Marmee & Louisa (9 page)

Even as Bronson mocked the imperious Aunt Q, his admiration of her world grew. “The morality of Boston is more pure than that of any other city in America,” he felt. “Channing is its moral teacher. His system of instruction is that of Christ.” This “righteous” city had hosted the
momentous event of the past year, his “connexion with Miss May,” of which he “anticipate[d] the fullest felicities.”

Abigail, meanwhile, anticipated the kind of family she hoped they would create. The mother “is the most interesting as well as important member in the community,” she believed. “The father, brother, husband, son all feel her importance and are rational, enlightened enough to acknowledge it.” This was not true among the Mays, but it would, she vowed, be true among the Alcotts.

She spent the autumn in Connecticut with Samuel Joseph and Lucretia. More sad news came in November 1828, when her last surviving sister, Louisa May Greele, who had been “miserable” for months with “horrible headaches” of unknown cause, died at age thirty-five, leaving two children.
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Samuel Joseph and Abigail went to Boston for Louisa’s funeral, while Lucretia stayed in Connecticut with her baby. “Dear Lucretia . . . [seems] nearer and dearer to me than any female friend in the world,” Abigail wrote, now that her mother and sisters were all gone.
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Years later Abigail asked her brother to “tell Lucretia her love is more substantial than the world’s Gold.”
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In Brooklyn a week after Louisa’s funeral, one-year-old Joseph May developed a cough and high fever. He was so pale and weak by December 11 that Lucretia notified Samuel Joseph, who was still in Boston. “You had best come home soon,” she scrawled early the next morning. “7 o/clock the darling is no better, do come soon, yrs in love, LFMay.” Before handing her note to a rider for delivery to Boston, she added, “The Dr says he is no better. He is very very sick.”

Even before her note could be delivered, a messenger arrived at Federal Court in Boston to say the baby had died. Samuel Joseph “hurried home” to his wife and dead son “with a brain almost bewildered.” This loss recalled the loss of his brother Edward, which had proved God’s existence, guided him to the ministry, and helped him face death. “I pray God that these impressive lessons may sink deep into my heart,” he wrote in his journal, “and induce me to lead a life of greater holiness and devotion to his will and the happiness of my fellow-men.”

Abigail was drawn back to Connecticut to comfort her brother and Lucretia. She soon returned to the parsonage with her sister Louisa’s children, four-year-old Samuel Sewall Greele and two-year-old Louisa May Greele. For most of 1829 Abigail “had the care of these children,
boarding with them at my brother’s in Brooklyn, Conn.” Lucretia May gave birth to a second son, John Edward, on October 7, 1829, again with Abigail present.

Throughout these months, Bronson occupied her thoughts. In him she had found a man she could love and who could make her happy, she was sure. Like her mother, sisters, and Lu, she would marry and bear children. Unlike them, she would speak and be heard.

In Boston the enrollment at Bronson’s school began to decline, reducing his income and rendering his future uncertain, further delaying their wedding. He kept busy with “fearless free-thinking and brisk correspondence with Abigail May.”
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Eager to begin their shared life, she again sought assistance from relatives. Late in 1829 Dr. Charles Windship, her sister Catherine’s widower, learned of an opening suitable for Bronson. The Free Inquirers of Boston needed a teacher “willing to leave disputed [religious] points out of his system of teaching and inculcate nothing but what can be demonstrated to the senses and perceptions of the children. Such an individual they will amply reward by a salary of $1000 or $1200 per annum”—more than double what Bronson had ever earned.
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But Bronson said no. The job was “absolutely wrong,” he said. The Free Inquirers “do not love virtue nor truth” and “are indifferent to everything truly good,” so “I shall have nothing to do with them.” This astonished Colonel May, who continued to worry about Bronson’s ability to support a wife and family.

In February 1830, Aunt Q died, at eighty-two, cutting Abigail’s living link to the American Revolution.
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By then Abigail and Bronson had chosen May 23 as their wedding day, despite the problems at his school. Her father, now resigned to her choice and hoping to maintain good relations, invited Bronson to call on him on Federal Court. He gave Bronson his daughter’s dowry of five hundred dollars, in several payments, and with his second wife gathered household “sundries” for the young couple’s future abode.
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These included a mahogany washstand, a framed looking-glass, a mattress of horse hair, blankets, a rug, a sofa, a table, lamp oil, silver knives, forks, and spoons, cups and saucers, a “platter, bowls, pitchers, [toilet] chamber and cover,” and a pair of fireplace bellows.

In mid-April Abigail returned for the last time from Brooklyn to Boston to prepare for her marriage. On the morning of Abigail’s departure, Lucretia described her emotions to Samuel Joseph. “We shall be
mourning our loss [of Abigail] & it will be to us a cross that the world can ill supply.
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She has so long shared our joy & participated in our sorrows & has become so identified with ourselves, that it is like plucking out an eye to part with her & I doubt not that many who know her less intimately & cannot so well estimate the excellent qualities of her mind & heart will share in our grief.” Not long afterward, when Samuel Joseph was away from home, Lucretia wrote to him, “I am solitary enough now that you and Abba are so far away.”

The Boston to which Abigail returned in 1830 had begun its transformation into a major city, which would soon make it unrecognizable to those who had known it as a country town.
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“I never desire to go near [Boston] for it is entirely changed to me,” Lucretia May wrote later.
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Boston had become a city in 1822 by a citizens’ vote. In 1830 its elected mayor was Abigail’s cousin Josiah Quincy, a reformer known for cleaning streets, renovating the waterfront, creating the Faneuil Hall market district, fighting prostitution and public drinking, and removing cows from Boston Common to make of it a leafy public park.
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The city was growing rapidly, following a period of no population growth during and just after the revolution. Its population now doubled every twenty-five years—from 25,000 inhabitants at Abigail’s birth, in 1800, to 60,000 at her wedding, thirty years later. By 1900 Boston would have more than 500,000 residents, a twenty-fold increase in one century. Its character was changing, too, as the maritime commerce that provided livings to Colonel May and his peers gave way to a market economy based on manufacturing.
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The factory system that began around 1800 would soon be a multimillion-dollar industry dependent on the labor of numerous new immigrants from Europe.
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As production and exchange moved farther from the home, the divide between the public sphere, limited to men, and the private domestic sphere of women grew wider.

Early on May 23, 1830, at home on Federal Court, Abigail donned a plaid silk walking dress with puffed sleeves that she had chosen for the occasion.
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She put on a stylish black beaver-fur hat. Her father and stepmother accompanied her to the Stone Church, as they still called King’s Chapel to avoid mentioning the monarchy. Joseph May, as a church warden, walked through the vestry before emerging from behind the pulpit to join his wife, Samuel Joseph, sons-in-law, and grandchildren in the family pew, No. 20, to the right of the chancel. Abigail’s father was
a “noticeable” figure, “with his massive square head, and manly figure,” his elegant waistcoat, breeches, and “grey stockings showing the muscular limbs of which he was justly proud, [and] the knee-buckles and shoe-buckles of the gentleman of the old style.”
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Bronson arrived in his best suit, with the long pants that were now in fashion. The Reverend Francis Greenwood, the church’s second Unitarian minister and Joseph May’s old friend, prepared to perform the ceremony.
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During the short wedding service, Abigail was painfully conscious of the absence of her mother and sisters, and of Lucretia, who had stayed in Connecticut with seven-month-old John.
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Acutely aware of her father’s disappointment in her choice of a husband, Abigail found comfort in her brother’s glistening eyes and beaming face. He and Lucretia were her dearest friends in the world, she felt. Of Abigail’s marriage Lucretia would pray, “May she never have cause to repent her passage & may he whom she has chosen for the deposit of her heart never prove unworthy of the sacred trust she has reposed in him & may they live long & happily a blessing to each other & to all the ‘little Alcotts’ who may rise toward them.”

After the wedding, Colonel and Madam May hosted a party for Mr. and Mrs. Alcott. The company feasted on cakes, tarts, and puddings prepared by servants, oranges and meats arrayed on platters, and glasses of porter, claret, Madeira, rum, and brandy. That evening Abigail and her husband walked the few blocks north to Mrs. Newell’s boardinghouse on Franklin Street, where he rented a room. This bare chamber was the first of many dwellings they would share. But Abigail felt no fear or worry, only hope. She embraced her beloved and with him went promptly to bed.

Chapter Three

Humiliating Dependence

T
wo weeks after her wedding Abigail was pregnant. “I am very well,” she wrote to Lucretia in June, before she knew she had conceived.
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“My husband is all I expected.
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 . . . I have already seen the good effects [of marriage] operating in our lives and conversations. My mind is gradually engaging.”

For most of the next decade Abigail would be pregnant or breastfeeding or both. The prospect of a baby pleased her. She longed for a family with whom to re-create the love and security she had known as a child. At the same time, though, she worried about Bronson’s employment, which was “inadequate to our support.”
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Less than a month after her wedding, his school had “diminished a good deal in consequence of families going into the country.
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I hope some good salary offer will be made him ere long. It is important to him, for all financial concerns are very irksome and embarrassing to him. A salary would relieve his mind from all those anxieties which are incident to the fluctuations of a private school.”

Bronson did not find a job he felt he could consider until autumn, when a wealthy Philadelphia Quaker named Reuben Haines with an interest in universal education invited him to Philadelphia to create a school with the Scottish educational pioneer William Russell. Bronson’s letters of recommendation included several from Abigail’s family friends: The Harvard professor George Ticknor noted that Bronson had “married into one of our most respectable families,” while the Reverend
Joseph Tuckerman described Bronson as “one of the most child-like and amiable of men.”
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Bronson accepted the job and determined to close what little remained of his Boston school in November and move with his pregnant wife to Philadelphia. Abigail, unlike her wanderer husband, had little experience of travel, having occupied only the houses of her parents and brother. As she prepared for the first move of her married life, she could not have imagined that she and Bronson were establishing a pattern. In their first thirty years the Alcotts would relocate more than thirty times, mostly to rented or borrowed homes.

Abigail faced the future with hope. She was expecting a child, Bronson had found a fine job, and together, she prayed, they would create a loving home. She might teach alongside her husband; surely she would teach her own children. In addition, she would maintain a connection to books, ideas, and the world.

In their boardinghouse room on Tuesday, October 12, 1830, an advertisement in the
Boston Courier
caught her eye. A man named William Lloyd Garrison requested the use for an evening of “a Hall or Meeting-house . . . in which to vindicate the rights of TWO MILLIONS of American citizens who are now groaning in servile chains in this boasted land of liberty.”
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Garrison, a twenty-four-year-old printer from Massachusetts who had recently been released from a Maryland jail for publicly criticizing someone for shipping slaves to New Orleans, was now on a tour of Philadelphia, New York, and New England, lecturing and seeking support for his cause. He promised “just, benevolent, and constitutional measures” to end slavery. If no space were donated, he offered to “address the citizens of Boston in the open air, on the Common.”

Abigail was captivated. She and Samuel Joseph had often talked of the evils of slavery. But this man offered something new. He not only condemned the trade but also promised to end it. No church she knew would host such a man. He would likely be thrown in jail or forced out of town. “Too many Boston folk were making a great deal of money out of slavery” to welcome immediate emancipation, the historian Mary C. Crawford observed.
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“Nearly all of Boston was strongly opposed to Garrison.” Prominent Bostonians preferred either gradual emancipation of slaves over many decades or their resettlement to African colonies, such as Liberia.