LibGuides: Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women: Abolitionism

OVERVIEW

Every one knows the story of the attack on Fort Wagner; but we should not tire yet of recalling how our Fifty-Fourth, spent with three sleepless nights, a day's fast, and a march under the July sun, stormed the fort as night fell, facing death in many shapes, following their brave leaders through a fiery rain of shot and shell, fighting valiantly for God and Governor Andrew,"-- how the regiment that went into action seven hundred strong came out having had nearly half its number captured, killed, or wounded, leaving their young commander to be buried, like a chief of earlier times, with his body-guard around him, faithful to the death. Surely, the insult turns to honor, and the wide grave needs no monument but the heroism that consecrates it in our sight; surely, the hearts that held him nearest see through their tears a noble victory in the seeming sad defeat; and surely, God's benediction was bestowed, when this loyal soul answered, as Death called the roll, "Lord, here I am, with the brothers Thou hast given me!"

The future must show how well that fight was fought; for though Fort Wagner still defies us, public prejudice is down; and through the cannon smoke of that black night the manhood of the colored race shines before many eyes that would not see, rings in many ears that would not hear, wins many hearts that would not hitherto believe.

When the news came that we were needed, there was none so glad as I to leave teaching contrabands, the new work I had taken up, and go to nurse "our boys," as my dusky flock so proudly called the wounded of the Fifty-Fourth. Feeling more satisfaction, as I assumed my big apron and turned up my cuffs, than if dressing for the President's levee, I fell to work on board the hospital-ship in Hilton-Head harbor. The scene was most familiar, and yet strange; for only dark faces looked up at me from the pallets so thickly laid along the floor, and I missed the sharp accent of my Yankee boys in the slower, softer voices calling cheerily to one another, or answering my questions with a stout, "We'll never give it up, Ma'am, till the last Reb's dead," or, "If our people's free, we can afford to die." ~from Alcott's short story "The Brothers," originally published in the Atlantic Monthly, November, 1863, and collected in Hospital Sketches as "My Contraband."

“My mother always declared that I was an abolitionist at the age of three. During the Garrison riot in Boston the portrait of George Thompson was hidden under a bed in our house for safe-keeping, and I am told that I used to go and comfort 'the good man who helped poor slaves' in his captivity. However that may be, the conversion was genuine, and my greatest pride is in the fact that I have lived to know the brave men and women who did so much for the cause, and that I had a very small share in the war which put an end to a great wrong.

“Fugitive slaves were sheltered under our roof, and my first pupil was a very black George Washington whom I taught to write on the hearth with charcoal, his big fingers finding pen and pencil unmanageable.”

~From “Recollections of My Childhood” by Louisa May Alcott,
in The Youth's Companion, 1888

Read Hospital Sketches online at:

Google Books
Project Gutenberg (read online or download as HTML, Kindle, etc.)
Classic Authors
University of Virginia Library

Illustration from Alcott, Hospital Sketches and Camp and Fireside Stories (1869)

Prophets Of Protest: Reconsidering The History Of American Abolitionism by Timothy Patrick McCarthy & John Stauffer, editors
Includes the essay "Profits of Protest: The Market Strategies of Sojourner Truth and Louisa May Alcott" by Augusta Rohrbach. Prophets of Protest, the first collection of writings on abolitionism in more than a generation, draws on an immense new body of research in African American studies, literature, art history, film, law, women’s studies, and other disciplines. The book incorporates new thinking on such topics as the role of early black newspapers, antislavery poetry, and abolitionists in film and provides new perspectives on familiar figures such as Sojourner Truth, Louisa May Alcott, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown.
"A Wound of One's Own: Louisa May Alcott's Civil War Fiction" by Elizabeth Young
American Quarterly 48:3 (1996) 439-474
Interpreted in the context of the Civil War, Alcott's work offers important insights into nineteenth-century constructions of femininity, masculinity, authorship, war, and nationhood. In Alcott's writing, both individual and national bodies undergo feminization, a process that begins with what might seem to be the most literal index of the maleness of war: the wounded body of the male soldier. First appearing in Alcott's fictionalized account of her nursing experiences, Hospital Sketches (1863), the suffering soldier is marked by and praised for his proximity to femininity. In this text, moreover, Alcott offers not one but two Civil War figures who blur conventional gender designations. Even as she valorizes the injured soldier for his feminine characteristics, she also relocates the traits of masculinity within the figure of the female nurse.
Cherokee Slaveholders and Radical Abolitionists by Natalie Joy
Common-Place 10:4 (July 2010)
In 1825, David Brown, a young Cherokee leader, wrote to the editor of the Family Visitor in Richmond, Virginia. Brown was keen to demonstrate just how far his people had advanced in adopting "civilization," and his letter, which was subsequently reprinted throughout the eastern United States, included a wealth of information about the Cherokee Nation. Among other things, Brown noted that there were 1,277 "African slaves" owned by Cherokee Indians, a figure he gleaned from a recent census. Concerned that some of his readers might be displeased to learn of Indian slaveholding, he offered the following explanation: "You perceive that there are some African slaves among us. They have been, from time to time, brought in and sold by white men; they are, however, generally well treated, and they much prefer living in the nation to a residence in the United States." Even better: Brown assured antislavery readers that Cherokee slaveholders would soon "cooperate with the humane efforts of those who are liberating and sending this race to the land of their fathers."
Racial Sacrifice and Citizenship: The Construction of Masculinity in Louisa May Alcott's 'The Brothers' by Mark Patterson
Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 25, 1997
Traces the relationship between racial sacrifice and masculinity by focusing on Alcott's story. Written soon after the attack on Fort Wagner, "The Brothers" was just one of a number of poems, orations, and stories commemorating the battle and thereby participating in the wider construction of black masculinity that eventuated in the Fifteenth Amendment.' However, the very existence of a story written by a white woman about a black man testifies to the complex ways race and gender intersected at this critical moment. By using the battle as a "solution" to her story's many conflicts, Alcott reveals the ways in which a black man is "made" out of images that have been coded as both "white" and, oddly enough, feminine. These codings, in turn, have been key elements in the construction of national civil rights rhetoric from Reconstruction to the present.

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women: Abolitionism

OVERVIEW

FURTHER READING