Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  As humble as the cottage may have seemed, it was not enough for Alcott to move into a situation that looked like charity; always a teacher, even when he had failed at teaching, he had to spin some ideas around this new offer. At each stage of his life, he provided a new metaphor for himself and his growing family. As long as he could produce a sympathetic story, his optimism was undimmed. “You may ask what I am about now,” he wrote his mother that year; “I reply, still at my old trade hoping, which thus far has given food, shelter, raiment, and a few warm friends.”2

  Not for the first or the last time, it was the Alcotts’ friend Emerson who provided. Emerson was the financial father of the Alcott family while Bronson took care of the mythmaking. In fact, during the first decade of their friendship, Emerson often seemed to have been put on earth partly to bail out his friend Bronson Alcott and his family. For Emerson, Alcott represented the brilliance of the unschooled. He admired Alcott’s confidence and optimism. Emerson was also amazed by Alcott’s ability to spout cascades of language while he, Emerson, often agonized over a sentence or two until he got it right.

  Emerson was in his thirties, but he had already lived a lifetime of exhilaration and sorrow. Growing up in Boston in a large family raised by a single mother, he had known the discomforts and fears of real poverty, although the Emerson family had deep roots in colonial New England. Emerson’s step-grandfather Ezra Ripley was a respected minister in Concord who lived at the Old Manse, a house above the Concord River, and welcomed his sisters’ children whenever they chose to visit. Emerson had managed to go to Harvard with help from his energetic Aunt Mary Moody and a series of scholarships, and he had become a minister in the Congregational Church.

  At the age of twenty-five, he fell in love with a seventeen-year-old Concord, New Hampshire, girl, Ellen Tucker, and the two planned out their life together, a plan that depended on Ellen’s money and her desire to write poetry and Emerson’s talent and ministry. Her death from tuberculosis two years later devastated Emerson. He obsessively visited the cemetery in Roxbury, and in March, fourteen months after her death, actually opened her coffin in an attempt to understand his own devastation.3 He quit the ministry and fled to Europe. On his return, he sued the Tucker family for Ellen’s portion of her fortune; her brother had argued that since she was still underage her money could not be inherited. Emerson took the family to court in 1836, and won.

  With the Tucker money and a second wife, Lydia Jackson, whom he had met while giving a lecture at Plymouth, Emerson moved to Concord, the small town inland from Boston where he had spent happy childhood summers. In Concord, a long stagecoach ride from Boston, Emerson and his new wife, Lidian—one of the conditions of his proposal was that she change her first name as well as her last name—bought a large white house on the Cambridge Turnpike. With Lidian’s help, for she was a competent partner more than a passionately beloved new wife, Emerson determined to create a lively intellectual community that would rival anything he could have had in Boston or Cambridge.

  The Alcotts were not the only recipients of Emerson’s largesse. The genius cluster that sprang up in Concord in the 1840s, and which essentially created American literature as we know it, was largely assembled through Emerson’s judicious use of money, power, and personal persuasion. The Alcotts moved in, and soon enough Henry David Thoreau, a Concord native, had moved into the Emersons’ house too; Emerson then recruited Thoreau to plant a garden for Nathaniel Hawthorne and his new wife, the former Sophia Peabody. The couple had taken Emerson up on his offer of a low rent for the empty Ripley House—the Old Manse. Margaret Fuller sometimes stayed with the Hawthornes and sometimes with the Emersons.

  When he couldn’t entice people to live in Concord, Emerson brought them for visits at his new house, and his study sometimes resounded with the voices of Henry Longfellow from Cambridge and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry James the elder and his son Henry James from New York. Emerson also corresponded with those he couldn’t host like Thomas Carlyle in London and Walt Whitman in Brooklyn. Later, Herman Melville came to Concord to visit the Hawthornes. Sophia Peabody’s sister Mary visited with her husband, Horace Mann. (In the competition for Mann with Elizabeth, she had won.) Choosing Concord, a relatively remote outpost where he felt very much at home, Emerson assembled the most extraordinary literary community ever gathered in a small town. He was the force behind the first community of professional writers in the New World, a community whose work and ideas underlie almost everything we write and think even today.

  Alcott justified his family’s move to Concord with a harebrained decision to be a simple farmer. He would live his ideas instead of writing and teaching them. “My garden shall be my poem,” he wrote. “My spade and hoe the instruments of my wit and skill.”4 He would abandon intellect, he decided, and make his living from the land. Armed with his own knowledge of planting and his strong arms and back, he would create a garden that would feed his family. “I have now abrogated all claims to moral and spiritual teaching,” he wrote to his brother-in-law Sam May. “I place myself in peaceful relations to the soil—as a husbandman intent on aiding its increase—and seem no longer hostile to things as they are the powers that be.”5

  So on March 31, 1840, the Alcott family boarded the stagecoach in Boston at Hanover Square for the bumpy ride the sixteen miles to Concord, where they spent their first night. “A long soaking rain, the drops trickling down the stubble,” wrote Henry David Thoreau the day before the Alcotts left Boston. “I lay drenched on last year’s bed of wild oats, by the side of some bare hill, ruminating. These things are of the moment.”6

  April 1 was Town Meeting Day, so the arrival of the strangers didn’t cause much notice. Concord still takes its town meetings very seriously; crowds turn out to debate and vote on everything from local offices to stop lights. The Hosmer Cottage, a good walk from the town center, was small but thrilling for the Alcott family, especially Louisa, an active eight-year-old who was extremely fond of running and all forms of movement. The neighbors near the Hosmer Cottage agreed. “Louisa was always the leader in the fun,” wrote Lydia Hosmer, who lived in a larger house nearby. “It seems to me that she was always romping and racing down the street, usually with a hoople higher than her head. . . . She was continually shocking people . . . by her tomboyish, natural and independent ways.”7

  “It pleases both housewife and little ones,” Bronson wrote of the modest new house, “and the neighborhood enjoys the highest reputation.”8 The Alcotts named the wreck “Dovecote Cottage” and proceeded to make themselves at home.

  In a few weeks, Bronson had repaired leaks in the roof, fixed the drains, whitewashed the fences, transplanted trees, and trellised the entire house. Always an energetic and imaginative landscape gardener, Bronson also ploughed a fresh garden and planted a new crop of fruits and vegetables. In the spirit of living his ideas, Bronson ran an eccentric household. No meat was eaten and animals were not used for work—they were to be regarded as partners rather than slaves and could not be slaughtered or exploited. Oxen could not be yoked for ploughing; horses could not be harnessed for transportation.

  Alcott had remained an admirer of Sylvester Graham, and he believed that animal flesh was not a natural food for human beings. Some of Alcott’s dietary rules were moot because of the Alcotts’ poverty. Bronson’s income was nonexistent, and his debts from the Temple School had not been repaid. All clothing was made from flax because cotton was picked by slaves. The family also gave up everything that may have used international slave labor in its manufacture or transportation—spices, sugar, and coffee, for instance. Abba went around singing as she cleaned out rooms and made curtains; she too loved a move. The Alcott family was very good at getting a fresh start. They knew how to do this well. The move to Concord was the fifth move in their decade of marriage, and the family would move twenty-nine times before they came to a rest back in Concord on the other side of town almost twenty years later.

  Concord in 1840 was much more than
an escape for the Alcotts. It was a community of men and women who understood them. The Thoreau brothers, Henry and John, had created a private school—Concord Academy—and were running it with progressive methods that Bronson Alcott immediately found familiar. Anna was soon enrolled. Other students at the school often boarded with John and Henry’s mother, Cynthia Thoreau, who ran a pleasant boardinghouse in the old Parkman house across the street. At school, John taught writing and arithmetic and Henry classics, Greek, and higher mathematics. But the brothers taught much more than the required curriculum, and Henry often took his delighted pupils on field trips, giving them lessons in the names and attributes of plants and animals and in the history of the Indians and the way they were driven out of Massachusetts. He took them fishing on the river and showed them how land was surveyed.

  It was also an election year—and Concord takes politics seriously. William Henry Harrison, a sixty-seven-year-old soldier from the Indian Wars, had been the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe. He and John Tyler were running against the incumbent, Martin Van Buren. Although there were some in Concord who didn’t believe that the Indian Wars yielded heroes, on the Fourth of July the whole town turned out to campaign for the Whigs, the log cabin party, against the aristocratic Van Buren.

  Louisa and her sisters watched by the roadside as hundreds poured into town for the celebration. Dozens of pigs were roasted for those less vegetarian than the Alcotts, and hogsheads of cider prepared. By dawn the three roads into town began to be jammed with people, the fife and drum corps, and a giant log cabin drawn by twenty-three horses; delegates from Boston formed a two-mile-long line as they began their march through town. The Tippecanoe Club of Cambridge rolled their famous red, white, and blue campaign ball. The speakers’ stand at the edge of the river was under a tent for 6,000 people, who crowded in to hear Daniel Webster and other party luminaries.

  The Alcotts thrived as Bronson spaded the earth for his acre of garden. The girls, especially Louisa, began understanding the beauties and consolations of the natural world. “I remember running over the hills just at dawn one summer morning, and pausing to rest in the silent woods, saw, through an arch of trees, the sun rise over river, hill, and wide green meadows as I never saw it before,” Louisa wrote years later in the closest she ever came to a conversion experience. “Something born of the lovely hour, a happy mood, and the unfolding aspirations of a child’s soul seemed to bring me very near to God.”9 The summer of 1840 was a tumultuous time in American politics, and the excitement of the log cabin parade to an observant, receptive eight-year-old was just the beginning of Louisa May Alcott’s political involvement. As the Alcotts and the town of Concord were caught up in intense political forces beyond their control, one of the most fascinating and dreadful times in our history began to unfold.

  Old Tippecanoe was elected in a landslide carrying Massachusetts, but on the day of his inauguration a few months later, he caught a cold that became full-blown pneumonia and killed him within months of his ascension to power. The man the country got as president was Vice President John Tyler, the afterthought who was principally known as being the Tyler in Harrison’s campaign slogan: “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too.” Tyler was an unknown whose bungling of the delicate issue of states’ rights during the four years of his presidency may have laid the ground for disagreements that led to the Civil War.

  Concord would be torn apart by the issue of slavery even before the war. Concord people were furiously law-abiding, yet they were also deeply invested in individual rights. Every Concord resident knew the glorious part Concord had played in the American Revolution, after all. Three years before the Alcotts arrived in Concord, the town had proudly erected a battle monument, an obelisk at the Old North Bridge to commemorate Concord men’s part in the first exchange of shots in the Revolutionary War.

  Emerson had been chosen to write a “Concord Hymn,” as if the town itself were a kind of religion. The hymn would commemorate the events of April 19, 1775 when British militia marching across the river had encountered the farmers and drovers and citizens who had blocked their way. In his “Concord Hymn,” Emerson wrote, “By the rude bridge that arched the flood/Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled;/Here once the embattled farmers stood;/And fired the shot heard round the world.” The hymn is partially engraved on another battle monument—a Daniel Chester French statue of a Revolutionary minuteman placed at the bridge in 1875.

  When the Alcotts arrived in Concord in 1840, the family was regarded with some suspicion, especially when the local farmers and householders heard from Bronson Alcott that he was a philosopher who intended to till the soil. Concord is a close-knit community. Strangers are not immediately welcomed; neighbors are treated like family. A good example of the way the community of Concord worked together in the nineteenth century is the story of Franklin Sanborn and the federal agents.

  Sanborn, a schoolteacher who had come to Concord at Emerson’s invitation, had been one of the principal supporters of the rebellious John Brown, the abolitionist who had been captured at Harpers Ferry and executed. Late one night in 1859, a pair of federal agents with a warrant for Sanborn’s arrest pulled up to the Sanborn house in a horse and carriage. Sanborn answered the door of his house, realized what was happening, and began to struggle. His sister rushed down the street and rang the church bells that summoned a crowd of sympathetic townspeople, including Ralph Waldo Emerson. As Sanborn was dragged toward the waiting carriage, a writ of habeas corpus was produced and waved at the federal agents. Before the agents could stuff their quarry through the carriage door, the crowd had closed in, threatening to unhitch their horses or begin throwing stones. The agents released Sanborn and took off with all deliberate speed.

  The townspeople of Concord responded to outsiders and disasters by working together with uncommon efficiency. Years later, the Emersons’ house on the Cambridge Turnpike was seriously burned. A collection was taken, and Emerson and his daughter Ellen were sent abroad on a monthlong trip. While they were away, the town got together to rebuild the house. On his return, the whole town turned out to welcome him. His possessions and books had been moved back in and it was as if the fire had never happened.

  Yet Concord, for all its support of its own residents, also had a guilty secret when it came to the Native Americans who had originally settled this lovely piece of landscape along the Concord and Assabet rivers. Even though Concord men and women revered the idea of individual freedom and respect for the land, they had engaged in a bloody war against the individuals who were there when they arrived. In King Philip’s War at the end of the seventeenth century, and later in the 1700s, Concord men went musket to musket and atrocity to atrocity with the Indians—the Abenaki and the Pawtuckets—who were, at least at first, just trying to protect the life they had peacefully led for generations. Concord’s Captain Richard Lovewell was a famous “Indian fighter,” as was President Harrison, a man who hunted down the Indians and decapitated them or scalped them for bounty.

  The dark side of community spirit can be intolerance, and Concord’s history when it comes to those who don’t belong or those who are disenfranchised is definitely mixed. During the Indian Wars of the eighteenth century, although the town of Concord was never the subject of an Indian raid, no one seemed inclined to ask if the Indians had rights or if there was anything wrong with decimating their villages and slaughtering their braves.

  The arrival of Emerson in Concord, a man who came from one of Concord’s original families but who also had been educated and raised in Boston, was part of a change in the mood of the town. When the United States government drove the Cherokees off their land, Emerson himself wrote a letter of protest to President Van Buren. Later, Concord seemed to reverse itself again by becoming a center of passionate abolitionism and a stop on the Underground Railroad.

  Politics, at least passionate politics, often comes from personal experience. In Concord, abolition became a personal matter in 1850 when the United States Congress, with Daniel We
bster’s support, put teeth in an old eighteenth-century fugitive slave law. At that point, it became illegal for anyone to help a slave on the run. Slaves had to be returned under the law no matter where they were found. As a result, anyone involved in the Underground Railroad or any other means of escape for slaves became a criminal.

  The summer the Alcotts arrived in Concord, the town was already debating the slavery question; a question fired up by the wild William Lloyd Garrison and the brilliant young lawyer Wendell Phillips and others like him. At one point, another group tried to keep Phillips from speaking at the local Lyceum. The Lyceum was for educational purposes, it was argued. Many were abolitionists, but they deplored controversy. By planting himself in the audience with the help of Emerson and his friend Henry David Thoreau, who was a Lyceum curator, Phillips managed to speak anyway during the question-and-answer session.

  For Louisa, the exhilaration of the country was as brief as it was thrilling. Her pregnant mother, for all her happiness at the new situation, found that her most difficult daughter was just too difficult to have around during the final months of her pregnancy and delivery. Abba had miscarried a baby boy in 1838 as the Temple School disintegrated, and she didn’t want to risk having that happen again.

  In early July, just a few months after the family moved to Concord, Louisa was on the stagecoach, banished from her newly beloved country home back to urban Boston. Staying at Federal Court with her distinguished grandfather Colonel May, an old man in his eighteenth-century clothes, was no fun at all for an active, questioning little girl. At Federal Court there were no open fields for romping in or kittens for playing with or even any sisters. “We all miss the noisy little girl who used to make house and garden, barn and field ring with her footsteps,” her father wrote her from Concord. The letter, with unintentional cruelty, describes all the wonderful things Louisa is missing—the birth of six chicks, dolls, hoops and other things “you would have enjoyed very much.” The letter ends with the warning Louisa must have been sick of hearing. She should be kind and gentle and speak softly and step lightly. “Grandpa loves quiet.”10 A postscript reminds her how much her own cat misses her.