I had just come up from the border where I had seen the actual war; the filthy spewings of it; the political jobbery…the malignant personal hatreds wearing patriotic masks, and glutted by burning homes and outraged women…. War may be an armed angel with a mission, but she has the personal habits of the slums.
During the Civil War, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne was the Alcotts’ remote and skittish next-door neighbor. Bronson found “something of strangeness even in his cherished intimacies.”
(Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association)
Hawthorne, according to Davis, wore a look of mockery as he sat backward astride a chair, listening to Alcott’s monologue. At last, he said gravely, “We cannot see this thing at so long a range,” and he quietly conducted the party into the dining room.
Earlier in the day, Hawthorne had warned Davis about Alcott’s obsession with vegetarianism. “You may begin at Plato or the day’s news,” Hawthorne told his guest, “and he will come around to pears. He is now convinced…that pears exercise a more direct and ennobling influence on us than any other vegetable or fruit.” By the end of the meal, Alcott did indeed announce the spiritual influence of pears, and Hawthorne laughed aloud to see his prediction come true.”35 Yet although Davis thought him ridiculous, Alcott remained more sensitive to the sufferings of war than she knew. When he read the accounts of Antietam in September, the old feelings of helplessness and pity came back. He wrote, “What can one do but read the news and weep at our victories even?”36
For Louisa, a supreme test of confidence was drawing near. It was hastened, perhaps, by the news that Anna and John were expecting their first child, another sign that time was passing. “At twenty-five,” Louisa would later write in Little Women, “girls begin to talk about being old maids, but secretly resolve that they never will; at thirty, they say nothing about it, but quietly accept the fact.”37 Louisa was to turn thirty on November 29, 1862. She had no interest in quietly accepting the fact. The notation in her journal for that month, “Thirty years old. Decide to go to Washington as a nurse if I could find a place,” illustrates that the birthday and her redoubled desire to break out of old patterns were no coincidence. Uninterested in enlisting dewy-eyed young women heeding the call of romance instead of duty, Dorothea Dix, the head of the Union’s nursing corps, had publicly announced that she would consider no applicants under thirty. Louisa had heard good reports of the facilities at the Armory Square Hospital in Washington. She hoped to rely on Hannah Stevenson, who had found Louisa a job in the aftermath of the latter’s brush with suicide and who wielded some influence with the necessary authorities. Louisa sent in her name and, as she awaited a reply, made ready for a great change.
Louisa received her orders on the morning of December 11. She had not been assigned to the Armory Square but to a less desirable institution in Georgetown known as the Union Hotel Hospital, a place Louisa learned to refer to in jest as “The Hurly-Burly House.” Louisa was to report for duty as soon as possible, and the rest of that Thursday was spent in a whirl of activity. Abba, Anna, and May, back from Syracuse, all helped to stuff Louisa’s traveling bag with all there was of home that such a bag could carry. Sophia Hawthorne looked in to see whether she could help. There were too many hands for the necessary tasks. Someone remembered to make tea but, in the confusion, put in salt instead of sugar.38 Bronson was away that day making school visits; for all the documents show, he and Louisa may not even have had a chance to say good-bye. Proud as he was of his daughter’s decision, he also knew that she was going to a dangerous post; he told someone that he was sending his only son to war.39 Louisa was equally aware that she might never see the family again. She maintained a brave face until the very last, but when it was time to go, she began to cry. Everyone broke down. Already knowing the answer, she asked her mother as she held her close, “Shall I stay?” “No, go! and the Lord be with you,” was the reply.40 As Louisa turned to catch a last glimpse of Orchard House, she saw her mother waving a handkerchief. May, along with Julian Hawthorne, escorted Louisa to the Concord train station.41 Louisa rode to Boston, where she spent one last civilian night with her cousin Lizzie Wells.
Friday was, if possible, more frantic than Thursday had been. Always eager to economize, Louisa scoured Boston to obtain the free rail pass to which her military appointment entitled her. Each official referred her to another, usually in some building on the side of town from which she had just come. She crossed and recrossed the city, clashing with languid and indifferent bureaucrats seemingly intent on denying her the essential documents.42 She got the last of her papers in order, just in time to join Anna and her husband for a hasty farewell dinner. The couple accompanied Louisa to the station so that theirs might be the last in a series of numbing good-byes.
The sun in that dark season had already faded as Louisa sank into her seat on the train. Abruptly, after two days of furious bustle, hours of empty time lay ahead of her—time to check over her tickets, put them in a safe place, then lose and rediscover them again; time to count the small fund some family friends had given her to buy necessities for herself and modest gifts for her patients. She had time to gaze out onto the darkening landscape as city gave way to open fields. Feeling lonely, she let her seatmate draw her into a long conversation about “the war, the weather, music, Carlyle, skating, genius, hoops, and the immortality of the soul.”43 Any topic was fine as long as it kept away the blues.
The train did not take Louisa directly to Washington. In New London, Connecticut, she transferred to a steamship, which carried her through the night to New Jersey. A rank novice at seafaring, she spent a wide-eyed night imagining that the boat was about to sink and wondering how she would save herself if it did. When, to her mild astonishment, the boat landed safely in Jersey City, she made her way to the train for Washington. Although the places through which she passed were unknown to her, they evoked clear emotions. As the train puffed its way through Philadelphia, Louisa regretted that she did not have time to stop and seek out her birthplace in Germantown. In Baltimore, her train passed not far from the spot where, two springs before, a mob of southern sympathizers had attacked the Sixth Massachusetts Regiment on its way to Washington. As she remembered the riot, Louisa’s temper rose as if the assault had just happened, and she felt “as if I should enjoy throwing a stone at somebody, hard.”44
Louisa’s journey ended as it had begun, in early evening. As her hired carriage drew her through the streets toward Georgetown, she caught her first glimpse of the unfinished Capitol dome and gazed in wonder at the White House. On her arrival at the Union Hotel Hospital, she received the welcome of Mrs. Hannah Ropes, the hospital matron. The kindly woman noted Louisa’s arrival in her journal that night: “We are cheered by the arrival of Miss Alcott from Concord—the prospect of a really good nurse, a gentlewoman who can do more than merely keep the patients from falling out of bed.”45
All through the time of Louisa’s journey, quite unknown to her, events had been unfolding in a fatefully simultaneous fashion. The new commander of Lincoln’s Army of the Potomac, Ambrose Burnside, had decided to attempt a strike against Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia before the coming winter would bring a pause to significant maneuvers. On December 11, the very day that Louisa received her orders, Burnside’s engineers were hastily laying pontoon bridges across the Rappahannock River, and the Army of the Potomac prepared to cross into the evacuated town of Fredericksburg. The next day, as Louisa scoured Boston in search of an official to authorize her train pass, Union soldiers vandalized the Virginia town, smashing china and wrecking furniture. That night, as Louisa’s train plunged into the night south of Boston, blue-coated amateur musicians played raucous versions of patriotic tunes on pianos that had been dragged into the streets of Fredericksburg, and officers gazed anxiously up at the strongly fortified Confederate positions above the town, wondering if Burnside’s battle plan would lead to victory.46
Their worst doubts were confirmed the next day. On
the damp, leaden Saturday afternoon of December 13, 1862, while Louisa’s train was steaming through Pennsylvania and Maryland, Burnside sent fourteen separate brigades up the sloping hillside known as Marye’s Heights. Near the top was a stone wall. Behind it, an entire corps of Lee’s army lay waiting. When the rebels opened fire, their fusillade was as thick and rapid as machine-gun fire. Of the thousands who answered the order to charge, not a single Union soldier came within thirty yards of the wall. Using a strangely placid simile, Union corps commander Darius Couch later described watching the brigades “melt like snow coming down on warm ground.”47 After nightfall, in Georgetown, Louisa first turned down the blankets in her upstairs room at the Union Hotel Hospital. Forty miles to the southwest, on the sloping ground above Fredericksburg, the bitterly cold air was filled with the despairing cries of literally thousands of wounded men. Louisa had completed her journey to the Union Hotel Hospital. For many of the Fredericksburg wounded, a journey to the same destination was about to begin.
Louisa wrote a mildly fictionalized version of her time as an army nurse: a short book called Hospital Sketches that she published within months of returning from service. Shying away from overt autobiography, Louisa dispensed with her real name in Hospital Sketches, adopting the alias of Tribulation Periwinkle. Despite the superficial camouflage, however, Hospital Sketches is a virtually true account. Not only did Louisa assemble the manuscript while her recollections were fresh, but her principal source material was unimpeachable; according to Clara Gowing, an Alcott family friend, all but a few of the narrative’s passages were taken directly from the letters, now lost, that Louisa had sent home to her parents.48
One particular in which Hospital Sketches varies from the truth is in its narrator’s denial of any deeply felt motivation to join the cause. Miss Periwinkle decides to take up nursing only because she wants “something to do,” and going off to tend to wounded soldiers is only one of the possibilities suggested by her well-meaning relations. Louisa, to the contrary, ached to have a part in the war from its outset, and military nursing appealed both to her maternal instinct and her love of a good fight. In a dispatch written for the New York Times, Walt Whitman observed that “a benevolent person, with the right qualities and tact, cannot, perhaps, make a better investment of himself at present anywhere upon the varied surface of this whole big world than in these military hospitals.”49
Coincidentally, Whitman’s first personal encounter with war also came on the heels of Fredericksburg. What he saw nauseated him. “Here in the hospitals,” he wrote, “I am present at the most appalling things….[Hours] afterward…I feel sick and actually tremble when I recall the thing and have it in my mind again.”50 Although Louisa reported for duty at her hospital on the day of the battle, four days went by before the first of the wounded began to arrive. During that brief period of grace, Louisa settled in and began to acquaint herself with her new tasks. Even before the flood of wounded arrived from Fredericksburg, she had a great deal of work to do. In between major engagements, the hospitals were kept busy administering to soldiers who had been felled by disease. Louisa reported that she was surrounded by “pneumonia on one side, diphtheria on the other, [and] five typhoids on the opposite.”51 Moreover, only three months had gone by since the battle of Antietam, the bloodiest one-day battle of the war, and a number of casualties from that battle were yet to be discharged. During Louisa’s first morning, a soldier died before her eyes. Not much later, she learned that one of the nurses in charge of a ward of patients had departed without leave. Despite her inexperience, Louisa was immediately entrusted with the supervision of forty beds, incongruously located in an erstwhile ballroom. She washed faces, dispensed medicines, and tried to look as professional and competent as possible as she and the other nurses awaited the wounded from the recent battle.
One of Louisa’s first patients was, in her description, “a boy with pneumonia.” She sat with him all day and, in a gesture both kind and symbolic, placed her mother’s shawl around the young man as he sat up, fighting for breath. When he smiled at her and said, “You are real motherly, ma’am,” she felt for the first time as if she were getting on. She hoped that she looked motherly to all the men in the ward, for, she wrote, “my thirty years made me feel old, and the suffering round me made me long to comfort everyone.”52
Louisa’s work began in earnest on the morning of December 17, when an African American boy, in an excited tone that might have been mistaken for joy, cried out, “They’s comin’ in, I tell yer, heaps on ’em!”53 The rest of the day was a baffling swirl of sensations—unspeakable odors, the sight of men without arms and legs, the sound of heavy feet, and the urgent shouts of doctors, nurses, and orderlies. Louisa noticed, however, that one sound was surprisingly absent from the general uproar. Scarcely a cry of pain went up from the men, no matter how grotesquely they had been wounded. Louisa often longed to groan for them “when pride kept their white lips shut, while great drops stood on their foreheads, and the bed shook with the irrepressible tremor of their tortured bodies.”54
Her first weapons in her war to save the Union were a sponge, a basin, and a bar of brown soap; removing the dirt from the endless stream of wounded consumed the first part of the day. When the scrubbing and rinsing were done, Louisa and the other nurses dispensed bread, soup, meat, and coffee to all who were well enough to eat. One man, his right arm too shattered to save, struggled to write a letter to a girlfriend with his left. Another, shot through the stomach, asked for water. By the time Louisa was able to find a cup for him, he was dead. There was little time, however, to reflect on any individual tragedy. Until eleven that night, Louisa did whatever she could do to comfort her charges—mopping feverish faces, smoothing rumpled beds, and even singing lullabies.
The days that followed arranged themselves into a routine constant enough that Louisa was able to describe a typical day in her journal. It began at six, when she rose and dressed by gaslight. She then risked the fury of the men in her ward by throwing open the windows to admit the frigid winter air. Much as she understood their objections to the chill, she was convinced that the alternative was worse. When the windows were closed, the room received almost no ventilation, and Louisa was terrified that the absence of fresh air would turn the room into a more lethal pestilence-box than it already was. Despite her best efforts, it remained a dirty, damp place where the odors of wounds, stables, kitchens, and washrooms perniciously mingled. As a futile defense against them, she carried a bottle of lavender water, whose contents she liberally scattered. She poked up the fires, laid blankets where they were needed, and lightened the atmosphere as best she could with joking and conversation.55
Her breakfast would have sent a devoted Fruitlander into spasms. It was an unchanging menu of fried beef, bread with salted butter, and coffee that she described as “washy.”56 The discussions around the table added no seasoning to the heavy, unappetizing fare; Louisa found most of her colleagues either bland or pompously opinionated, and it was all she could do to keep from laughing aloud at their ill-tutored arrogance. After breakfast, she could be found doing any of a dozen things, often almost simultaneously. She gave out rations and washed faces. She dusted tables and chased after supplies. She sewed bandages, dispensed medicine, and changed dressings. She was perpetually nettled by the incompetence of the attendants she supervised, who even needed to be shown how to sweep a floor and make a bed. Her daily battle with “disorder, discomfort, [and] bad management” eased a bit after the midday meal, when she took time to write letters for the soldiers who could not write for themselves.57 The duty she found hardest was answering letters that had come for men who had not lived to receive them. Newspapers, gossip, and the evening medicinal doses occupied her colleagues during the relatively unhurried hours after supper. When time permitted, Louisa read to the soldiers from the Dickens novels that she had brought with her for that purpose. The day typically ended at nine, when a bell sounded the call for lights-out.
Th
e evenings, however, were not all the same, thanks to Dr. John Winslow, the recently appointed surgeon on Louisa’s ward. Dr. John, as he permitted Louisa to call him, quoted freely from Browning and often came to her room to share a few selections from his portable library. He went for walks with her when time allowed and took her to the Capitol to hear the House chaplain read a somewhat flowery sermon, followed by dinner at a German restaurant. Dr. Winslow seems to have had more than friendship on his mind, and Louisa observed with a tingling awareness that her companion “is given to confidences in the twilight, & altogether is amiably amusing, & exceeding young.”58 The emphasis on the last word was Louisa’s. What might have happened, either for good or ill, if she had been more receptive to the young doctor’s attentions is a matter of entertaining speculation. However, restraint and propriety won out; the good doctor invited Louisa to his room, and she did not go.
The fortunes of another John possessed a more powerful, though decidedly unromantic, hold on Louisa’s heart. His full name was John Suhre, a blacksmith from Virginia who had come to the hospital gravely wounded. Unmarried and twenty-eight years old when the war began, Suhre had remained loyal to the Union when his state had seceded. However, he had not been able to join the army as soon as he would have liked, for he was responsible for the welfare of his widowed mother and younger siblings. Their needs had kept him from marrying, but enlisting posed a harder question. Enlisting, he had reasoned, meant helping his neighbor, whereas marriage would have meant only pleasing himself. For a long time, he had weighed his obligations to family against his duty to country, until the day when his mother decided the issue by pressing a keepsake ring into his hand and saying, “Go.” Fredericksburg had been his first battle. A rebel bullet had pierced his left lung and broken a rib, so that every breath stabbed him like a knife.
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