companion.

  “Hearing that I was something of a nurse & wanted to travel [he] proposed my going.… I agreed though I had my doubts, but every one said ‘Go,’ so after a week of work & worry I did,” Lu recorded in her journal.

  But Lu was still having second thoughts about the trip. “I missed my freedom & grew very tired of the daily worry which I had to go through,” Lu revealed.

  Thirty-year-old Anna Weld wasn’t an easy patient to take care of, and it wasn’t clear what exactly ailed her, but the doctors in Europe were trying to cure her. Lu and Anna had spent the summer in Schwalbach, a German town famous for its bubbling mineral water, some of which tasted like wine. Anna had been under the care of Dr. Adolph Genth, the author of The Iron Waters of Schwalbach. Lu was familiar with the water cure. Her mother, Abba, had left the family and worked briefly in Maine as the matron of a water cure spa and believed in its effectiveness. It was a very popular treatment in New England and went hand-in-hand with developing women’s rights.

  Many water cure spas actively recruited female workers and doctors (of which there weren’t many), so their female patients would feel comfortable receiving treatment, especially relating to pregnancy, menstruation, and chronic ailments that male doctors often dismissed as “female complaints.” The cure involved wrapping the patient in a wet sheet for a few hours so she would sweat, then she was plunged into cold water. The patient was also prescribed long walks, fresh air, rest, bathing, and eight glasses of water a day.