Louisa as Activist Transcript

Welcome to Let Genius Burn, a podcast series about the life and legacy of Louisa May Alcott. I’m Jamie Burgess and I’m Jill Fuller. In today’s episode, we’re talking about the issues that stirred Louisa’s soul, many of which still resonate with us today. We’ll be exploring empathy, equality, and emancipation--and getting rid of corsets. This is Louisa as Activist.

On a chilly New Year’s Eve 1862, at the end of the third year of a bitter and bloody war between the Union and the Confederacy, Louisa May Alcott lay in bed waiting for midnight. She wasn’t feeling like her usual self, full of energy and vigor. Instead, she was worn down, inexplicably achy and exhausted. Beginning two weeks before, on December 17, when the wounded soldiers from the Battle of Fredericksburg began to arrive at the hospital where she was stationed in Georgetown, Washington, DC, Louisa May Alcott had been working non-stop to provide for the wounded and tend to the dead.

The past two weeks were a blur of writing letters, wrapping wounds, feeding soldiers, telling them jokes. As she became more exhausted by the effort, she was convinced she needed to work harder. This was a trait she inherited from her mother Abigail, something she had witnessed during Abigail’s years as a “missionary to the poor” in Boston when Louisa was a teenager. Rather than slow down and rest, Louisa began to take runs in the brisk morning air to give her energy and take her out of the hospital walls.

This late December night, she had to admit: she was unwell.

Then, the bells began to ring out. It was the beginning of a new year, 1863, a year full of hope—that the war would end, that there would be freedom and justice for the Black people who had lived in slavery. The Emancipation Proclamation came into effect at midnight, and the people of Washington, DC were cheering and hollering.

Louisa danced from her bed and around the room. Her roommate was less enthused, but Louisa did not let it dampen her spirits. Though her voice was hoarse and sore, she cheered as best she could, and she leaned out her window to wave her handkerchief at the crowd of Black men celebrating below, who popped firecrackers and sang “Glory, Hallelujah.” 

The singing lasted all night.

The Emancipation Proclamation was far from perfect—it did not free all men and women in slavery immediately. Instead, it placated certain wealthy slaveholders in the border states. People escaping slavery from the South had to make it to the North in order to achieve freedom, a dangerous journey that many did not survive. Still, for Louisa, like the revelers in the street, there was a sense of joy and satisfaction at its recognition of freedom.

The Alcotts had long been involved in the antislavery movement, and Louisa’s mother Abigail claimed that Louisa had been an abolitionist since the age of three. Their antislavery sentiments were handed down through many generations on Abigail’s side of the family. Social justice was not just Louisa’s legacy; it was in her blood.

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On Abigail’s side of the family, Judge Samuel Sewall, her great-great grandfather, believed the family was cursed when he sentenced twenty women to death during the Salem Witch Trials. Afterwards, he became known as the ‘repentant judge,’ believing the only way to lift the curse and right the wrongs was to fight for equality.

Judge Sewall has a complicated legacy, but is ultimately remembered for writing an anti-slavery tract more than a hundred and fifty years before the Civil War in 1700 and fighting for Indigenous peoples’ rights. Whether or not he was right about the curse, many of his descendants were ardent abolitionists, including Abigail’s brother, Samuel May.

Samuel served as the first general agent and corresponding secretary of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, and he made his home a safe stop on the Underground Railroad. He traveled the northeast making anti-slavery sermons and speaking on behalf of women’s equality. In these early years, abolition was not a popular stance. In fact, Samuel May was regularly threatened by mobs and told never to return to Boston. 

As for Louisa’s father, Bronson, biographer Madelon Bedell writes, “It would have been unthinkable for Bronson Alcott to have been anything but an abolitionist.” He was passionate and principled, and more than many of his colleagues, he believed in taking action—even if it meant the use of violence or force—for the immediate emancipation of all people living in slavery.

Bronson and Abigail brought their fervent beliefs to Louisa’s education. The Alcotts too made their home a stop on the Underground Railroad. The work was done in secret, so it’s impossible to know who exactly passed through their home at Hillside in Concord, but Bronson described that at least one of these freedom-seekers talked openly with his girls about the wrongs against people in slavery. Louisa practiced writing with another man, showing him how to form letters with a piece of coal on their hearth.

One of the proudest moments in Louisa’s abolitionist activism was welcoming John Brown’s widow to Concord in 1860. In 1859, John Brown organized a group of about twenty men to attack Harper’s Ferry, Virginia and take control of the armory, in an effort to gain weapons and free the enslaved people in the area. Now called the Raid on Harper’s Ferry, the raid is considered a key event leading up to the Civil War. Sixteen people died in the raid, including two of Brown’s own sons. Brown was hanged two months later for murder and insurrection.

Far from thinking he had been too violent or radical in his approach (as many did), Louisa referred to him as “St. John the Just,” and she proudly served his widow with tea and cookies the following spring, thinking of it as the least she could do. 

Less than a year from the start of the war, it was still considered radical to be an abolitionist, especially when it came to supporting Brown, whose efforts had led to the deaths of so many. When the authorities came to arrest her neighbor, Franklin Sanborn, for being one of the “secret six” who provided funding for Brown’s raid, bells rang through Concord, waking up everyone—everyone, it seemed, except Louisa and her youngest sister May, who only heard the following morning how the women of Concord stormed the carriage that was meant to take Sanborn away. One woman used her own body as a barricade and fought with a cane. These were the women of Louisa May Alcott’s community, people she looked up to and learned from. Surrounded by a progressive group, it can be difficult to imagine why others haven’t reached the same beliefs, and Louisa became increasingly incensed by what she perceived as needless inequality and suffering.

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On May 22, 1856, as debates about slavery were beginning to boil over toward war, Charles Sumner, an abolitionist and senator from Massachusetts, was sitting at his desk on the floor of the senate in the capitol in Washington, DC. Two days before, Sumner had made a fervent antislavery speech to the senate, asking for their support. Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery democrat from South Carolina, approached Sumner at his desk, and as Sumner began to stand, Brooks took out his cane and began to beat Sumner over the head with it. Sumner fell to the floor and became trapped under his heavy writing desk, while Brooks continued to hit him, repeatedly, with the cane, until he was blinded by his own blood. Sumner nearly died from these injuries, and the attack further polarized the two political parties and differing opinions on slavery.

Six months later, Sumner’s homecoming in Boston was celebrated with a parade and demonstration, and Louisa May Alcott was sure to be in attendance.

Louisa wrote in a letter to her sister Anna that Sumner looked pale but otherwise healthy, despite the wounds to his head, as he rode down Beacon Street in Boston. In front of the State House, Louisa could not hear the speeches at the demonstration, so she “tore down” Hancock Street and stood opposite Sumner’s house to catch another glimpse of him. There, “the leader of the cavalcade cried out, ‘Three cheers for the mother of Charles Sumner.’” Sumner stepped aside, and a small woman stood on the doorstep, waving. More moved by the old woman than by the sight of the senator, Louisa wrote to Anna that she “pitched about like a mad woman, shouted, waved, hung onto fences, rushed through crowds, and swarmed about in a state of rapturous insanity till it was all over & then I went home hoarse & worn out.” She was young and energetic, full of the zest of young people who hunger for change and believe it is possible.

As she had been taught by her parents, Louisa wanted action—she was not content to sit still while inequality reigned. At her first opportunity to join the Union cause, as a nurse in 1862, Louisa left home for Washington, DC. She was prepared to give her life for the cause.

Not every Northerner supported the immediate and irrevocable emancipation of Black people from chattel slavery, but that cannot be said of Louisa May Alcott. She believed in unconditional emancipation, and when her time came to serve in the war, she went willingly, hopefully, ready to make a difference. It was there that she heard the bells ring through the streets in celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation, the beginning of the long road to legal equality—a road we continue to walk today.

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Less than two weeks after the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, Louisa May Alcott was too sick to leave her bed. Her father came to Washington, DC to bring her home and nurse her back to health.

As she slowly recovered the following spring, Louisa wrote about her experiences in the Union hospital and published them in the Boston Commonwealth. Her stories were a hit—a term used even back then—and she was approached by two publishers interested in turning the sketches into a book. Louisa eventually chose James Redpath as her publisher, because he was an abolitionist, and he agreed to give at least five cents from each copy sold to orphans who had lost their fathers in the Civil War. 

Even after she almost gave her life for the cause, Louisa was willing to give the thing she wanted and needed most desperately—her hard-earned money—to others who needed it.

Abolitionism was far from the Alcotts’ only cause. To Bronson, it was most important that his life should reflect his values, so he lived out his principles and brought his family members along with him, sometimes against their wills. For many years, the Alcotts ate a strictly vegan diet and boycotted cotton, because it benefitted slavery, and wool, because it was an animal product. This led the family to wear linen, an ineffectual material in cold New England winters. Bronson’s family was not always so pleased by his so-called social justice, which seemed to cause them strife and create so little change.

On the other hand, Abigail Alcott offered Louisa practical ways to live out her beliefs. Her own ideas about dress reform, for example, benefitted the girls rather than making their lives more difficult. Abigail thought corsets were a cage, and she encouraged the girls to loosen their corsets, so their bodies could function better. Then, she stopped wearing one altogether.

Abigail had an enormous capacity for empathy that made her an effective activist who could engage the public to her cause, raising funds that could truly make an impact. She was especially well-suited for work with the poor, and it became her mission to serve Boston’s underserved groups.

Abigail’s reports on her work, some of which can be found in My Heart Is Boundless, the only published collection of Abigail’s writings, offer the best analyses of poverty in this era. Her writings are so relevant that they speak easily to the same issues about the rights of workers and the working class today, some one-hundred-and-seventy years later. Consider this letter she wrote “To the Ladies of the Southern Friendly Society:” “Incompetent wages for labor performed is the cruel tyranny of capitalist power over the laborer’s necessities. The capitalist speculates on their bones and sinews. Will not this cause Poverty—Crime—Despair? Employment is needed, but just compensation is more needed.” 

Abigail saw firsthand the needs of the poor in Boston, and despite the Alcotts’ own destitution (at the time, they were living in a small shack, in the same neighborhood as the poor she served), she worked herself tirelessly to improve the lives of these immigrants and impoverished people.

These experiences within her own family taught Louisa that living out your beliefs about social justice was not optional. Striving for equality and a better world touched every part of her life, from the food she ate to the clothes she wore. It was her moral imperative as a human being.

Eventually, when Louisa was no longer well enough to attend demonstrations and pitch about like a madwoman, she sought a different way to participate in political conversations. Like so much of her life, it came down to writing.

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In writing, Louisa imagined a world where her beliefs made a difference. It was a world of equality between men and women, where women had agency and rights.

Louisa’s uncle, Samuel May, once said, “A perfect character in either man or woman is a compound of the virtues of each.” Eve LaPlante, author of Marmee and Louisa, points out that Louisa used this idea about gender equality to create female characters who were strong, even masculine. Jo, with her boyish name and cropped hair, represents a striving for gender equality, a woman who will not conform to constraints on women, directly because she sees them as unjust.

As for worker’s rights, Louisa’s novel Work: A Story of Experience also effectively advocates for class equality. The characters are subjected to the worst of the working world, and Christie, the protagonist, even contemplates suicide. The novel explores the conditions of work in industrializing America, advocating for workers’ rights, addressing the gender pay gap, and, perhaps most importantly, giving voice and agency to the oppressed, making them human and empathetic.

After Louisa made her fortune as a writer, she was not content to sit back as a member of the moneyed class. The lessons of her years in poverty and the difficulties she’d faced as a woman stayed with her, and she remained active and vigilant against inequalities until the end of her life.

On April 19, 1875, during the centennial celebrations of the Battle of Concord, the women of Concord were prohibited from participation in many of the events, including a parade where President Ulysses S. Grant rode through town. Enraged by the exclusion, Louisa wrote an article for the magazine Women’s Journal that predicted “there will come a day of reckoning and, then the tax-paying women of Concord will not be forgotten. … Following in the footsteps of their forefathers, they will utter another protest that shall be ‘heard round the world.’”

The revolution did not come as quickly as Louisa would have liked. When her mother passed away in 1878, women still were not allowed to vote even in local elections. Then, in the summer of 1879, Massachusetts passed a law that allowed women to vote in town elections that “involved children and education.” The day the law was passed, Louisa hurried to the town hall and was first to register to vote. 

She spent the next several months trying to drum up interest among other women in Concord, but she was not so successful. On September 4th 1879, for example, she wrote to Ednah Dow Cheney, “Our meeting last evening was a small one, and no one had registered because of jelly-making, sewing, sickness, or company, so I gave them a good scolding & offered to drive the timid sheep to the fatal spot where they seemed to expect some awful doom.”

Even Ellen Emerson—Ralph Waldo Emerson’s oldest daughter—wouldn’t register to vote, and Louisa remarked on the influence she held over the other women in Concord; they would not vote, because Ellen didn’t. She signed this letter “Yours disgustedly.”

By the spring of 1880, only twenty Concord women were registered and arrived to vote in the school committee election. Louisa lined up with the other women outside of Concord’s town hall. Her father went with her, for moral support, he said. He proposed letting the women vote first.

The twenty women cast their ballots. In a surprising move, Judge Ebenezer Hoar moved to close the polls with only the women’s votes. The motion was carried, and the women had the only say in who was elected to the school committee in Concord that year, a tiny consolation for hundreds of years of patriarchy and oppression.

When Louisa was a teenager, Abigail Alcott had organized and presented a petition to the Massachusetts State Constitutional Convention on behalf of women’s suffrage. Her petition was rejected 108 to 14. Still, Abigail never gave up hope. When she was seventy-three, she said, “I mean to go to the polls before I die, even if my daughters have to carry me.” She did not live quite long enough. Louisa cast her ballot that day for all that Abigail taught her about gender and racial equality. But the fight, as today, was far from over.