Louisa May Alcott

by Susan Cheever

  On January 6, Lane and his son, under pressure of the Alcotts’ impending departure, left to live with the Shaker community. Abba wrote her brother exultantly, “All Mr. Lane’s efforts have been to disunite us. But Mr. Alcott’s conjugal and paternal instincts were too strong for him.”15 Abba had beaten Lane. Her husband once again belonged to her and her daughters, but the shifts that occurred in that remote snowbound farmhouse would be played out for the rest of their lives together.

  By the middle of January, Fruitlands was abandoned; the Alcott family moved to a house on Hog Street in Still River rented from the Lovejoy family and paid for with labor from Bronson, who chopped wood, and Abba, who took in sewing. (Later, Lane was able to sell the Wyman farmhouse to former Consociate family member Joseph Palmer.) During the summer and autumn months, Abba had befriended the Lovejoys, and the move was financed by her sale of a silver piece that had been a gift from a friend, a cloak, and a $10 bill sent by her brother Sam. The Lovejoys had been stalwart friends during the last months at Fruitlands, visiting back and forth with Abba and her daughters and refusing to believe any of the local gossip about the weird doings at the old Wyman farmhouse.

  By spring Abba had moved her family, which still included Bronson, from the rented rooms to a larger place, half a house in Still River called the Brick Ends. Louisa and Anna were enrolled in Miss Chase’s village school, where the neighborhood children, and games and lessons appropriate to children, seemed more Edenic than anything at Fruitlands. Hundreds of pages have been written by biographers about the six months the Alcotts spent at Fruitlands, but the eight months the family spent recovering in Still River are usually given only a few paragraphs. Not much happened to the family in this peaceful interlude of rest and recuperation from the dreadful last days at Fruitlands. For once, the Alcotts had a chance to behave like a normal family, and Louisa seemed to relish this. Children love children, and in Still River the Lovejoys and the Gardner family children as well as the children at the school were supplemented by Llewellyn Willis, a boarder at the school who was taken in by Abba. Even in a crisis, she never stopped being as hospitable as if she were running an inn.

  By July of 1844, Bronson was off again, but this time he took the thirteen-year-old Anna along with him as a companion, traveling to western New York to visit his mother and, as he wrote back, to investigate other possible communities that might interest him. It’s not hard to imagine Abba’s feelings of dismay when she got a letter from Bronson saying that he was planning to visit Mottville, a Utopian community in Onondaga County run by a man named John Collins. “At the latter place are a few persons whose plans deeply interest me.”16

  When we make mistakes, we often blame them on a decision we made, a road not taken. If only we had not listened to this friend or been swayed by that one. If only we had not swept aside our reservations about something in the enthusiasm of the moment. Bronson, a chastened idealist, was torn between loyalty to his old idea of a perfect community and regret for what he had lost. Remorse was never a powerful feeling for this optimist, who had invented himself whole-cloth as an intellectual complete with broad-brimmed hat. Still he confided in his brother Junius that the failure of Fruitlands had made him feel abandoned. “For I am all alone again; and you seem the sole person in the wide world, designed as faithful coadjutor—a lover of the Excellent and willing to join in the attainment of the same day by day.” Even surrounded by his own adoring, resilient family, he seems to have felt alone. He hadn’t given up his idea of a perfect community and, as he wrote to Junius sounding very much like his old self, he considered joining some of the other communities in Massachusetts but “they aim at little, and are but new phases of the spirit of the Old Society.”17 As the humbling days at Still River rolled into summer, a summer that was worlds away from the victorious summer before at Fruitlands, Bronson wondered if his mistake had been in leaving Concord. Concord understood him; Concord was a place where ideas and idealism were honored.

  So in November the Alcott family headed back to Concord. They had moved from Fruitlands to Still River in the middle of winter by ox sled. Now they boarded the stagecoach that ran from town to town pulled by four lackadaisical post horses; the coach went about 10 miles an hour. Louisa sat on the roof of the coach above the huge wheels and between the carriage lamps next to the bench for the driver.

  About halfway from Still River to Concord, the Alcott family made a change that may well have symbolized their entrance into the modern world. They left behind an agricultural, patriarchal past; they entered an industrial future where women’s power would often equal, if only quietly, the power of their husbands. They unloaded themselves from the stagecoach and boarded the train—their first train ride. The train on the Fitchburg Line, which had opened with great fanfare on Bunker Hill Day, June 17, provided four trains a day at a third the cost of Deacon Brown’s old stage and at more than twice the speed. The train, still traveling at a pokey 20 miles an hour, would eventually bring the world to Concord, but on that day it only brought the Alcotts.

  In the war between the old agricultural ways and the new mechanized ways, the train was the decisive weapon. When the train came through town, first in the form of a swarm of workers who laid the track, and then in the form of the actual cars, Concord’s intellectuals all wrote obligatory attacks on the railroad. At Walden Pond, part of which had been filled in to accommodate the tracks which he could see from his hut, Henry David Thoreau wrote that “the iron horse makes the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils.”18 Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a jeremiad about men being transported in boxes. Then he shrewdly also bought some railroad stock. Emerson, Alcott, and a council of the town’s leaders wrote a furious complaint to the railroad’s general manager while the tracks were being laid. “The No. branch of the Concord River is our ‘Central Park’ and one of the most beautiful pieces of simple scenery in New England. We feel it is bad enough to have a railroad at all in that place, but the ruthless destruction of a single tree, or shrub, for fire wood or any purpose not absolutely necessary . . . will be viewed by all as barbarism.”19

  Concord’s intellectuals could see that industrialization might also be a blessing for them, bringing their Cambridge and Boston friends closer and, in Emerson’s case, broadening the scope of his lecture circuit, which was now his primary source of income. In fact, most of Concord found it hard to resist the seductions of the new, especially since in this case the railroad made it possible to go to Boston for the day. The trip, once a dusty and miserable three to four hours, was reduced to a relatively comfortable hour.

  Agricultural Concord, once an isolated hub for the Concord and Assabet river valleys, soon became connected to a network of providers and buyers; by 1846 a milk train had been added to the morning train and Concord farmers began shipping their milk to Boston. In the winter, the ice on Walden Pond was stacked up on straw and sent off to the city on the afternoon train. The railroad also developed an area of Concord that not many tourists see. Its history is not that of the American Revolution but of the Industrial Revolution. Just west of town, the combination of water power from the Assabet and the new railroad line came together in a small cluster of mills, two sawmills, a factory which made lead pipe, Damon’s fabric mills, and a powder mill, which occasionally exploded. Although West Concord never approached the scale of Lowell, Massachusetts, or Manchester, New Hampshire, to the north, it changed the feel of the center of Concord from being at the heart of a world of farmers to being at the edge of a world of manufacturing.

  By Thanksgiving, the Alcott family had resettled in Concord, renting rooms from the Edmund Hosmer family again in the big house next to their old cottage. But the family who returned from Fruitlands and Still River was a different family than the one that had disappeared to the west just a little more than a year earlier. Bronson’s blond hair had turned to gray and he was stooped over. He had not stopped feeling sorry for him
self. Some introductory enquiries that he made about starting a school in Concord were soundly rebuffed. Later the Teacher’s Institute, led by another educational reformer, Horace Mann, who had married Mary Peabody, met at the Concord courthouse for a ten-day session. Had Mary forgotten what had happened between the Alcotts and her sister Elizabeth? Alcott eagerly went to the meetings and was told that he was not welcome. The brilliant educator of 1837 was an outcast. “I am looked upon with distrust,” he confided to his journal. “And while there is little hope of aiding forward mankind save by forming the young, I am prohibited from communication with these. How am I to work?” And later, “O God! How long wilt thou not permit me to be useful to my fellowmen,” he wrote. “How Long, O Lord! How long wilt thou try me.”20

  Of course, the biggest change was in the four Alcott daughters. “It was the children who had changed the most. Marked, all of them by the drama of separation and reconciliation that had taken place at Fruitlands, they were, as children brought up in isolated families often are, older and more sophisticated,”21 writes Madelon Bedell in The Alcotts.

  The sisters were Alcotts first and girls second. Louisa took this literally, acting whenever she could as if she had been born a boy. She climbed trees, ran and jumped, and took dares—once rubbing red peppers in her eyes. In a rage, she could destroy a friend’s pen or pour whale oil on her hair. She loved all animals, especially spiders, those creepy, crawly creatures that make most girls scream.22

  Louisa was the clear leader, the one who organized games and plays and the one who told stories. In looks and temperament, she was like her mother, who often gave her gentle talks about controlling her temper. This had always been a problem. In the detailed notes he took about his infant children, her father had written about Louisa’s obstinacy of temper. Like her mother, she had a sense of herself as an aristocrat in temporarily straitened circumstances.

  By now, as a mature thirteen-year-old, Louisa was writing stories to add to her journals and letters. She would be a writer; she would be an actress. Louisa wanted to be famous, as famous as Jenny Lind, she said, and her sisters believed that one day she would be.

  In May of 1845, after a winter with the Hosmers, Abba got a letter from her cousin Samuel Sewall that once again changed everything. Her father’s will had been settled and what was left of his estate ready to be distributed. His wish that none of his money would be used to pay Bronson’s debts had been successfully skirted. In return for a percentage of what they were owed—$2,000 on a $6,000 debt—Bronson’s Temple School creditors had agreed to drop their claims. After that, what was left of Abba’s remaining small legacy was actually hers. Enlisting their friend and neighbor Emerson as a scout and a lender—he offered to contribute an additional $500 this time—the family began to look for a new house in Concord. For the first time in almost a decade, they were actually solvent.

  At first Emerson offered them one of his new woodlots on Walden Pond, but eventually the family settled on a run-down house for sale by Horatio Cogswell, a wheelwright. This house on the Lexington Road had a fine pedigree; it had been owned by Samuel Whitney, the muster master of the Minutemen during the Revolution. Yet the house had known hard times in the intervening years; it had served as a trading post and, more recently, as a pig farm. It fronted directly on the road half a mile uphill from the Emerson’s house, with 10 feet of shoulder separating it from the traffic between Concord and Boston.

  Frustrated by his inability to teach, Bronson Alcott threw his energy into improving the new house, and it certainly needed improvement. He cut the old wheelwright building in two, hoisted it up on a set of wheels, and moved one-half to the other side of the house. He began extensive planting and terracing. He moved a barn from the other side of the road to a spot next to the kitchen end of the half of the wheelwright shed. Twenty fruit trees were rooted in the sandy soil. The land on the other side of the road was turned into a thriving vegetable garden.

  On the steep hillside behind the house, Bronson began what would be one of his largest and most lasting projects, a dozen terraces dotted with benches and fanciful shelters. At the top of the ridge he built a larger gazebo, a curved shape that he wove, basketlike, out of saplings and osier so that its curved lines seemed to grow out of the surrounding landscape. That ridge and its transformation into a picturesque spot was one of the things that enchanted everyone who lived in the house after the Alcotts had left. In the new house, at Hillside, Louisa got something she had wanted for a long time—a room of her own. It was a small dark room with one window at the back of the house, perfectly situated for bursting out the back door and scrambling up the bank into the woods.

  Louisa was an intense, intelligent girl on the verge of womanhood. Dark-haired and tall, she had not yet learned—she would never learn—the arts of femininity. “I have at last got the little room I have wanted so long, and I am very happy about it,” she wrote in her March journal after the family move. “It does me good to be alone. . . . I have made a plan for my life, as I am in my teens, and no-more a child. I am old for my age and don’t care much for girls’ things. People think I am wild and queer, but Mother understands and helps me.”23 She was outspoken, well read, and prone to temper tantrums. She was smarter than almost everyone else, and she didn’t mind letting them know that. In spite of her mother’s support, she was often in trouble with her parents.

  The Alcott family had already moved ten times, and Louisa could look back on at least three triumphant starts that had slowly turned to desperate failures. She revered her father, but in the family hierarchy even Louisa—especially Louisa—must have sensed that his masculine, intellectual idealism had failed so dramatically that the women must now take over. Abba Alcott was very good at taking over, and she raised at least one daughter who was also a born leader. But what is it like to be a thirteen-year-old on the brink of sexuality who is better equipped to lead a family than to settle down with a husband?

  Anna at fifteen was already beautiful and attracting the notice of the men who visited the family or who saw her in Boston. Blond and accommodating, she was able to appear fascinated—or actually be fascinated—by the men who crossed her path. Louisa had no such gift. If a man said something idiotic, it was hard for her to hold her tongue. Her erotic idols were men who would never fully reciprocate: the dreamy naturalist Thoreau and the older, thrillingly powerful and intelligent Emerson.

  Then as now, thirteen is a critical age for a girl. It is at this age, as feminist writer Carol Gilligan among others has explained, that girls begin to lose their original voices. They are mercilessly pressured by the world around them, the impossible models provided by society, their parents’ expectations, and the landslide of feelings and opinions released by their emerging, delicious, and unconscious sexuality. Under this onslaught of expectation, many young girls are pushed away from their original childhood selves and become silent hybrids, creatures molded so much by their environment that it is hard to recognize who they really are. “Girls in our society learn early on that they are expected to behave in certain ways,” writes pediatrician Berry Brazelton in an analysis that might apply to Louisa as well as anyone in the twenty-first century. “Girls are expected to be compliant, quiet and introspective. They soon learn that they should suppress any open expression of aggression or even strong non-compliant feelings. They also learn . . . to value relationships more than rules.”24

  In 1845 the pressures on young women to conform to a feminine ideal that would be attractive to men were more severe than they are now. At puberty both the older Alcott girls understood that in some people’s eyes they were the family’s greatest assets. By marrying the right man, either of them could end the financial pressures that still clouded every family decision.

  Louisa May Alcott resisted these pressures, and her resistance was made easier because she lived in a family that was laughed at and pilloried by the forces that sought to mold her. The Alcotts relished being different and unconventional. They were th
e pathetic family and proud of it. After an afternoon in which her new tutor, Sophia Foord, and her sisters went tramping through the woods destroying their clothes and getting thoroughly wet, Louisa wrote her friend Sophia Gardner back in Still River, “We are dreadful wild people here in Concord, we do all the sinful things you can think of.”25

  One of the “sinful” things that happened in the winter of 1846, a sin of which her family was especially proud, was sheltering a runaway slave on his way from Maryland to Canada. The slave’s name was John. Bronson described him as “an amiable intelligent man just seven weeks from the House of Bondage.”26 The Alcotts welcomed the fugitive, and he lived, more or less hidden, at the house until arrangements could be made for him to travel north. While he was there, Emerson dropped by. Bronson probably took John along on one of his regular Sunday visits to Thoreau’s hut at Walden Pond. Some biographers speculate that Thoreau used his cabin on Walden Pond as a stop on the Underground, although clearly it did not provide good hiding places. “Some who had more wits than they knew what to do with,” Thoreau writes of his visitors to Walden, “run-away slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a baying on their track.”27

  Many in Concord were not sympathetic to the abolitionist cause at the time. This was before the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made it possible to break the law in your own house by practicing hospitality. That revised act made it a crime not to turn in a man’s property—an escaped slave—even if the slave had made it as far as Massachusetts. Before then, to many people it seemed as if the best thing to do with the problems of the South was to let the South solve them. Bronson Alcott and Henry David Thoreau never wavered. They were always ready to help the runaways and always fiercely clear about the value of human life whatever the color of the human’s skin or the “ownership” the person might officially have to deal with. Both men knew that no one owns anyone, and they were pioneers in this furious, beneficent belief. In education and in human rights, Bronson Alcott was a man whose convictions—convictions formed somehow in the progress from farmer to schoolmaster—were way ahead of his time. No one could budge him. This courage was one of the things that Emerson so admired.