Marmee & Louisa (34 page)

Five months after the lecture, John Brown’s bloody raid on the U.S. armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, galvanized abolitionists across the country. Troops captured Brown and killed or captured his twenty cohorts. A jury in Virginia swiftly found him guilty of treason, rebellion, and first-degree murder. By early December 1859, when Brown was hanged, he had become a martyr for the antislavery movement. While some nonresistant abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass, were horrified by his violence, many, including Thoreau and Emerson,
called Brown a “saint” and an “angel of light.”
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Thoreau was a longtime abolitionist, and Emerson had begun to speak out against slavery in 1844.
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“Transcendentalists rushed to beatify Brown,” John Matteson observed.
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Abigail’s cousin Samuel E. Sewall, who had provided legal advice to Brown after the raid, “never felt . . . that the heroism of the attempt entirely obliterated its folly,” yet “was deeply moved by [Brown’s] self-sacrificing spirit.”
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Even Garrison, long an “ ‘ultra’ peace man,” called Brown a “hero.” At home in Concord, Bronson composed a sonnet to Brown, “O Christian meek and brave!” Louisa wrote a poem praising Brown, “Saint John the Just,” for making “death divine.”
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Samuel Joseph, however, reacted to Brown’s raid with more trepidation. He did not learn of it until early November, when his ship from Europe arrived in Halifax. He had been at sea following a tour of England, France, Italy, Germany, Holland, and Wales with friends and his son John Edward. Hearing the news at anchor in Halifax Harbour, he felt shock and fear. The John Brown raid, “I apprehend, is but the beginning of sorrows,” he wrote in his diary; “the pattering of the rain before a hurricane.”
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The mood was happier in Concord, as Abigail anticipated Anna and John’s wedding, throwing herself into the role of mother of the bride. Her “usual vigor of thought and action” had returned, her husband observed happily at the end of 1859.
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She was “full of Anna’s expected marriage” and “as energetic and busy as ever.”
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Anna and John hoped to be married by Samuel Joseph the following June. Abigail spent several weeks in Boston planning the wedding, which for reasons unknown was moved forward to Wednesday, May 23, 1860, Abigail and Bronson’s thirtieth wedding anniversary.

For her part, Louisa tried not to think about the wedding. She felt Anna was abandoning her. To distract herself, perhaps, she began a novel for adults. Her stories were finally bringing in enough money to support her family and even to send occasional gifts to her father’s mother, who now lived in New York, and other relatives.
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Freed from sewing, teaching, and cleaning, Louisa had the luxury of writing longer, more challenging works.

At the desk by a window in the second-floor bedroom she shared with Anna at Orchard House, Louisa lost herself in her novel. “Genius burned so fiercely that for four weeks I wrote all day and planned [the
novel
Moods
] nearly all night, being quite possessed by my work,” she wrote in her journal in 1860.
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“I was perfectly happy, and seemed to have no wants.” Whenever Louisa fell into this state, which she likened to a “vortex,” her “Mother wandered in and out with cordial cups of tea, worried because I couldn’t eat.”

The novel
Moods
concerns the conflict at the heart of her mother’s life, which Louisa would address again and again: how a woman can live in a world in which to marry is to enslave oneself. The heroine of
Moods,
Sylvia Yule, travels the world in search of love and finds two potential mates, one apparently modeled on Emerson and the other on Thoreau. She marries the wrong man, discovers her mistake, and considers suicide and divorce. As a slave to her husband-master, she has no choice but to join “that sad sisterhood called disappointed women, a larger class than many deemed it to be, though there are few of us who have not seen members of it. Unhappy wives, mistaken for forsaken lovers; meek souls, who make life a long penance for the sins of others; gifted creatures kindled into fitful brilliancy by some inward fire that consumes but cannot warm. These are the women who fly to convents, write bitter books, sing songs full of heartbreak, act splendidly the passion they have lost or never won. Who smile, and try to lead brave uncomplaining lives, but whose tragic eyes betray them, whose voices, however sweet or gay, contain an undertone of hopelessness.” The novel’s central issue, Elizabeth Lennox Keyser has written, is “whether Sylvia had the moral obligation to remain with her husband, whom she found impossible to love, or the moral obligation to leave him.”
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She could have been describing Abigail.

Moods
was not the only work that Louisa based on her mother’s experiences, in Bronson’s view. At the end of 1859, after “Love and Self-Love” appeared in the
Atlantic,
he observed that Abigail “partakes largely in [Louisa’s] good fortune herself—[and is] a heroine in her ways, and with a deep experience, all tested and awaiting her daughter’s pen.”
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Moods,
he added, was “attractive to us for the personal and family history, but slightly shaded, scattered along its pages.”
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Bronson spent this winter at home with his family, something he had not done for years. He had taken a job as superintendent of the town’s public schools, which required his presence. His annual salary was one hundred dollars, which Louisa could now earn in a day or two.
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That winter he began to insulate the walls of their house.

As Anna’s wedding approached, Louisa and May also stayed close to home.
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May, now nineteen, painted and gave drawing lessons to the sons of Horace Mann and his wife, the former Mary Tyler Peabody, and other Concord youth. Louisa worked on her novel and sewed a dress for May to wear to a ball. May, according to her father, was the “pink of a party” who with a female friend could “extemporize” entertainments at home for a throng of “very genteel young gentlemen.”
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May had “many sweethearts,” according to Anna.
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Sometimes Louisa struggled with jealousy toward her “fortunate” younger sister’s serenity and ease, just as she envied Anna’s ability to separate from the family by marrying. May “gets what she wants easily,” Louisa lamented in her journal. “I have to grub for my help, or go without it.
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Good for me, doubtless, or it wouldn’t be so; so cheer up, Louisa, and grind away!” Several years later, learning that an artist had given May free art lessons and a bouquet of flowers, Louisa wrote that May “always finds someone to help her as she wants to be helped.
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Wish I could do the same, but suppose as I never do that it is best for me to work & wait & do all for myself.”

Less than two months before Anna’s wedding, Louisa traveled to Syracuse to see her cousin Charlotte. On Friday, May 4, Samuel Joseph “took dinner at Charlotte’s [house] with Cousin Louie.”
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Two weeks later the minister, likely accompanied by his niece and daughter, traveled from Syracuse to Utica, Albany, Springfield, Worcester, West Newton, and Boston on his way to officiate at Anna’s wedding. On Tuesday, May 22, after calling on relatives and the Garrisons in Boston, Samuel Joseph “went to Concord to my sister Alcott’s.” He “called on Mrs. [Horace] Mann and Miss [Elizabeth] Peabody. Emerson spent an hour with me.” After sleeping at Orchard House, Samuel Joseph “rose at 6
¹
/
₂
, had a long and delightful conversation with Mr. Alcott.” Decades of personal disappointment, especially on behalf of his adored Abigail, did not lessen Samuel Joseph’s appreciation of Bronson’s conversational gift. Another friend, James Russell Lowell, had described Bronson in a witty couplet, “While he talks he is great but goes out like a taper / If you shut him up closely with pen, ink, and paper.”
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Samuel Joseph May’s terse account continued, “At 11
¹
/
₂
, I married Anne B. Alcott to John B. Pratt.”

Other observers provided more concrete details of the ceremony, which was attended by Henry David Thoreau, Elizabeth Peabody, the Emersons, the Alcotts, and the Mays. “All persons spoke of [the] fitness
and beauty . . . [of] Mr. May’s address and prayer,” Bronson reported.
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Just before the ceremony, Anna and John crept up to the bedroom that Anna and Louisa had shared, to say their vows in private. The front parlor of Orchard House, where they all stood around the couple and their Uncle Sam, was “full of sunshine, flowers, friends, and happiness,” Louisa said. But she herself was dressed in gray, “sackcloth, I called it, and ashes.” In childhood she would have heard from Abigail that their ancestor the Salem witch judge had repented for his wrongful convictions by wearing sackcloth for the rest of his life. Louisa wore it symbolically, to “mourn the loss of my Nan. . . . Uncle S. J. May married them, with no fuss, but much love, and we all stood round her.
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She in her silver-gray silk, with lilies of the valley (John’s flower) in her bosom and hair. . . . We had a little feast, sent by good Mrs. Judge Shaw; then the old folks danced round the bridal pair.” Eight years later, in
Little Women,
Louisa created a similar scene:

[T]he only ornaments she wore were the lilies of the valley which “her John” liked best of all the flowers that grew. . . . All three [sisters] wore suits of thin silver gray. . . . There was no bridal procession, but a sudden silence fell upon the room as Mr. March and the young pair took their places under the green arch. Mother and sisters gathered close, as if loath to give Meg up; the fatherly voice broke more than once, which only seemed to make the service more beautiful and solemn. . . . After lunch . . . Laurie . . . [said]: “All the married people take hands and dance around the new made husband and wife . . .” [prompting all to] dance around the bridal pair.

The flesh-and-blood bridal pair “left for their home in Chelsea at 1
¹
/
₂
,” Samuel Joseph noted, to begin their married life in a house owned by John’s maternal grandparents, the Bridges, near the beach just north of Boston.
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Then the mother of the bride took a nap.
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The next day Samuel Joseph visited Frank Sanborn’s school, which he was considering for his fifteen-year-old son, “Bonnie.”
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To Sanborn, whose students included the offspring of Emerson, Hawthorne, John Brown, Henry James Sr., and Horace Mann, Samuel Joseph said, “I am desirous of removing my son George Emerson May from [a school in] West Newton to Concord.
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 . . . My sister’s maternal care, and her daughters’
sisterly affection will cherish and quicken his domestic virtues. I wish him also to enjoy the benefits of your school. Can you receive him?” Bonnie began the term with Sanborn that fall and boarded with the Alcotts.

Later that day the Alcotts hosted a party for the family of John Brown. “A large party of antislavery ladies and gentlemen met at Mr. Alcott’s,” Samuel Joseph wrote.
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“Mrs. John Brown was there” with her baby, the youngest of John Brown’s twenty children, who charmed Louisa and Charlotte.
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Louisa later reported, “C[harlotte] and I went and worshipped [him] in our own way . . . kissing him . . . and feeling highly honored when he sucked our fingers.”
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She described Emerson and her Uncle Sam “cuddled into a corner” with their plates and teacups. The crowd of about forty people “had an earnest talk upon nonresistance,” Samuel Joseph noted in his journal, but it is likely that he was the one who hewed most closely to that old faith.
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“Samuel J. May’s plea for peace” before and during the Civil War “was most touching,” according to Ednah Dow Cheney, “for he stood as truly an opponent of slavery as any man living, and firmly as ever he maintained his old faith in non-resistance.” In early June, after he and Louisa attended a memorial service in Boston for the Reverend Theodore Parker, who had died of tuberculosis at forty-nine, Samuel Joseph brought his Harvard classmate George B. Emerson to Chelsea to visit the newlywed Pratts.
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At her desk in Concord, Louisa spent the days after the wedding transforming her tangled thoughts into a short story based on her sister’s courtship. Her emotions dictated the subjects of her work: whatever aroused her strong feelings worked its way into her fiction. The
Atlantic
paid her seventy-five dollars for the resulting story, “A Modern Cinderella.”
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“Emerson praised it,” she said with pride. Many “people wrote to me about it and patted me on the head.
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[I] paid bills and began to simmer another” story to sell. With both Anna and Elizabeth gone, Louisa felt even more strongly that she had to stay by and support her mother, so she and May remained in Concord for most of the summer, riding neighbors’ horses in their free time. Louisa “had a funny lover,” a handsome, forty-year-old southern man whom she eventually rebuffed. Privately she complained, “My adorers are all queer.”

Louisa and May took over the housekeeping whenever Abigail was absent or sick. “My wife is very well, and does her own work” in the
house, Bronson observed that summer.
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“My wife . . . lives in her family mostly as mothers and wives will.”
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A year later he reported that “Louisa writes stories still and assists her mother about housekeeping.”
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Louisa and her parents spent the eventful winter of 1860–61 alone together at Orchard House, as Abraham Lincoln became president, the South seceded from the Union, and the nation anticipated war. May moved to Syracuse to live with her uncle and aunt and teach drawing at the insane asylum where Anna had worked.
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“More luck for May,” Louisa wrote in her journal in December.
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“She wants to go to Syracuse and teach, and Dr. W[ilbur] sends for her, thanks to Uncle S. J. May. I sew like a steam-engine for a week, and get her ready. On the 17th [I] go to B[oston] and see our youngest start on her first little flight alone in to the world, full of hope and courage.”