My love and thanks to my husband, Todd, who always tells me, “You can do it!”
PRAISE FOR
LOUISA ON THE FRONT LINES
“Louisa on the Front Lines is a lively account of a critical moment in Alcott’s life, her time working as a nurse in the Civil War—a moment that reverberates, sometimes in surprising ways, in her most beloved work.”
—Louisa Thomas, Author of Louisa: The Extraordinary Life of Mrs. Adams
“Louisa on the Front Lines tells the story of a powerful period in Louisa May Alcott’s life—her brief occupation as a Civil War nurse. Samantha Seiple, with her lively, well-researched narrative, captures Alcott at a pivotal time in the history of our country and in her own career as a young writer. Readers will discover the story both engaging and informative. Alcott herself would have marveled at how Seiple’s biographical and historical account reads like a novel!”
—Daniel Shealy, UNC Professor of English and Editor of the Journals of Louisa May Alcott
“Louisa on the Front Lines illuminates the working life of a wartime nurse—the stench, the rot, the supply shortages, the lack of respect shown nurses by male bureaucrats and doctors, the sheer horror of trying to care for young men whose bodies were mangled beyond repair. Strong and determined, Louisa May Alcott was tireless and loving as she tried to heal her patients or to be at their sides with comfort when they died. Not coincidentally, her experiences helped propel her to financial success as one of America’s first professional women writers. Bravo to Samantha Seiple for her sensitive portrayal of the difficulties and the successes of Civil War nurses, as seen through the clear eyes of Louisa May Alcott.”
—Dr. Patricia Brady, Historian and Biographer
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alcott, Abigail May. My Heart Is Boundless: Writings of Abigail May Alcott, Louisa’s Mother. Edited by Eve LaPlante. New York: Free Press, 2012.
Alcott, Amos Bronson. Amos Bronson Alcott Papers. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
. The Journals of Amos Bronson Alcott. Edited by Odell Shepard. Boston: Little, Brown, 1938.
. The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott. Edited by Richard L. Herrnstadt. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1969.
Alcott, Louisa May. Flower Fables. Boston: George W. Briggs, 1854. Accessed January 23, 2018. https://archive.org/details/flowerfables00alcoiala.
. Hospital Sketches. Boston: James Redpath, 1863. Accessed January 23, 2018. https://archive.org/details/hospitalsketches00alcorich.
. The Journals of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy. Introduction by Madeleine B. Stern. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997.
. Little Women. Edited by Anne Hiebert Alton. Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001.
. Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Illustrations by May Alcott. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869. Accessed January 28, 2018. https://archive.org/details/littlewomenormeg01alco.
. Little Women, or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy. Part Second. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869. Accessed January 28, 2018. https://archive.org/details/littlewomen00alco_9.
. Louisa May Alcott, Her Life, Letters, and Journals. Edited by Ednah D. Cheney. Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 1889.
. Louisa May Alcott Papers. Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.
. Moods: A Novel. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1881. Accessed January 23, 2018. https://archive.org/details/moodsnovel1882alco.
. The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott. Edited by Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy. Introduction by Madeleine B. Stern. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995.
. The Sketches of Louisa May Alcott. Introduction by Gregory Eiselein. New York: Ironweed Press, 2001.
. Work: A Story of Experience. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873. [Working title was Success.] Accessed January 23, 2018. https://archive.org/details/workstoryofexper1873alco.
Anthony, Katharine. Louisa May Alcott. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938.
Barton, Cynthia H. Transcendental Wife: The Life of Abigail May Alcott. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1996.
Brooks, Noah. Mr. Lincoln’s Washington: Selections from the Writings of Noah Brooks, Civil War Correspondent. Edited by P. J. Staudenraus. South Brunswick, NJ: Thomas Yoseloff, 1967.
. Washington in Lincoln’s Time. New York: Century, 1896.
Dyer, J. Franklin. The Journal of a Civil War Surgeon. Edited by Michael B. Chesson. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003.
Eiselein, Gregory, and Anne K. Phillips, eds. The Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia. Foreword by Madeleine B. Stern. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Ellis, John B. The Sights and Secrets of the National Capital: A Work Descriptive of Washington City in All Its Various Phases. New York: Trow & Smith, 1869.
Emerson, Ellen Tucker. The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson. Vol. 1. Edited by Edith E. W. Gregg. Foreword by Gay Wilson Allen. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982.
Gowing, Clara. The Alcotts as I Knew Them. Boston: C. M. Clarke, 1909.
Harper, Judith E. Women During the Civil War: An Encyclopedia. Foreword by Elizabeth D. Leonard. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Hawthorne, Julian. The Memoirs of Julian Hawthorne. Edited by Edith Garrigues Hawthorne. New York: Macmillan, 1938.
. Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife: A Biography. Vol. 2. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1884.
Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne Collection of Papers. New York Public Library Archives and Manuscripts.
Hirschhorn, Norbert, and Ian A. Greaves. “Louisa May Alcott: Her Mysterious Illness.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 50, no. 2 (Spring 2007): 243–259.
Lothrop, Margaret M. The Wayside: Home of Authors. New York: American Book, 1968.
Low, Sarah. Sarah Low Papers. New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord, NH.
Matteson, John. Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
. “Finding Private Suhre: On the Trail of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Prince of Patients.’” New England Quarterly 83 (2015): 104–125. Accessed December 15, 2016. doi: 10.1162/TNEQ_a_oo437.
Morrow, Honoré Willsie. The Father of Little Women. Boston: Little, Brown, 1927.
Nightingale, Florence. Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not. Foreword by Virginia M. Dunbar. Preface by Margaret B. Dolan. New York: Dover, 1969.
Reisen, Harriet. Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women. New York: Picador, 2009.
Ropes, Hannah Anderson. Civil War Nurse: The Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes. Edited with an introduction and commentary by John R. Brumgardt. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980.
Scudder, Townsend. Concord: American Town. Boston: Little, Brown, 1947.
Shealy, Daniel, ed. Alcott in Her Own Time. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005.
Shepard, Odell. Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott. Boston: Little, Brown, 1937.
Stern, Madeleine B. Critical Essays on Louisa May Alcott. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984.
. Louisa May Alcott: A Biography. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996.
. “Louisa M. Alcott: Civil War Nurse.” Americana 37 (1943): 296–325.
Stevenson, Hannah. Curtis-Stevenson Family Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA.
Ticknor, Caroline. May Alcott: A Memoir. Boston: Little, Brown, 1928.
Wilbur, C. Keith. Civil War Medicine 1861–1865. Guilford, CT: Globe Pequot Press, 1998.
Woodward, Joseph Janvier. The Hospital Steward’s Manual: For the Instruction of Hospital Stewards, Ward-Masters, and Attendants, in Their Several Duties. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1863.
SOURCE NOTES
Introduction: The Heroine’s Journey
“My life is one of daily protest”: Abigail May Alcott, April 28, 1851, My Heart Is Boundless: Writings of Abigail May Alcott, Louisa’s Mother, ed. Eve LaPlante (New York: Free Press, 2012), 181.
“radical manifesto”: Alison Lurie,
“She Had It All,” New York Review of Books 42, no. 4 (March 2, 1995): 5.
Chapter 1: Wayward Daughter
“poor as rats”: Louisa May Alcott, [Notes and Memoranda, 1851], The Journals of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Athens: University of Georgia Press), 65. [Hereafter LMA, The Journals.]
“We are used to hard times”: Louisa May Alcott, December 1860, LMA, The Journals, 101.
“A most uncommon fit of generosity”: Ibid., 103.
“more patch and tear than gown”: Ibid.
“We supplied him with the means”: Bronson Alcott, February 9, 1847, The Journals of Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard (Boston: Little, Brown, 1938), 190.
“Glad I have lived to see”: LMA, The Journals, 95.
“I’m a better patriot”: Ibid., 101.
“If I look in my glass”: Ibid., 61.
“I went to a barber”: Maria S. Porter, “Recollections of Louisa May Alcott,” New England Magazine 6, no. 1 (March 1892): 5–6.
“That was not the first time”: Ibid., 6.
“Philosophers are always poor”: LMA, The Journals, 84.
“the most transcendental of the Transcendentalists”: Allen Johnson, ed., Dictionary of American Biography (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1928), 139.
“a fanatic in belief”: Clara Gowing, The Alcotts as I Knew Them (Boston: C. M. Clark, 1909), 1.
“trailing clouds of glory”: Harriet Reisen, Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind “Little Women” (New York: Picador, 2009), 20. From William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.”
“Father, mother, sister, objects”: Honoré Willsie Morrow, The Father of Little Women (Boston: Little, Brown, 1927), 157.
“wild exuberance”: Reisen, Louisa May Alcott, 33.
“I do not believe in”: Morrow, The Father of Little Women, 152.
“She listened to what”: Ibid.
“She only looks toward”: Ibid., 155.
“the worst child ever known”: Louisa May Alcott, Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1872), 6.
“Ever your loving demon”: John Matteson, “Little Woman: The Devilish, Dutiful Daughter Louisa May Alcott,” Humanities 30, no. 6 (November/December 2009), accessed November 2016, https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2009/novemberdecember/feature/little-woman.
“No animal substances”: Gowing, The Alcotts as I Knew Them, 60–61.
“Circumstances most cruelly drive”: Abba May Alcott, November 29, 1842, The Journals of Bronson Alcott, 148.
“More people coming to live with us”: Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals, ed. Ednah Dow Cheney (Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 1889), 43–44.
“He was very strict”: Gowing, The Alcotts as I Knew Them, 61–62.
“I was very unhappy”: Alcott, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals, 39.
“The arrangements here [at Fruitlands]”: Reisen, Louisa May Alcott, 104.
“I do not allow myself”: Ibid., 100.
“No one will employ him”: Riesen, Ibid., 62.
“Don’t distress yourself”: John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 5.
“He is moderate, I am impetuous”: Reisen, Louisa May Alcott, 17.
“Wife, children, and friends are less”: Abba Alcott, April 1, 1842, The Journals of Bronson Alcott, 141.
“It is this dependence on others”: Abigail May Alcott, April 4, 1841, My Heart Is Boundless, 88.
“I have no accomplishments”: Ibid.
“She always did what came”: LMA, The Journals, 67.
“a shelter for lost girls”: Ibid.
“It was not fit work”: Ibid.
“My girls shall have trades”: Abigail May Alcott, My Heart Is Boundless, 88.
“To the great dismay of the neighbors’ hens”: Alcott, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals, 30.
“I have made a plan”: Ibid., 48.
“be a help and a comfort”: Ibid.
“My quick tongue is always”: LMA, The Journals, 61–62.
“I will do something”: Daniel Shealy, ed., Alcott in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 37.
“My book came out”: Alcott, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals, 80.
“After ten years of hard climbing”: Ibid., 121.
“I’d rather be a free spinster”: Ibid., 122.
“I often think what a hard life”: Ibid., 62.
“I corked up my inkstand”: Ibid., 124.
“It seems to me”: Morrow, The Father of Little Women, 271.
“A hard thing to hear”: Alcott, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals, 96.
“My dear Beth [Lizzie] died”: Ibid., 97.
“She is well at last”: Louisa May Alcott to Eliza Wells, March 19, 1858, The Selected Letters of Louisa May Alcott, ed. Joel Myerson and Daniel Shealy (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 32. [Hereafter LMA, Letters.]
“Wonder if I ought not be a nurse”: Alcott, Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals, 103.
Chapter 2: Stitches
“The Confederate Traitors”: “The New York Press upon the War,” Evening Star, April 17, 1861, 1.
“The call for troops”: Ibid.
“Concord had raised $4,000”: Ellen Emerson to Edward Emerson, April 19, 1861, The Letters of Ellen Tucker Emerson, 2 vols., ed. Edith E. W. Gregg (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1982), 1:242.
“kindled a patriotic rage”: “The New York Press upon the War,” 1.
“I long to be a man”: LMA, The Journals, 105.
“A busy time getting them ready”: Ibid.
“At the station the scene”: Ibid.
“John Brown’s daughters came to board”: Ibid.
“They are good for me I’ve no doubt”: Louisa May Alcott to Alfred Whitman, June 22, 1862, LMA, Letters, 79.
“I used to think that if Mr. Alcott’s”: Shealy, Alcott in Her Own Time, 8.
“Ah, he is too blue”: Ibid., 11.
“sewing violently”: Louisa May Alcott to Alfred Whitman, May 19, 1861, LMA, Letters, 64.
“She sent for me to make”: LMA, The Journals, 105.
“The great parcel”: Ibid.
“Spent our May-day”: Ibid.
“Wrote, read, sewed”: Ibid., 106.
“stick to your teaching”: Ibid., 109.
“brainy, selfish, unladylike”: Judith E. Harper, Women During the Civil War: An Encyclopedia (New York: Routledge, 2004), 275–277.
“Being willful, I said, ‘I won’t’”: LMA, The Journals, 109.
“I will write ‘great guns’”: Louisa May Alcott to Alfred Whitman, November 12, 1861, LMA, Letters, 72.
“Last week was a busy, anxious time”: Louisa May Alcott to the Alcott family, October 1858, LMA, Letters, 34.
“Miss Peabody has opened a ‘Kinder Garten’”: Louisa May Alcott to Alfred Whitman, November 12, 1862, LMA, Letters, 70.
“Very tired of this wandering life”: LMA, The Journals, 108.
“I gave it up, as I could do”: Ibid., 109.
“Though my tales are silly”: Ibid.
“They are easier to ‘compoze’”: Louisa May Alcott to Alfred Whitman, June 22, 1862, LMA, Letters, 79.
“A dozen [stories] a month were easily turned”: James Parton, Noted Women of Europe and America: Authors, Artists, Reformers, and Heroines. Queens, Princesses, and Women of Society. Women Eccentric and Peculiar (Hartford, CT: Phoenix, 1883), 84.
“Louisa and her sister Annie”: Shealy, Alcott in Her Own Time, 82–83.
“a great taste for acting”: Ibid., 91.
“Sewing Bees and Lint Picks ‘our boys’”: LMA, The Journals, 109.
“Our women appear to have become almost wild�
�: “Correspondence. Duties of the Army Surgeon.—Females Not Suitable for Nurses,” American Medical Times 3 (1861): 30.
“a monument of weak enthusiasts”: Michael A. Flannery, Civil War Pharmacy: A History of Drugs, Drug Supply and Provision, and Therapeutics for the Union and Confederacy (New York: Pharmaceutical Products Press, 2004), 18.
“Miss Dix has been entrusted”: William Grace, The Army Surgeon’s Manual: For the Use of Medical Officers, Cadets, Chaplains, and Hospital Stewards (New York: Bailliere Brothers, 1864), 101.
“in her ministerings to the afflicted”: “The United States General Hospital, Georgetown, D.C.,” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, July 6, 1861, 119.
“habits of neatness, order, sobriety”: Rosamond Lamb, “A Great Woman of America: Dorothea Lynde Dix” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Bostonian Society, Boston, Massachusetts, January 19, 1937).
“I want new experiences”: LMA, The Journals, 110.
Chapter 3: A Soldier’s Story
“a lady of culture”: Portrait and Biographical Record of Ford County, Illinois, Containing Biographical Sketches of Prominent and Representative Citizens, Together with Biographies of All the Governors of the State and of the Presidents of the United States (Chicago: Lake City, 1892), 391.
“I told him if he needed any more”: John F. Suhre, “My Dear Sister,” October 6, 1862, Shure [sic] Letters, US Army Heritage and Education Center, Carlisle, PA. Also published in its entirety in John Matteson, “Finding Private Suhre: On the Trail of Louisa May Alcott’s ‘Prince of Patients,’” New England Quarterly 83 (2015): 115. doi: 10.1162/TNEQ_a_oo437.
“The dead are strewn so thickly”: Frank Moore, ed., The Civil War in Song and Story: 1860–1865 (New York: Peter Fenelon Collier, 1865), 473.
“In my feeble estimation”: “Clara Barton at Antietam,” National Park Service, last modified February 28, 2017, https://www.nps.gov/anti/learn/historyculture/clarabarton.htm.
“I have, as you are aware, thought a great deal”: Salmon P. Chase, Diary and Correspondence of Salmon P. Chase (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1903), 87–88.
“I return thanks to our soldiers”: “The President at Frederick, Maryland,” Evening Star, October 6, 1862, 1, http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045462/1862-10-06/ed-1/seq-1/.
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