Eden's Outcasts (38 page)

In May, Sanborn played host to an extraordinary guest. Sanborn's friend immediately struck Bronson with his simplicity and sense. He seemed to impress everyone with his courage and religious earnestness. He had a sharply angled jaw and a curious wildness in his blue-gray eyes. He let people know that he and his younger traveling companion, Jeremiah Anderson, were armed and would defend themselves if necessary. On May 8 the visitor spoke at the town hall, and the next morning Concord murmured and speculated about the ideas and intentions of Captain John Brown. Brown had also spoken in Concord two years earlier, in March 1857. At that time, however, Alcott was in New Haven. Thus, when he went to hear Brown, Bronson knew the speaker only by reputation. It was a reputation for mingling the highest of motives with the most horrible of means.

Like Bronson, Brown was a native of Connecticut. He had lived much of his life in Ohio and had failed in a variety of business ventures. Following the murder of an antislavery newspaper editor in Alton, Illinois, in 1837, Brown had stood up at a prayer meeting in Ohio and consecrated his life to the destruction of slavery. Not until he moved to Kansas in the mid-1850s, however, could Brown begin to carry out his vow. When he arrived, the territory was already plunged into violence over the question of whether it would enter the Union as a free or slave state. David Rice Atchison, a proslavery senator from Missouri, thought it would be a good idea “to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the territory.”
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The territory's proslavery legislature, seated by a corrupt election, had passed laws making it a crime to express opinions against slavery. Long before their father came to join them, John Brown's sons, all staunch abolitionists, had considered it wise to carry weapons on all occasions.
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On May 21, 1856, a mob of about eight hundred proslavery Missourians attacked the free-soil stronghold of Lawrence, looting shops and homes, burning the hotel, and destroying the two newspaper offices. Enraged by this attack and further goaded by news of Preston Brooks's infamous caning of Charles Sumner on the floor of the United States Senate, Brown and his sons swore vengeance. During the night of May 24–25, with the help of three other men, they abducted five proslavery men from their homes near Pottawatomie Creek. Under Brown's direction, his band then executed their captives with broadswords. Two years later, Brown and his followers gunned down a slaveholder, liberated eleven blacks, and escorted them to Canada.

The earliest known photograph of Captain John Brown, whom Louisa called “St. John the Just.”

(Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery)

At the time of Fruitlands, while Bronson Alcott refused to wear wool for fear of committing an offense against the sheep, John Brown had made his living as a wool trader and had also dabbled in the cattle business. One can only imagine the righteous invectives that Alcott would have spewed forth on hearing of such a man. And yet, when Brown stood before him at Concord Town Hall not as a defrauder of sheep but as a killer of men, Alcott lauded him as a hero. He pasted a large portrait of Brown into his journal and lionized him as “a disciple of the right, an idealist in thought and affairs of state.” Alcott called him “about the manliest man I have ever seen.” If Alcott was at all troubled by Brown's criminal past, he suppressed his scruples. Such a magnificent child of nature, Alcott concluded, was “superior to legal traditions.”
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Alcott's transcendental brethren also worshipped Brown. In the words of Walt Whitman, Emerson came out for Brown “with the power, the overwhelmingness, of an avalanche.”
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Thoreau claimed Brown as a fellow transcendentalist and called his activities in Kansas “the public practice of Humanity.” In Brown's determination to obey only the law of freedom, Emerson and Thoreau saw their theoretical principles translated into sublime activism. But it was more than this. For long, frustrating years, most opponents of slavery in America had worked within the bounds of the law and followed the meek, forgiving doctrines of Christ. They had always hoped that patience and compromise on their parts would inspire commensurate concessions from the South. Instead, they had seen African Americans yanked from their midst and sent south to be enslaved without having a chance to defend themselves. They had seen a senator beaten senseless in the Capitol. They had watched as a slaveholding chief justice proclaimed that a Negro had no rights that a white man was bound to respect. By 1859, countless despisers of slavery, Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott included, had had enough of turning the other cheek. In Brown, they had an advocate whose religion told him not to forgive, but to strike back in holy vengeance. Where the first wrong was the enslavement of four million Americans, they were prepared to test whether a second wrong could make a right.

At the town hall, Bronson was proud to shake Brown's hand. A month later, when Alcott heard rumors that his friend Frank Sanborn was supplying aid to Brown, he noted the fact with approval in his journal. He was not yet aware that Sanborn, Theodore Parker, and Thomas Higginson were all members of the “Secret Six,” the half dozen men who were Brown's strongest backers.

Later, in the autumn, Louisa too was eager for a fight. In September, as part of an event called the Great State Encampment, young men in uniform performed military maneuvers and drills near Concord. As she watched them, Louisa grumbled about the limitations of gender that denied her the kind of action she most desired. “I like a camp, and long for a war, to see how it all seems,” she wrote. “I can't fight, but I can nurse.”
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She did not know that Captain Brown was about to bring her wish perilously close to coming true.

At the head of his journal entry for October 23, 1859, Bronson wrote the words “Capt. John Brown” in red ink.
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It was his first reference to the raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia, carried out by Brown and a company of twenty-one men on October 16. Brown had planned to seize the town's arsenal, liberate its slave population, and then lead an ever-increasing force of freed blacks and antislavery sympathizers through the Virginia mountains, cutting a swath of liberty through the southern states. He thought that a sustained campaign of abolitionist violence could break the will of the slaveholding society and bring an end to the hated institution. He miscalculated tragically. When Brown chose Harpers Ferry as the starting point for his revolution, he failed to realize what a series of Civil War generals later discovered: that the town, while easily captured, was virtually impossible to defend. Once federal forces had been summoned to the area—under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee—the fate of the insurrection was sealed. Less than two days after the raid began, it was crushed, and the man whom Bronson had called “the type and synonym of the Just” was a prisoner.
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As soon as he received the news, Alcott grasped “the impossibility of any justice being done” to Brown.”
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Brown's capture touched off a whirlwind of activity in Concord. Louisa wrote to Alf Whitman, now living in Kansas, “We are boiling over with excitement here for many of our people…are concerned in it.”
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Each night there was a meeting to express indignation at the wickedness of the country and the frailty of human courage. Abba was perhaps the most agitated of the family; Louisa was afraid she would “die of spontaneous combustion” if things were not set right soon.
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But setting things right was impossible. Alcott, Thoreau, and Sanborn racked their brains to determine what, if anything, could be done for the captive. Thoreau wrote an eloquent speech, which he called “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” Alcott initially favored a dramatic covert operation. He calculated that there was enough courage and intrepidity among Massachusetts men that one could muster a band “to steal South, since they cannot march openly there, and rescue him from the slaveholders, the states and the United States Courts, and save him from the impending crisis.”
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After reflection, however, he changed his mind. Not only would it be virtually impossible to penetrate the armory where Brown was being held, but it was by no means sure that Brown, who had long ago accepted the possibility of martyrdom, would consent to being liberated. Furthermore, Alcott reasoned, “the spectacle of a martyrdom such as his must needs be…of greater service to the country, and to the coming in of a righteous rule, than years and tens of years of agitation by the press.”
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Thoreau and Sanborn both advised diplomacy. They talked of sending an emissary to Virginia to seek an interview with Governor Wise. Sanborn in particular thought Bronson possessed “some advantages” that made him the man for this work.
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Presumably, Sanborn was thinking of the mildness of Alcott's demeanor, which might mitigate the impression created by Brown's fiery words and countenance. In addition, Alcott's experience in the ways of southern gentility might help to sway the governor. Sanborn even entertained the outlandish idea that, while dealing with Wise, Alcott might simultaneously contact Brown and hatch an escape plot. There was much talking and planning. There was no action. All they were finally able to agree on was an impressive memorial service on December 2, the day of Brown's execution. Sanborn read a dirge that he had written, Thoreau read poetry, Alcott read from the Bible and from Plato, and Emerson read from Brown's own writings. Never at a loss for words, they seemed at a loss for anything else.

From the career and martyrdom of John Brown, Bronson took important lessons, both political and personal. They reminded him that one might more effectively change the world by acting in it instead of writing, talking, or withdrawing into a position of ascetic refusal. They also proved that, despite their contradictions, a righteous spirit and a violent nature might exist within the same person. The warrior spirit had always struck Bronson as a primitive trait, needing to be mastered as one strove upward from humanness to a more angelic form. He found it hard to believe that the most important struggle in a life might be against an outward enemy rather than an inner one. Nevertheless, Brown showed him that the fighter, just as much as the self-denying saint, could deserve respect and love.

Bronson's feelings toward a fighter in his own family can be seen in a journal entry he wrote later that winter. On February 17, he brought home the March issue of
The Atlantic Monthly
, which included “Love and Self-Love.” He gave it to Louisa, he said, “to 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.” His delight, of course, was shared by Abba. Bronson seemed to sense that, somehow, the character and struggles of his wife would figure largely in Louisa's prose. In the same entry, he wrote that Abba was “a heroine in her ways, and with a deep experience, all tested and awaiting her daughter's pen.” Before closing up his diary for the night, he added, thinking of Louisa, “I am pleased, and proud of thee.”
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Five months after Brown's execution, Brown's widow came to Concord, and the Alcotts held a reception for her at Orchard House. She arrived with her daughter-in-law, whose husband Watson Brown had been killed while fighting alongside his father at Harpers Ferry. The younger woman also brought her infant son, Frederick Watson Brown, who Louisa thought was “a fair, heroic-looking baby” as befitted his lineage. Louisa kissed the child as she would have greeted a little saint, and she felt honored when he sucked her fingers. In the face of Watson Brown's widow, Louisa saw all the heartbreak of bitter sacrifice.

The homespun dignity of the guests of honor clashed absurdly with the unexpected chaos of the event. Word of the visit had leaked to the community, and the house was soon crammed with twice the number of the invited guests. As the polite supper transformed into a “tea fight,” Louisa bravely marshaled the cake and tea, making sure that the regular antislavery stalwarts were served first. She would have gladly done much more to honor the memory of the man she called St. John the Just.

Only a few days before the reception for Mrs. Brown, the parlor of Orchard House had been the scene of a more sedate and far happier occasion. On May 23, thirty years to the day after her father and mother were wed, Anna had married John Pratt. Bronson was pleased to record that the day was “all grace and becomingness,” and he took both the sunshine and the luxuriant blossoms in his apple orchard as strong omens for the couple's happiness.
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Orchard House was filled with “flowers, friends and happiness,” as Louisa put it.
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Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, her quarrels with Bronson now a distant memory, was in attendance. Sanborn, Thoreau, and the Emersons were all present to hear Uncle Samuel May offer a prayer and join the couple in matrimony. Louisa recalled that he performed the rites “with no fuss, but much love, and we all stood round her.”
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Anna wore a silver-gray silk dress, and her bodice and hair were adorned with lilies of the valley, her new husband's favorite flower. Louisa, also in gray and bedecked with roses, humorously likened her costume to sackcloth and ashes; she still could not think of the day as entirely joyous. “I mourn the loss of my Nan,” she wrote, “and am not comforted.”
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The wedding party enjoyed a feast sent by Hope Shaw, the wife of the chief justice. Then, on the front lawn, beneath the ancient elms, the assembled relatives and heroes of transcendentalism danced in a circle around the newlyweds. Louisa called it a pretty picture to remember. As Anna and John were preparing to leave, Emerson begged permission to kiss the bride. To Louisa, it seemed that a kiss from such a man, who remained the god of her idolatry, would make even matrimony worthwhile.
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Bronson also felt profoundly the alteration of his family circle. In his mind, joy and sorrow, hope and fear for his good child mingled in a befuddling fashion. “I cannot yet write about it,” he told his journal. All the conflicting emotions that he wanted to put onto paper came out only as, “Ah! Anna.”
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The couple set up housekeeping in Chelsea, north of Boston, though Anna was never away from Concord for very long.