Marmee & Louisa (11 page)

About a month after Anna’s birth, Bronson wrote to his father-in-
law requesting money to furnish their new home. Bronson’s sponsor in Philadelphia, Reuben Haines, had purchased for the Alcotts a large, two-story stone house with a garden on nearly an acre along Germantown’s main road in which Bronson could teach and his family could live.
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Colonel May demurred. He told his daughter-in-law Lucretia that he disliked supporting those who “liv[ed] beyond their means.” Lucretia wrote to Samuel Joseph, “Now that [your father’s] feelings are not the kindest toward Abba, I know he will not feel as [generous as] you or I should about it.”
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Samuel Joseph often sent his sister gifts of ten or twenty dollars, but his salary was modest and not always forthcoming. Later that year, likely due to Samuel Joseph’s gentle prodding of their father, the Alcotts received two thousand dollars (equivalent to $38,000 in 2000) from an anonymous donor, probably Colonel May.
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Much of this money went to settling Bronson’s ancient peddling debts.
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Anna was two months old when Bronson’s attention was entirely diverted by the launching of his new school, in their house. His observations of Anna had revealed to him that “infancy is when most good can be done for the improvement of the character.”
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His task now was to improve the characters of his six students, boys and girls of eight to ten years of age, who boarded with his family while receiving regular lessons from him. These “6 children in my family besides a goodly company to dine and be looked after 7 hours in the day . . . unfits one for much mental effort,” Abigail complained to Lucretia.
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As she coped with new motherhood and a house full of children, Samuel Joseph preached and lectured throughout New England as an agent of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, raising money and support. “He traveled much in those years,” his daughter Charlotte recalled, “to preach in other ministers’ pulpits or to further the Anti-Slavery cause,” which alienated some white members of his congregation.

The Reverend May’s wife, house servants, and pulpit enabled him to devote himself to the cause. Lucretia hated his frequent absences from home but generally supported his antislavery work, particularly after she encountered open racism in Connecticut. She shocked a white neighbor there by saying, “I would rather marry a virtuous and sober colored man [than] an intemperate white man.”
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Although the steady stream of “black, white & grey” visitors to her house seemed overwhelming when her children were small, her objections suggested a light touch. In February
1833 she wrote to her husband, “I hope you will ‘remember not to forget’ that you went to Boston
this time to see your father
& will not give all your time to emancipating slaves & settling all the quarrels in Christendom & educating all the children.” A year later she begged him to “leave the slaves alone for one week” to join her and their infant and toddler.
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As Abigail’s brother railed against slavery in town halls and churches, Abigail struggled through busy days and restless nights. Five-month-old Anna, she informed Lucretia, was “sick with teething and bowel complaints.” Before Anna’s first birthday Abigail was pregnant again. Late in their second summer in Germantown, Bronson left her, six months pregnant, with their baby and the boarders while he spent several weeks in his hometown, in Hartford, and in Boston. Abigail became “unusually” depressed, she recalled later. “I was suffering under one of those periods of mental depression which women are subject to during pregnancy.”
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In her worst moments she felt she was “decaying” like the corpses in the family vault, somewhere in the bowels of the earth.
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Everyone around her, she observed, desired that her second child be male. She resisted this. “I always rejoiced over the birth of each girl-child,” she said later to another mother of daughters. “I never was one as Miss [Margaret] Fuller says ‘to make the lot of the sex such that mothers must be sad when daughters are born.
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’ Oh no!” She wrote to her brother on the day after Anna’s birth, “Lucretia I suppose is ready with her condolence that it is a girl—I don’t need it.
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My happiness in [the baby’s] existence . . . is quite as much as I can well bear—indeed I cannot conceive that its being a boy could add thereto.” In part because of the deficiencies of her own education, Abigail was determined to raise strong, confident children, male or female, by providing them with a good education and many opportunities.

On November 29, 1832, Louisa May Alcott was born at home in Germantown. Named for her late aunt, the sister with whom Abigail had hoped to start a school, Louisa became Abigail’s third precious Lu, after her sister and sister-in-law. Bronson was pleased that Louisa arrived on his “birth day, being 33 years of age.”

This baby seemed different to him. Louisa was larger and healthier than Anna at birth, delightfully “fat” and “fine.”
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She had “a fair complexion, dark bright eyes, long dark hair, a high forehead, and altogether a countenance of more than usual intelligence,” a friend said of the new
baby.
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In announcing Louisa’s arrival to Colonel May, whom he now called Father May, Bronson drew a portrait of Abigail that both sender and recipient must have considered flattering: she was “formed for domestic sentiment rather than the gaze and heartlessness of what is falsely called ‘society.
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’ ” It is not clear if Bronson knew his wife had been depressed while he was gone, or, if so, that her depression had begun to intensify.

Close female friends of Abigail’s were well aware of her condition, however, as well as of some of its causes.
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“Our dear Mrs. Alcott has an acquisition of another daughter to her family,” another friend wrote to Reuben Haines’s wife, Jane, when Louisa was just days old. “Mrs. A[lcott] was so ill that at one period [during the birth] I thought she had ceased to breathe but she revived again.” Bleeding was still the most common medical treatment for laboring women in distress.
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Abigail “has been wrought up to a high pitch of excitement from her [hired] nurse’s inexperience and neglect of her baby,” Louisa. “The little creature was not even properly washed so that its eyes were in a sad condition and its bowels not attended to. The Dr upon one of his visits found the child in almost a dying condition for the want of nourishment, the mother having nothing to give it.” A new nurse, who cleaned Louisa and helped Abigail begin to breastfeed her, reported that Louisa was “a dear little pet . . . the prettiest best little thing in the world. You will wonder to hear
me
call any thing so young pretty. But it is really so in an uncommon degree.” Two weeks later mother and child were both healthy and Abigail was calling the new nurse “the savior of her infant’s life.”

Bronson, meanwhile, was struggling to maintain his school. In a familiar scenario, parents of his students had begun to object to his open classroom and untraditional methods. Some parents, finding Mr. Alcott “eccentric” and “peculiar,” withdrew their children.
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By midwinter he had so few students that he could not afford to continue the school, although several of his former students stayed on as paying boarders under Abigail’s care.

Running a boardinghouse did not suit her. “It is a thankless employment to take care of other people’s children,” she wrote to her brother on February 20, 1833.
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When Louisa was nearly three months old and Anna almost two years, Abigail developed a serious problem with her vision, which would plague her for the rest of her life. “Dear Sam and Lu, I have been wishing to write you for at least 2 months but my eyes have been in no state.”
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She had resolved, “I never want a larger
domain than 3 rooms, [with] 1 servant, [only] my husband and children for occupants.”

Bronson announced in April that he was moving out, to read literature and philosophy in a rented room in central Philadelphia. Not wishing to part with her husband, Abigail suggested that the whole family move. He refused, saying children do better in the country than the city, so they should stay in Germantown. A separation would benefit them all, he promised.
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For the next eighteen months—a period that coincided with Louisa’s infancy—Bronson spent most of his time in a room near the Philadelphia public library immersed in Coleridge, Wordsworth, Spenser, Carlyle, and in translation Goethe, Schiller, Dante, and Kant.
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Abigail was beside herself. Three years married, with a two-year-old and an infant, she felt her life was in shambles. “A full connected letter seems to me now a formidable undertaking,” she wrote to her brother and sister-in-law. “We do not earn the bread; the butter we have to think about. . . .

My eyes are very uncertain, and my time is abundantly occupied with my babies.
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 . . . I am almost at times discouraged if I find the result [of my efforts] prove unfavorable. My Anna is just at that critical period when the diseases incident to [typical of] her age make her irritable and engrossing; and yet so intelligent as to her making inferences and drawing conclusions about everything which is done for her, or said to her, and I live in constant fear that I may mistake the motive which instigates many of her actions. Mr. A[lcott] aids me in general principles but nobody can aid me in the details, and it is a theme of constant thought, an object of momentary solicitude. . . . I know you laugh at me and think me a slave to my children and think me foolishly anxious. I can bear it all, better than one reproach of conscience, or one thoughtless word or look given to my Anna’s injury.

Another small school that Bronson had begun in Philadelphia was “slowly gaining confidence and numbers,” she reported.
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“We do not make much noise but shed some light, which travels faster and more direct” than noise, “and its influence is more effective.”

She tried to maintain the hope that had come so easily three years earlier. Bronson “soar[s] high and dig[s] deep,” she told her brother in
October 1833. Unfortunately, “such minds are somewhat solitary in this world of folly and fashion when a man’s hat is the most essential part of his head, and his coat his surest passport to society.”
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She wished “all philosophers would consent to admit in their domestic arrangements a financier . . . They are often (for lack of this) reduced to the most humiliating dependence. Wisdom must be fed and clothed, and neither the butcher [n]or tailor will take pay in aphorisms or hypotheses. There comes then the ‘tug of war’ between matter and mind.” Long before her daughter Louisa, Abigail showed she had a way with words.

On April 24, 1833, in Brooklyn, Connecticut, Lucretia gave birth to her third child and only daughter, Charlotte Coffin May. Charlotte, like her first cousin Louisa, was named for a maternal aunt.
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At Charlotte’s birth her cousin was five months old, and her father, the minister, was engrossed in the scandal that would make him famous.
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Chapter Four

Sacrifices Must Be Made

Y
ou and Miss Crandall are trying to destroy our town,” a lawyer shouted at Samuel Joseph May. In the spring of 1833, the two men faced each other on the town green in Canterbury, Connecticut. Across from the green and the meetinghouse and beside the home of the lawyer, Andrew Judson, the leader of the American Colonization Society, stood the schoolhouse in which a white woman named Prudence Crandall was teaching a class of Negro girls.

“The idea of having a school of nigger girls so near me is insupportable,” Judson railed at the thirty-five-year-old Unitarian minister, who was coordinating Miss Crandall’s legal defense, having already raised ten thousand dollars from New York abolitionists. “The colored people never can rise from their menial condition in our country,” Judson went on. “Africa is the place for them. . . . They ought not to be permitted to rise here. . . . You and your friend Garrison . . . are violating the Constitution of our Republic, which settled forever the status of the black men in this land. . . . The sooner you abolitionists abandon your project the better for our country, for the niggers, and yourselves.”

Calmly, Samuel Joseph replied, “There never will be fewer colored people in this country than there are now. Of the vast majority of them, this is the native land, as much as it is ours. It will be unjust, inhuman, in us to drive them out, or to make them willing to go by our cruel treatment of them. And,” he continued, “if they should all become willing to depart, it would not be practicable to transport across the Atlantic
Ocean and settle properly on the shores of Africa, from year to year, half so many of them as would be born here in the same time. . . . The only question is, whether we will recognize the rights which God gave them as men, and encourage and assist them to become all he has made them capable of being, or whether we will continue wickedly to deny them the privileges we enjoy, . . . [and] enslave and imbrute them.”