Although Abba was more directly concerned with more localized injustice than with the national calamity of slavery, she too was out of patience with the world. She was working to exhaustion at her intelligence office, and her lonely struggles to aid the downtrodden were making her more combative. The same month that Thomas Sims went back to Georgia, Abba wrote to her brother Sam, “My life is one of daily protest against the oppressions and abuses of Society.” The wage slavery that awaited the poor immigrants who flocked to Boston struck her as a “whole system of servitude” whose consequences were hardly better than southern slavery.42 The men and women she had met whose relentless toil could not earn a living wage had filled her with pity and rage:
Incompetent wages for labor performed, is the cruel tyranny of capitalist power over the laborers’ necessities. The capitalist speculates on their bones and sinews. Will not this cause Poverty—Crime—Despair?…Is it not inhuman to tax a man’s strength to the uttermost[?]43
Louisa proudly realized that her mother “always did what came to her in the way of duty and charity, and let pride, taste, and comfort suffer for love’s sake.”44 In her crusade, Abba collected sympathetic cases like stray kittens. Since she was running her service from the family’s apartment, the line between work and home inevitably blurred, and as Louisa recollected, the family’s meager rooms in High Street became “a shelter for lost girls, abused wives, friendless children, and weak or wicked men.” She continued, “Father and Mother had no money to give, but gave them time, sympathy, help; and if blessings would make them rich, they would be millionaires. This is practical Christianity.”45
In April 1852 a terrible reminder came of the Alcott family’s emotional instability. On the twenty-fourth, Bronson’s thirty-two-year-old brother Junius took his mother’s hand and told her he was going to Boston. Instead, he went with his brother Ambrose to Couch and Alcotts, a nearby bolt and lathe factory that he and Ambrose had been managing.46 Then, evidently before Ambrose could react, Junius did something unthinkable. In her journal, in plain, semiliterate phrasings, Bronson’s mother described what happened next. Junius “went Streat into the wheel and was gon the nuse came that he was dead…but I bore it with reconcelation.”47 In his journal Bronson eulogized his favorite brother as a man of “tenderest sensibilities and…mystic mind.”48 He never wrote of him again. Louisa’s surviving writings contain no mention at all of the death of the uncle for whom her father had felt such concern and had so often attempted to take under his own roof. One can hardly doubt, however, that the death cast a long shadow over the Alcotts.
Louisa’s reactions can only be guessed. Her Uncle Junius, like her father, had experienced episodes of mystical awareness, coupled with behavior sufficiently erratic to raise worries among his extended family. The year of Junius’s death, Louisa listed her favorite books in her journal. Among them was one that she prized especially highly, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Both in her reading and in her lived experience, then, she was led to consider the plight of families cursed by hereditary insanity. Though no clear evidence exists to prove the point, it would be extraordinary if Louisa never reflected on the fate of her uncle, the trials of her father, and the latent propensities that might have been passed into her own blood. Her most significant writings for adults, the works into which she was to pour the greatest portion of her true self, were to return frequently to the specters of depression, inherited madness, and suicide.
Fortunately, not all the news that spring was so terrible. Shortly before Junius’s death, there had come a much-needed modicum of financial relief. Nathaniel Hawthorne, having just completed a period of breathtaking productivity that had seen him produce The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables, and The Blithedale Romance in only three years, had decided to return to Concord after a seven-year absence. His thoughts turned to the old Alcott home at Hillside, which the family still had not succeeded in selling. Despite Bronson’s sporadic efforts to maintain it, the house had fallen into some disrepair, and withered vines now trailed where Bronson had once cultivated orderly and verdant bowers. However, Hawthorne knew a good acquisition when he saw one. He made an offer of fifteen hundred dollars.
Had he offered twice as much, Hawthorne would still have gotten a reasonable bargain. Nonetheless, fifteen hundred dollars was approximately what Bronson could expect to earn in ten years of conversing, so he accepted the novelist’s terms: a $750 down payment, with the balance to be paid in a year’s time. The monies were used to create a five-hundred-dollar trust for Bronson and a one-thousand-dollar trust for Abba. A newspaper called the Semi-Weekly Eagle caught wind of Hawthorne’s purchase of the home. However, Alcott had lately been so removed from the public eye that the reporter thought he was probably dead. The Eagle was only able to speculate as follows: “If he is in heaven, he is certainly cutting up some shine or other there; and if in the antipodes of heaven, it is equally certain that he is giving a distinguished personage, supposed to have much to do with the affairs of the world, a vast deal of trouble.”49
On the strength of this unexpected income, the Alcotts were at last able to secure better lodgings. They rented a four-story brick house at 20 Pinckney Street in Beacon Hill, then as now a stylish sector of the city. Despite the outward move upward, however, severing his tie with Concord exacted a cost from Bronson. Both psychologically and practically, the sale of Hillside divided him further from the place he called “classic land,” the home of “the Americans par excellence.” While living in Boston in 1850, he had written of Concord, “’Tis at heart my own home. I must draw me closer to its bosom and my friends one day, for the cities cannot detain me long.”50 Now it seemed as if his detention would last indefinitely.
Ensconced in a more congenial dwelling, Bronson experienced a renewed surge of ambition. During the winter of 1852–53, he mounted one of his busiest seasons of conversations, some of them sponsored by a group of Harvard Divinity School students, who asked him to lead a series of discussions on “Modern Life.” The conversations were also attended by a tall undergraduate named Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, who was sufficiently taken with Alcott’s performance that he sought and obtained an invitation to dine with the Alcott family. Sanborn quickly became one of Alcott’s closest associates. He served at times as Alcott’s unofficial secretary, conversing with him, recording his words, and helping him to compose and edit his writings.
In the fall of 1853, heeding a suggestion from Emerson, Alcott chose for the first time to take his conversations beyond the Northeast. He planned a tour that took him west through Syracuse, Rochester, Buffalo, Cincinnati, and Cleveland—what was then still considered the “West.” Travel was a tonic for Bronson. The letters he wrote home from these western journeys, which became a habit with him in ensuing years, were the missives of a man who found himself “well, happy, and flourishing.”51 His audiences greeted him as an emissary of a distant culture, their personal link to the world of Emerson, Garrison, and Parker. Among dinner parties, teas, and of course conversations, his calendar was almost always full. Pleased to receive the attentions of “very select, sensible people,” he suddenly felt important and admired, more so, it seems, than at any time since his trip to England.52 “Nothing,” he wrote to Abba, “can exceed the kindness and respect shown alike to the person and doctrines of your friend, here in this hospitable West.”53 The renewed sense of himself that he gained on this journey marked the beginning of his real recovery from his years of privation and ineffectuality. His confidence was in some measure rekindled. He returned to Boston a stronger man.
This initial tour of the West gave rise to one of the most endearing stories in Alcott family lore. Louisa told her journal that her father came home in February, a “half-frozen wanderer…hungry, tired, cold, and disappointed, but smiling gravely and as serene as ever.” Abba and the girls fed and warmed him, not quite daring to ask whether he had earned any money. Alcott regaled the family with pleasant tales of his travels but skirted the subject
of money until Abby May at last demanded, “Well, did people pay you?” The story goes that Alcott then took a single dollar bill from his pocketbook and said with a queer smile, “Only that! My overcoat was stolen, and I had to buy a shawl. Many promises were not kept, and travelling is costly, but I have opened the way, and another year shall do better.” As the sisters fought back their tears, Abba kissed her husband, saying, “I call that doing very well. Since you are safely home, dear, we don’t ask anything more.” Louisa writes that she and Anna took the scene as “a little lesson in real love” that neither ever forgot.54 The story is often cited, not only as an instance of Abba’s invincible patience and love, but also of Bronson’s utter haplessness as a provider.
But the story, or much of it in any event, is only a story. Some of the details contradict the historic record. Bronson returned home in January, not February, and Anna was not waiting to greet him; rather, it appears that she met him in Syracuse, where she was teaching and living with Abba’s brother Samuel, and she joined him for the last leg of his trip home. By far the most important discrepancy, however, has to do with the financial success of Bronson’s tour. Far from having only a dollar to show for his three months’ absence, Bronson had not only covered the expenses of the journey, but his letters reflect that he had sent home at least $180 from the road.55 In a letter that he sent Abba on his way home, he speculated that his earnings, along with sums from other sources, might be enough to “pay all debts.” While he had wished to do still better, he found that his travels had not been “without hopeful significance.”56 True, he was not paying all the bills, but he was paying more than Louisa indicated.
In May 1854, an African American named Anthony Burns absorbed the attention of the city. On May 24 Burns, a former slave, was taken captive on suspicion of being a fugitive from his former owner and was confined in the courthouse. It seemed a foregone conclusion that Edward Loring, the United States commissioner assigned to the case, would find in favor of Burns’s alleged owner. If Burns were freed, it would have to be by extralegal means. To date, Thomas Sims had been the only fugitive slave returned from Boston under the 1850 law. Now, three years later, the city’s antislavery Vigilance Committee, to which Bronson still belonged, was determined that Burns would not share Sims’s fate. The day after Burns was taken, before leaving town to give a conversation in Worcester, Bronson attended a hastily convened meeting of the committee. When he boarded the westbound train, Bronson carried with him a letter from Samuel May to their mutual friend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, urging him to come to Boston and to notify as many other potential supporters as he could. That night, Alcott and Higginson stayed up long into the night to discuss Burns’s rescue. Early the next morning, the twenty-sixth, they were on the train back to Boston, resolved to do what they could to restore Burns to freedom.
Their best opportunity came that evening. Higginson and another Burns ally, Martin Stowell, hastily concocted a plan to storm the courthouse where Burns was being held and carry him to freedom. A mass rally was scheduled for that evening at Faneuil Hall, where Theodore Parker and the famous abolitionist Wendell Phillips were to deliver speeches. Higginson and Stowell arranged for a man to cry out from the gallery, announcing that a mob of blacks was already attacking the courthouse. In fact, there was no such mob; the plan was to incite the crowd at Faneuil Hall to rush en masse to the courthouse, where they might be exhorted to charge the building and rescue Burns.
There was no time, however, to properly orchestrate the plot. When approximately five hundred men, confused and leaderless, made their way from the meeting to the courthouse, there was no way to organize them into an effective force. Some fell on the building with uncontrolled fury, attacking with whatever makeshift weapons lay handy. Inside the courthouse, Chief Justice Shaw was instructing a jury in a murder trial when suddenly the courtroom windows were shattered by a hail of bricks and cobblestones. Other members of the mob produced pistols and fired wildly into the building, fortunately hitting no one. Meanwhile, a small party that included Higginson had forced open the western door with an improvised battering ram, and they pressed forward into the anteroom. A detachment of officers armed with clubs awaited them. One of them struck Higginson in the face, splitting open his chin. A knife flashed. One of the courthouse defenders, an Irish-born truckman named James Batchelder, cried out, “I am stabbed!” and fell back on the carpet, fatally wounded. But the mob that Higginson expected to be at his back did not move. Driven back outside, he harangued them to no avail. At least two of his supporters, Stowell and a free black named Lewis Hayden, fired shots to cover Higginson’s retreat. Moments later Higginson was across the street from the courthouse, tending his wound, when Bronson Alcott appeared at his side. Alcott had been at the Faneuil Hall meeting. Still, having strolled to the courthouse at a leisurely pace, he arrived just as word of the stabbing of Batchelder had begun to circulate. “Why are we not within?” he asked Higginson. “Because these people will not stand by us,” came the reply. The police then appeared, and the two men were separated.
Then came an unforgettable moment of quiet courage. Twenty years later, recalling the scene outside the courthouse, Bronson remembered thinking that the wrong man on the wrong side had been killed. It was Burns’s friends who most needed a martyr, not his captors. Bronson felt “an obscure instinct within me that to die was about the best use that could be made of a freeman at that crisis…. It seemed the moment for a sacrifice to be laid on the altar for the rights of freemen and the salvation of the Republic.” He felt it would be a badge of shame for him to return to his house “erect and breathing…as I had left it.”57 Carrying only his walking stick, Bronson calmly turned and walked alone toward the courthouse door. At any moment, an anxious guard inside the building might have shot him dead. Yet Alcott looked utterly serene as he climbed the courthouse steps. He walked to the entrance, paused to consider the discarded beam of timber that Higginson had used to breach the door, and nonchalantly strode inside. Higginson swore that, at that moment, he heard a shot fired inside the building, but Alcott was unperturbed. Standing on the very spot where Batchelder had fallen, he gazed for a moment up the staircase that led to Burns’s cell. The stairs were lined with marshals, pistols and drawn swords at the ready. Having already given the defenders of the building ample cause to strike him down, Alcott decided that further provocation was pointless. Slowly, still betraying no sign of fear, he turned and left the building, never varying his measured pace. “Under the circumstances,” Higginson wrote, “neither Plato nor Pythagoras could have done the thing better, and all minor criticisms of our minor sage appear trivial when one thinks of him as he appeared that night.”58
The following day, a rumor circulated through Boston that a proslavery mob was preparing to sack Wendell Phillips’s home after nightfall. After dark, Bronson, Samuel May, and three other committee members took up defensive positions in the house, ready to protect both the property and the terrified Mrs. Phillips.59 Like the other men, Bronson was armed with a pistol. In his hatred of slavery and cowardice, he was prepared to do to a rioter what he would have refused to do to a mosquito. Bronson Alcott, a quintessential man of peace, was never braver than when he was in the greatest peril.
The moment inside the courthouse might have served as an emblem of much of Bronson Alcott’s career: admirably brave, thoroughly right-minded, and ultimately ineffectual in achieving his intentions. The Vigilance Committee failed to rescue Burns. Tried without a jury and judged by a man who, by law, received an extra five dollars for ruling against him, Anthony Burns was found to be a fugitive and was sent to Virginia.60 One week to the day after the botched storming of the courthouse, as many as fifty thousand onlookers lined the streets of Boston to watch as a heavily armed guard led Burns to the waiting ship. Windows along the route were festooned in black. Abba’s uncle Samuel, still a fighting May at the age of seventy-eight, hung two American flags, upside down, from his windows. Bronson and Louisa watched as Burns
was escorted to the wharf; they were so close to the captive that Louisa was able to discern the brand on his cheek.61 She evidently remembered that mark years later when she created Robert Dane, the ex-slave with a disfigured face in her story “My Contraband.”
Until that time, Bronson had declined even to vote in an election. The Burns affair changed his mind. He knew that more than voting was needed to change America. Nevertheless, from now on, he vowed, “I must see to it that my part is done hereafter to give us a Boston, a Mayor, a Governor, and a President—if indeed a single suffrage, or many, can mend matters essentially. So I shall vote.”62 Actually, however, he took his time in giving effect to his resolution. He found no state or presidential candidate worthy of his support until 1860, when he finally cast a ballot for another tall, enigmatic son of a poor farmer.
If the Burns trial was cause for despondency, the summer brought a reason to celebrate. On August 9, the day of its publication, Thoreau dined with Alcott and presented him with a copy of Walden. Alcott accepted the book gratefully and spent the next four days reading and rereading it. He also dusted off his copy of the book Thoreau had written while living by the pond, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, convinced that, whether or not his friend’s work was immediately popular, the passing years would “publish the author’s surpassing merits.”63 It must have pleased Bronson to see Walden enjoy a modest success, selling more than seventeen hundred of its initial edition of two thousand copies by the end of 1854. He took pleasure not only in Thoreau’s philosophy and prose, but also the latter’s reminiscences of the days and evenings the two had spent together, trading thoughts, “revising mythology, rounding a fable here and there, and building castles in the air.” Alcott, Thoreau said, had “enhanced the beauty of the landscape.”64
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