Crossing the bridge over the frozen Musketaquid River, where he noticed Emerson’s children skating with friends, and then walking along the frozen mud-churned streets of Concord, Amos Bronson Alcott talked. He talked to women carrying parcels beneath the snow-covered awnings. He talked to children on their way home from Franklin Sanborn’s school. He talked to farmers and carpenters, hot and red-faced despite the cold. Earlier in the day he had invited his friend Henry David Thoreau into his parlor, where the two men warmed themselves before the fire and gazed at the marble bust of Plato perched atop his crammed bookcase. As usual, he had talked.
On this particular day in February 1860, however, Bronson Alcott was not speaking about the divinity within, or about a new heaven on Earth, or even about the pressing need for a decent geography book for the pupils of Concord, his current pet project. He was instead consumed with the accomplishments of his second-oldest daughter, Louisa, whose melodramatic short story “Love and Self-Love” had just been published by the Atlantic Monthly. On this blustery day he carried a copy of the most distinguished literary journal in the country and was proudly displaying its table of contents to everyone.
Louisa was twenty-seven that year. Wry, ironic, alternately ebullient and stormy, she longed to become a best-selling author, as famous and consequential as Harriet Beecher Stowe, as enduring as her idol Charlotte Brontë. Like those authors, she was a cultural sponge; she absorbed her society’s concerns and contradictions, its fears and aspirations, and she transformed these things into plot, motive, resolution. Perhaps because she created characters who represented various points of view, she was more accepting of new ideas than her father. Bronson had settled upon his philosophy decades earlier, and it remained a formidable support, a bulwark against the changing world. Louisa was more open to the Darwinian ideas then coursing through Concord’s intellectual circles, so much so that she quickly absorbed them into the apprentice fiction she wrote that year.
She had long dreamed of leaving the provincial confines of Concord, of departing the old brown house she called “Apple Slump,” of visiting the pyramids in Egypt and the boulevards of Paris. She raged at the limitations imposed on womanhood in the nineteenth century, toying with the idea of becoming a stage actress, then a nurse. Mostly she wanted to write—to direct her prodigious energies into a dream world where candid, fearless young women fulfilled their duty and achieved love, all without compromising their inner selves. In Little Women, the work that was based upon life at Orchard House and that eventually fulfilled her aspirations for money and fame, Alcott provided a vivid portrait of her writing life. Speaking of her alter ego, Jo March, she wrote: “Every few weeks she would shut herself up in her room, put on her scribbling suit, and ‘fall into a vortex,’ as she expressed it, writing away . . . with all her heart and soul, for till that was finished she could find no peace.” There was something transcendent, almost ecstatic, about the experience. “When the writing fit came on, she gave herself up to it with entire abandon, and led a blissful life, unconscious of want, care, or bad weather, while she sat safe and happy in an imaginary world, full of friends almost as real and dear to her as any in the flesh.” Louisa ironically deployed her father’s language when she noted that the “divine afflatus usually lasted a week or two.” Eventually she emerged from her “‘vortex’ hungry, sleepy, cross, or despondent.”
Her energy found other outlets. She went outdoors, bunched her dress in one hand, and did what practically no other young woman of her period did: ran. She sped down country lanes and across pastures, sometimes through town, her dark hair streaming loose from its ribbons, her face flushed with exertion. And she proselytized on behalf of abolition. Like her mother, she belonged to the Concord Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, attended lectures that condemned Southern slavers, distributed pamphlets, and collected funds. John Brown’s visit to the village the year before had electrified her, and she had reacted to the news of his capture and arrest with outrage.
Mostly, though, she wrote. Brown’s death wrung a poem from her that conveyed her reverence for the executed man:
There blossomed forth a grander flower in the wilderness of wrong,
Untouched by Slavery’s bitter frost, A soul devout and strong . . .
No monument of quarried stone, No eloquence of speech,
Can ’grave the lessons on the land His martyrdom will teach.
She would always remember 1860 as a particularly “happy year,” in part because it heralded her entrance into professional authorship. But she was also referring to her hard-won emergence from another sort of vortex—a profound depression that had nearly swallowed her up in 1858 when her sister Lizzie died from scarlet fever. Two weeks later her older sister Anna was betrothed, and Louisa felt abandoned, deprived of her two most important confidantes. Weighed down by grief, inconsolably alone, she went to Boston in search of a job. Soon she wrote her family a baleful confession: she had sunk into such despair, she had considered throwing herself into the cold brackish water of the Mill Dam. Drawn to the promise of oblivion, she had stared at her shimmering reflection for a long time. “But then it seemed so mean to turn & run away before the battle was over that I went home, set my teeth & vowed I’d make things work in spite of the world, the flesh & the devil.”
“Love and Self-Love,” her first story published in the Atlantic, was a product of this heroic resolution. A cathartic melodrama, it tells of a sixteen-year-old orphan who marries someone twice her age, a middle-aged man in love with another woman. (Alcott’s models here were Jane Eyre, Bleak House, and numerous other Victorian page-turners.) Effie Home, the story’s heroine, strives to create the familial abode promised by her surname. Failing that, she tries to drown herself. Only after this dramatic event does her distant husband awaken to the needs of his bride, and the story ends with husband and wife learning to value mutual respect more highly than the passionate love neither feels.
Critics have read Alcott’s tale as a veiled account of Louisa’s relationship with her father, who became less stern and distant after his daughter confessed her desire to end her life. But the story also registers larger concerns of the era—for instance, the proper way to treat orphans. Orphans populate American fiction throughout the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth. They hunt whales, sail down the Mississippi, suffocate in society’s houses of mirth. The figure is linked to the migratory experiences of Americans, who severed ties with European culture and sought to construct new lives and new social identities upon the blank slate of a New World. Effie Home, like other fictional orphans, suffers from an abandonment that is as much existential as it is parental—a spiritual desertion Melville alludes to in Moby-Dick when he writes, “Our souls are like those orphans whose unwedded mothers die in bearing them.” “Love and Self-Love” is not only a sentimental love story, then, but also a tale of profound alienation, a work that dramatizes the collapse of prior beliefs and the feeling of bereavement that results. In this context it is worth noting that Effie’s older husband resembles not so much Bronson as his friend and neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who had allowed the young writer carte blanche to his library and prompted her to declare that he was “the man who has helped me most by his life, his books, his society. I can never tell all he has been to me.” Despite Emerson’s gifts, Louisa felt detached from the transcendentalist’s extravagant claims on behalf of the spirit, which did nothing in the here and now to relieve the hardships of daily life. Louisa and her mother took in sewing, tutored, did piecework to earn money—while the philosophical Bronson sat in his garden and blandly contemplated the universe. Effie’s estrangement from her husband can be read in part as a separation from the idealism of her father’s generation.
Once he reached home, Bronson presented Louisa with the March issue of the Atlantic, which he hoped would “encourage and lead her to some appreciation of the fair destiny that awaits her if she will be true to her gifts as she has begun.”
Louisa was touched. “Though in many people’s eyes Father may seem improvident, selfish, and indolent,” she had once admitted in her journal, “—though he often does in my own and I wish he were more like other men—yet I begin to see the purpose of his life and love him for the patient persistence with which he has done what he thought right through all opposition and reproach, for that is what few do I find.” Now Bronson returned the compliment. The last words he put into his journal on this particular evening were addressed to his daughter: “I am pleased, and proud of thee.”
• • •
The publication of “Love and Self-Love” kindled Louisa’s creativity. Within days she fell into the vortex again, spending the cold nights huddled over a candlelit desk while the rest of the family slept. Within a week she completed another story, this one more sensational than the last, which she immediately sent to James Russell Lowell at the Atlantic. More audacious, more daring than “Love and Self-Love,” the new story flirted with the great taboo of nineteenth-century America. It addressed the unspeakable subject that preoccupied antebellum Americans more than any other: sexual relationships between whites and blacks.
Toward the end of February, Louisa summoned her mother and father into the parlor to read this new work, which was entitled “M. L., An Abolition Tale.” She had finished the story days earlier, but the week had been too filled with excitement to unveil it until now. For one thing, Franklin Sanborn had just returned to Concord. He carried himself even more erect than usual, swaggering as if he had been leading the fight against slavery instead of hiding in Canada for the past month. And he brought with him two guests he had picked up on his way through North Elba, New York, where John Brown’s surviving family still lived. Brown’s youngest daughters, Sarah and Anne, were aged sixteen and thirteen, and Sanborn had persuaded them to attend his academy. “They are bright girls,” he wrote, “though of course unused to the ways of society.” Henry David Thoreau’s mother and sister hosted a welcoming party for the girls, and before long the Brown sisters were boarding with the Alcotts, where they played cribbage, chess, and a card game called casino Morris with Louisa and Abba in the evenings.
Years later Anne Brown recalled those times with bittersweet fondness. She still grieved for her father and three brothers, all of whom had been killed at Harpers Ferry or executed soon after. As it turned out, John Brown’s trial had proved far more effective for the cause of abolition than his actions in Kansas or at Harpers Ferry. His defense lawyer attempted to enter a plea of insanity, but his client refused. Brown wished to testify on his own behalf during the trial. “This court acknowledges, as I suppose, the validity of the law of God,” he announced on the day of his sentencing. “I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, that teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them.” His raid upon the federal arsenal had been an endeavor “to act upon that instruction. . . . I believe that to have interfered as I have done—in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments—I submit; so let it be done!”
Anne Brown missed her father, but she was also glad to be inside a warm home in a town that was far removed from the grim subsistence of North Elba. Concord was lively and prosperous. In February there had been a masquerade party for the young people. Ellen Emerson dressed as an old woman, and her younger sister, with whom it was rumored that Sanborn was infatuated, dressed as a Dickens character. Someone else dressed as Topsy, the unruly slave girl in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Louisa appeared as a nun, with a large black cross hanging from her neck. There was something prophetic about the costume, Anne thought, for later that spring, when a suitor began courting Louisa, she asked her new friend why she didn’t marry him. Louisa replied, “Ah, he is too blue and too prudent for me, I should shock him constantly.”
Louisa’s new story was designed to shock the prudent. It was based on a real-life story she had heard from her uncle Samuel J. May about a biracial man and his white wife. William G. Allen was the child of a mulatto mother and a white father; raised by a free black family, he eventually made his way to Boston, where he clerked for Ellis Gray Loring (another relative of Charles Loring Brace) and lectured on abolition, the equality of the races, and the inevitability of “amalgamation.” Soon he became a professor of Greek and German literature at a small college in upstate New York, where he fell in love with a white student named Mary E. King. The couple’s engagement prompted outrage in the community; threats were made on Allen’s life. As he described it in his pamphlet The American Prejudice Against Color, he narrowly escaped a mob “armed with tar, feathers, poles, and an empty barrel spiked with shingle nails.”
The events described in Allen’s pamphlet had been simmering in Louisa’s imagination for months. They mingled with tales of unrequited love, with the raging debate over slavery, and with some of Louisa’s favorite chapters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Allen’s autobiographical pamphlet seems to have put Louisa in mind of George Harris, the mulatto character in Stowe’s novel who runs away from servitude and vows to die rather than return to slavery. George stands in sharp contrast to the titular Tom, humble and Christlike, whom Stowe meant to represent as a redeemer of the nation. In the logic of the novel, George’s resistance is the inevitable product of his Anglo-Saxon blood. His white parentage links him to the Founding Fathers and to their willingness to fight tyranny and oppression. But if George has inherited the revolutionary ardor of his white forefathers, his eagerness to exact vengeance on his master is all too reminiscent of Toussaint L’Ouverture, Nat Turner, John Brown, and other leaders of slave rebellions. Disguised as a Spaniard and tracked by a slave catcher in the first half of the novel, George determines to kill his pursuer in the name of freedom. Stowe sidesteps this incendiary scene of interracial violence by having George merely wound his pursuer. But at the end of her book she banishes the rebellious character from her imagined America, “colonizing” George and his family in Africa.
Another influence on Louisa’s story was surely On the Origin of Species. By this time she knew of the book from her father’s recent conversations, as well as from Franklin Sanborn and especially Henry David Thoreau, who discussed it on repeated occasions throughout the first half of the year. Louisa probably had some idea of the ongoing quarrel between Asa Gray and Louis Agassiz, since the Swiss naturalist was a friend of Bronson’s and the two men regularly dined at Saturday Club meetings. (Later that summer another one of Louisa’s stories would share space in the Atlantic with Gray’s essay on Darwinism.) But beyond all these connections she would have been interested in Darwin’s work for the same reason the Concord transcendentalists were: because it provided a rigorous scientific argument that suggested that all people were linked by inheritance and destined for progressive improvement. These ideas are at the heart of Louisa’s abolitionist story.
Paul Frere, or “Brother Paul,” is the romantic foil for the heroine Claudia, whose name echoes the Gentile woman addressed in the biblical Paul’s second letter to Timothy. Like her scriptural antecedent, she will hear a gospel of love and learn to believe. In Louisa’s story, Claudia hears Paul singing a classical oratory in an adjacent room at a party. Even before she sets eyes upon him, she has fallen in love. Inquiring about the stranger, she learns that Paul is, like her, an orphan, as well as “a Spaniard, and of noble family.” When at last she is introduced to him, she is struck by his appearance: “Black locks streaked an ample forehead, black brows arched finely over southern eyes.” Something about his appearance reminds her of “a picture she had often pondered over when a child of a tropical island, beautiful with the bloom and verdure of the South.” Palm trees and orange groves populated the picture, “but looking nearer, the eye saw that the palm’s green crowns were rent, the vines hung torn as if by ruthless gusts, and the orange boughs were robbed of half their wealth. . . . Far on the horizon’s edge, a thunderous cloud seemed rolling westward, and on the waves an ominous wreck swayed with the swaying of the treacherous seas.”
The imagery here is conventional, a typical representation of the slaveholding South. It echoes, for instance, the lush backdrop of Longfellow’s “The Quadroon Girl,” a poem Alcott knew by heart, in which “odours of orange-flowers, and spice” reach the Slaver in “the broad lagoon.” (Several lines later in the poem a slave-owning father sells his mixed-race daughter for gold.) But Louisa’s language contains something Longfellow’s poem doesn’t: a hint of humid sexuality. And the portentous storm in the distance, blowing wrack toward a troubled western shore, is a rich amalgam of suggestions—of the illicit interracial love that produced Paul, of Paul and Claudia’s incipient romance, of the global slave trade more generally, and finally of the building storm between North and South.
Smitten by Paul, Claudia never suspects his racial inheritance until a jealous friend reveals his secret, literally branded on the palm of his hand. (The initials M. L. stand for Maurice Lecroix, Paul’s former master.) Paul grew up in Cuba, the illicit love-child of a planter father and a beautiful mixed-race mother. While his father lived, the boy was “lifted up into humanity,” a cherished member of the household. After his father died, however, he was sold to a “hard master” and “cast back among the brutes.” At this humiliating turn of events, Paul’s European blood rebelled. “I could not change my nature though I were to be a slave forever,” he confides to Claudia. Inherited from his father, like a feverish disease, are his “free instincts, aspirations, and desires.”
• • •
Louisa had received some of her ideas about inheritance from her father. Obsessed with genealogy, Bronson spent decades tracing the ancestral Alcocke family to its Puritan roots. He believed physical and spiritual qualities were passed from generation to generation—that people inherited even their moods and temperaments from their forebears. He also believed one’s complexion and hair color were outward symbols of inward qualities. This meant that dark-haired and dark-complexioned people were passionate and moody; those with lighter complexions were intellectually and spiritually superior. Bronson, who had blue eyes and blond hair, liked to tell Louisa that she was a “true-blue May, or rather a brown,” alluding to Abba’s olive skin and brunette hair. By the early 1850s he had constructed a private taxonomy of race that ranked types of people in ascending order from dark to copper to yellow to white.
These ideas disturbed his friends, who saw them as racist. When the reformer Ednah Littlehale Cheney told Bronson that the Swedish scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg considered blacks the most beloved of all races, he merely smiled and answered, “That is very nice of Mr. Swedenborg.” Like many abolitionists of the era, Alcott had no trouble believing that black people deserved freedom while also assuming that God had made them inferior for obscure reasons of His own.
Louisa engaged her father’s ideas about inheritance and race in “M. L., An Abolition Tale,” but the story addressed an even more pressing public question: whether black or mixed-race people could be integrated into Northern society through love and marriage. Louisa’s literary hero, Harriet Beecher Stowe, had thought not: she banished every biracial character in Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Africa, neatly solving the problem of amalgamation and interracial society. Stowe was in the mainstream. In 1862, when Abraham Lincoln met with a “Committee of colored men” to discuss the future, he expressed his concern that both races living side by side were bound to have “general evil effects on the white race.” Worried that an intermixture of peoples would erode American society and spark resentment among whites, he concluded, “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”
Louisa’s story was more radical in its prognosis. Her white heroine ignores all social prohibitions against interracial relationships, heeding instead a “Diviner love.” Soon after Claudia agrees to marry Paul, she is wracked with doubt. She considers “the worldly losses she might yet sustain” and briefly despairs at her future prospects. But in the end she determines to commit “social suicide.” Forsaking “the emptiness of her old life,” “the poverty of old beliefs,” she marries Paul.
This was a bold move. Sensationalist “tragic mulatta” stories often highlighted the exotic sexuality of biracial characters, but they usually portrayed that sexuality as coarse, animalistic, sometimes even predatory. Louisa ignored these conventions, violating social and literary propriety in an imaginative act that exceeded what her culture deemed acceptable. She created a happy and enduring marriage between her white and mixed-race characters—a marriage that would have been illegal in the South and would remain so for another century. For Louisa, mixed-race marriage implied the future: the slow unraveling of racial prejudice, the redemption of America through interracial love. In language that echoes the longstanding rhetoric of Northern abolitionism and places both a Christian and a Darwinian emphasis on common descent, Paul received “a welcome to that brotherhood which makes the whole world kin.”
Written around the time John Brown’s daughters arrived in Concord, “M. L.” is a counternarrative to the violent raid at Harpers Ferry, a story that dramatizes how selfless love might produce racial equality more quickly and effectively than warfare. But this selfless love comes with a cost, especially for Paul. The moment Claudia sacrifices social respectability for love, he becomes “the weaker now.” “‘I accept the bondage of the master who rules the world,’” he tells Claudia, referring to the newfound Christianity he adopts as he marries. “As he spoke, Paul looked a happier, more contented slave, than those fabulous captives the South boasts of, but finds it hard to show.”
This abrupt—and disappointing—ending may be Louisa’s effort to render her story fit for publication. Always a keen observer of the literary marketplace, she knew that stories celebrating marriage between people of two races were forbidden from print. But the conclusion also hints at Louisa’s own uncertainties about a future interracial society, which threatened to radically transform the stable and largely homogenous New England culture in which she had spent her entire life.
As it turned out, even with the symbolic emasculation of Paul, the story proved much too risqué for the Atlantic. “Mr——won’t have ‘M. L.,’ as it is antislavery, and the dear South must not be offended,” Louisa soon confided to her journal. “Mr——” was James Russell Lowell, an avowed abolitionist who nevertheless believed Louisa’s work was too incendiary for national publication. The story would eventually see print some three years later, during the height of the Civil War, in a pro-Union periodical called the Commonwealth that was edited by Franklin Sanborn.
But in the early months of 1860, no major magazine would print Louisa’s “Abolition Tale.” After the execution of old John Brown, Southerners and Northerners had come to view each other not just as different peoples but as mortal enemies. Tempers simmered on both sides. In the North, most people decried Brown’s actions but admired his Puritanical belief. In the South, many read about the bells tolling across New England on the day Brown was hung and assumed the worst. The rising Republican Party, they asserted, was clearly “organized on the basis of making war” against its Southern neighbors. And indeed, in the first half of the year, the nation seemed to lurch ever closer to open conflict over the question of slavery. In such an environment, even the most progressive literary journal in the nation was not quite ready for an interracial love story—at least one that did not end in tragedy.