By mid-winter the nightmare of the war seemed already to have consumed sevens of generations, and the conflagration, clearly, was nowhere near an end.

The Alcotts are going on much as usual, Louisa May Alcott wrote a friend before leaving Concord at the end of the year,1862, to become an Army nurse in the makeshift hospital at the Union Hotel in Georgetown, Washington D.C. Father writes and talks, Superintends the schools, and keeps together our topsy turvy family, she wrote. Mother sings away among her pots and pans, feeding and clothing all the beggars that come along, sewing for the soldiers, delivering lectures on antislavery and peace wherever she goes.

When Mrs. Alcott went to stay with friends in Chelsea at the close of the year, she got a note from her husband saying he'd join her there, with a little help from Sanborn. The Sanborns had only lately returned to Concord, temporarily renting rooms in the Old Manse from Mrs. Sarah Ripley. Knowing Sanborn would soon be visiting George Stearns in Medford, Alcott had asked if he could join Sanborn in his carriage. From Medford, he said, he could easily continue on to Chelsea.

In January, 1863, Emerson joined Sanborn in travelling to Stearns' Medford estate to be present at the unveiling of a bust of John Brown by Edwin Brackett. Joining Stearns and Brackett in the mansion's elegant foyer for the ceremony were William Lloyd Garrison, John Murray Forbes, Sam and Julia Ward Howe, Wendell Phillips, Emerson, and Sanborn. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, then a Union Colonel commanding a black regiment in South Carolina, had politely sent his regrets. Gerrit Smith hadn't responded at all.

To mark the occasion, Wendell Phillips gave a short, simple speech, after which Julia Ward Howe sang the national favorite for which she had provided the words, The Battle Hymn of the Republic. Emerson recited his abolitionist ballad, The Boston Hymn, which he had written in commemoration of the Massachusetts rebellion against the Fugitive Slave Law. The black cover over the bust was then removed, revealing the bust of John Brown. Polite applause was greeted by an apparently embarassed Brackett. He looked down at the floor, his face red. The greatness is not in my work, he said softly, but in the man himself.

In the meantime, in New York, Henry James, Sr. paced the floors of his mansion, brooding over the war and the fate of his sons. If by any one act, James wrote, I could fully express the affection I bear for my wife, and my child, and my friend, my next act towards them would be extermination. James' son Willkie had recently been injured in an attack on Fort Wagner, South Carolina; his close friend Sarah Shaw had there lost her only son, Robert Gould Shaw, who had led a Union regiment of black soldiers in the assault.

We are all very sorry Robert Shaw was killed, Ellen Emerson wrote when she learned of it. What a magnificent attack! But they say nothing was gained.

Willkie James has been made an Adjutant in the 54th, Louisa Alcott noted lightheartedly. He was smashed at Fort Wagner, and blossomed into a hero. One of his brothers has put on a Lieutenant's shoulder straps, and has pranced off with the 55th.

It wasn't long before the Army nurse herself lay among the rows and rows of dead and dying soldiers at the Union Hotel, struck down by typhoid fever. Louisa's father came straightaway, again to take her north to Concord, where she was quarantined in her room for a month. After nursin' in the army, Louisa wrote later, I came bundling home, raving, got my head shaved, and almost retired into the tombs. When I got up again, I appeared before the eyes of my grateful country in a wig, and with no particular flesh left on my bones.

Walt Whitman was in the meantime making his rounds in Washington, going from hospital to hospital, tending to soldiers bed by bed, row after row. Among the wounded was the antislavery activist Richard Hinton, a former staff writer for the Knikerbocker Magazine who had introduced the Boston publishers Thayer & Eldridge to Whitman's poems. After the war, Hinton would write a series of important and influential articles in high praise of the poet who had helped nursed him back to health.

Numerous of the Good Gray Poet's radical reformer friends would surprise him, after the war, in their becoming tame, respectable citizens. Whitman’s loquacious, wild-eyed friend William Douglas O'Connor would marry and, after having a few children, take a menial government job. It would be O'Connor who'd secure, for Whitman, a Government job as a clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Charles Eldridge, a partner in the Boston publishing firm that had put out the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, ironically defending Whitman as one of the most conservative of men, would also take a conservative government job, after which he'd become a distinguished lawyer. James Redpath, the abolitionist author of the first biography of John Brown, would supervise the National Lyceum Bureau before becoming editor of the respectable North American Review.

But then, in 1862, no one worried whether Whitman was too staunch a conservative or too wild a radical. The war was everything. Whitman prevailed upon friends not to support his poems, but to send him their pocket change so that he could buy such luxuries for the soldiers as candy, writing paper, pencils, newspapers.

In Springfield, Massachusetts the editor of The Republican, Sam Bowles, called for unity among the publishers and editors of Northern newspapers, in support of the Lincoln administration. Prior to the war, Bowles had firmly backed the right of states to withdraw from the Union, so long as they did not impose themselves against federal forts, arsenals, or custom-houses. He had likewise embraced numerous other compromises, hoping to appease the Southern rebels. But, so soon as war broke out, Bowles supported the effort to save the Union wholeheartedly, damning the disparate cacophony of viewpoints then springing from New England newspapers. Like many another Republican editor, he too had doubts about Lincoln's having the stature, intelligence, and resourcefulness required to resolve The Great Argument and bring the war to an end. But he was The President, and the war would not end soon, he knew, if even Northern newspapermen could not cease in bickering. Bowles remained steady in his course, supporting Lincoln when he initially delayed, only later proclaiming, emancipation of the slaves.

During the war, Sanborn began to contribute letters to The Republican, which was delivered throughout Western Massachusetts, from Auburn to the Berkshires. From Sanborn readers got the latest gossip on his many and luminous Concord and Boston neighbors. Even Emily Dickinson, secluded in Amherst, was heard from time to time chuckling with delight over Sanborn's juicy gossip.

From Medford, George Luther Stearns called on Sanborn to succeed Moncure Conway as editor of his paper, The Boston Commonwealth, for $20.00 a week. Sanborn accepted, leaving the Concord School closed, though he did take private pupils for a few years afterwards. Two daughters of John Brown who’d been in the school had returned to their home in the New York Adirondacks. Sanborn’s brother Joseph, Frank Stearns, and Julian Hawthorne had all gone on to college. His sister Sarah was not in good health.

I gave up my plan, Sanborn revealed, of studying in Germany.

Louisa and I have both seen some of our things printed in The Commonwealth, Bronson Alcott wrote a friend in June, 1863. It is edited by our own town's man, Sanborn. I am otherwise occupied with Gardening, Writing, Conversing, and Superintending the Schools.

Sanborn asked me to do what his Commonwealth predecessor, Moncure Conway, had already suggested to me, wrote Louisa. Before leaving for Europe, Conway had challenged me to arrange my letters in a printable shape and to publish them in his paper. He had thought them witty; I hadn't. But I wanted money, so I did give Sanborn some of my Hospital Sketches. To my surprise they made a great hit. People began buying the papers faster than they could be supplied. So then folks began saying, Put your stories in in a book. And so for for my grateful country, though being drove wild with proof, printers, and such matters, I made my book, meanwhile keeping house, seeing company, adoring my nephew, and furnishing literary gems for sundry papers. I have not been idle.

Sanborn asks for still more contributions, she wrote. I gave him some of my old Mountain Letters, vamped up. But they were not good, though they sold the paper. I was heartily ashamed of them. I've stopped contributing, resolving never again to be funny. I'm glad of the lesson, hoping it will do me good.

I return your Contract signed, Louisa wrote James Redpath in July. I am sure it is all right. About the dreadful percentage: I have puzzled my stupid head over it till I believe I understand it. I will devote my time and earnings to the care of my father and mother. The one has never possessed any gift for money making, and the other is too old to be working. You ask me about any other story I may have. Mr. Sanborn has advised me to prepare a manuscript from notes written several years ago, which you might examine and see fit to publish.

That summer, Sanborn's former landlord, the Concord eccentric Ellery Channing, was finishing his biography of Henry Thoreau. The work, Sanborn learned when Channing offered it up to his former tenant for serial publication in The Boston Commonwealth, ran to one hundred thirty-four manuscript pages. When Sanborn balked, suggesting alterations, Channing was miffed.

Channing had told Sanborn his plan: he'd write a book of three hundred pages. He insisted he was unwilling to ask Sanborn for his aid in the undertaking, except for that he knew he could not see his way to finishing the book without Sanborn's assistance.

I thought we might find a publisher in Mr. Redpath, Channing wrote Sanborn. I feel entirely certain you will afford me all the aid that you can, but it does not diminish my unwillingness to ask it. There are many reasons why this is a matter of confidence, which I cannot explain. What I need, for any alacrity in the task, is some friendly guarantee of pushing on the enterprise, and I have no one now to confide that matter with but you. To you and me has been entrusted the care of Henry's immediate fame. I feel that my part cannot be done without your aid. In the midst of all the cold and selfish men who knew this brave and devoted scholar and genius, why should not you be called on to make some sacrifices, even if it be to publish my sketch? There might be persons who, if they were to surmise that we two had this object in view, would hire some literary jackal to dig up and befoul our brother Henry's corpse.

The tone of this note was probably sharpened at the very unhandsome criticism of Thoreau by Lowell, Sanborn wrote years later. There was then very little public interest in Thoreau, or his manuscripts. Mr. Redpath was named a possible publisher, because he had made a good success with Miss Alcott's Hospital Sketches that year. The aid that Channing expected of me was given.

Sanborn saw to it that Channing's manuscript got copyrighted, agreeing to publish the memoir in The Commonwealth in weekly installments, starting at the end of the year. The serial would begin to appear, until mercurial Channing withdrew it. The series just suddenly ceased appearing in the paper. Sanborn knew Channing's moods, so like New England weather, subject to sudden, dramatic changes. His friendship was like a White Mountain wind, blowing hot or cold on all short notice. He'd have his hands full, encouraging Channing to resume the work, which Sanborn hoped he could help usher into print as a book.

Still more work came to Sanborn that year, in the form of a political appointment. In 1863, Sanborn wrote, I officially began inspecting the insane of Massachusetts.

John Albion Andrew, attorney to Howe, Stearns, and Sanborn after John Brown's assault on Harper's Ferry, was now Governor. In 1862, he had asked his friend Howe to make recommendations to him regarding the reorganization of the state's charities.

Howe had long been a fervent supporter of Dorothea Dix, a Boston Schoolteacher and reformer in the antebellum period before the war who had worked tirelessly for societal improvements, primarily in the treatment of the mentally ill. Her fervent campaign for public awareness of the problem, her inspections of asylums, and her controversial reports on the hideous circumstances of asylum inmates, in and outside of Massachusetts, had led to many reforms, including state-supported mental hospitals.

The state welfare system had been founded, and had long operated, on the principle of Setlements, individual villages being responsible for the support of their poor, lame, or insane. In the 1840s, however, had come a crisis of mass immigration, particularly through the Port of Boston via the flood of immigrants from Ireland. In 1851 a Board of Alien Commissioners had been assembled in urgent hope of somehow fixing the immigration problem, which then had only gotten worse. In 1858 had come the appointment of a special legislative committee to investigate the situation. This committee had proposed the creation of a unified, central board responsible for overseeing the state's many and diverse charitable institutions, but it wasn't until 1863, when Samuel Gridley Howe revived the 1858 proposal in his recommendations to Governor Andrew, that the Massachusetts State Board of Charities came into being. Andrew immediately named Howe Chairman of the Board and, upon Howe's urging, appointed Sanborn Secretary.

Within days of creating the new Board, Andrew received a letter from Professor Louis Agassiz, calling on the Governor to take immediate control of the ailing postgraduate facilities of Harvard University, asking him to put up two million dollars toward bolstering up the institution, aiming to secure for Massachusetts what he called Intellectual Supremacy over the rest of the country. His Harvard would be divided into five main branches: Divinity, Law, Medicine, Letters, and Science. The Law branch would include courses in Roman law, political economy, comparative jurisprudence, and diplomacy. The School of Science would include courses in engineering and agriculture, but Agassiz gave no consideration whatsoever, in his proposed salvation of declining Harvard, to the emerging field of Social Science. Within a year, however, Agassiz would propose, and advocate for, federal funding for two new instiutions, an Academy of Letters and an Academy of Moral and Social Sciences. In the late 1860s he would join Cornell President Andrew Dickson White in Ithaca, to be present at the founding of the new university, which eventually would take the lead in the advancement of formal social science studies.

In his new role as Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Charities, Sanborn was given much leaway, by Howe and Governor Andrew, in his interpretation of what the job should be. He had no qualms or apprehensions. He felt the appointment signified quite nicely his having risen in life, a station and distinction consistent with just such an opportunity or duty he'd expected would come to a man of his competence and accomplishments, both heretofore and lately.

I had never been noted for idleness, Sanborn recollected late in life, but never was I more industrious than in the first two years of my new office. It was necessary, for though I had a general knowledge of philanthropy and of public charity, I knew but little of its organization in Massachusetts. My first occupation was to learn and report on the charitable institutions in existence: their objects, their history, their annual cost, and results. The same must be done for our jails, convict prisons, almshouses, poor houses, and orphan asylums. Massachusetts had fourteen counties, most with one prison, the larger counties with two. Essex had three (at Ipswich, Newberryport, and Salem), as did Middlesex (at Cambridge, Concord, and Lowell). In Boston there were two convict prisons under City government, and the new and modern Suffolk jail under the county sheriff. Of all these prisons I became the one State Inspector

Sanborn embraced this new role, wholeheartedly bringing the twin charms of his eagerness and elegance to it. He'd command much respect, prevailing over his many detractors, calling for reform in the treatment of the insane, demanding improved conditions in the oppressive and contemptible asylums that held them. He would be a respected authority on prison reform, an enlightened influence on the advancement of the social sciences, a major player in bringing oppressive social legislation out of the dark ages. Sanborn would draft numerous bills he'd shepherd through the Massachusetts House and Senate for enactment into law. Having developed procedures for inspecting and reporting the conditions of Massachusetts institutions that provided a model for the entire nation, Sanborn would retire as Secretary of State Charities in 1868, remaining on the Board through eight more years, serving as its Chairman from 1874 to 1876.

In the summer of 1863, Frank and Louisa visited the Alcott sisters at their family retreat on Clark's Island, by Plymouth. We had a riotously good time, Louisa May Alcott wrote afterwards, singing, dancing, boating, croqueting. The island is the most romantic place! We were all quite carried away, admiring everything about it.

All summer, Louisa May noted in the fall, I've had the satisfaction of seeing people buying my book, Hospital Sketches, and reading and laughing and crying over it. Sanborn and I mixed some business with our pleasures, him suggesting sundry small changes to be made in the next edition. I told him some fussy people have said the margin should be wider, and the cover darker. Having a maternal interest in the clothes my offspring wear, and the impression they make, I asked Sanborn if the covers could not be dark green, or drab.

Our Concord Company, she wrote of the war, is to return tonight, fresh from the battle at Gettysburg. The town is in as wild a state of excitement as it is possible for such a dozy old place to be, without dying of brain fever.

The Alcott girls, and a score more of the prettiest girls in the village, all stood in white frocks to serve out the drinks, the newly mustachioed Harvard dropout Julian Hawthorne reported. There was lemonade enough to flavor Walden Pond. Louisa, in her hospital costume, conducted the ceremonies.

Flags flapped everywhere, Louisa wrote. Our drum corps, consisting of eight small boys with eight large drums, kept up a continual rub-a-dubbing. Wreaths and banners, saying Welcome Home, were stuck every stickable place.

I should like of all things to go south, Louisa wrote Colonel Higginson. To help the blacks. I am no longer allowed to nurse the whites, you know. Dont you want a cook or nurse for your regiment? I am willing to enlist in any capacity. The blood of old Colonel May asserts itself in me, his granddaughter, in these martial times. I am anxious to be busied in some more loyal labor than sitting at home spinning fictions, when such fine facts are waiting for all of us to profit by and celebrate.

Busy as a bee, Ellen Emerson wrote over the holidays. Errands. Tomorrow to Boston. New Years shopping. To Cambridge to spend the night. Thursday morning with Mrs Sanborn. Thursday evening, Soldiers Aid. Cake-baking. Tying up presents. Writing poems. Thursday night dance at the Town Hall. New Years Day Breakfast. School-children.

I come now to the Sanborns, Ellen wrote early in January,1864. Mr. Sanborn is Secretary of the Board of State Charities, and as such continually journeys about making investigations, Mrs. Sanborn often accompanying. They are boarding at the Manse this spring, having a beautiful time. I see them constantly.

It was in the spring of this year that the former President, Nathaniel Hawthorne's friend Franklin Pierce, took the ailing author on a journey by carriage through the New Hampshire mountains. Pierce had hopes the fresh air and gorgeous scenery would help renew his friend's spirit, and health. But Hawthorne died along the way one bright may morning, at Plymouth, New Hampshire. His body was escorted back to Massachusetts to be buried in Concord's Sleepy Hollow Cemetary.

Mr. Hawthorne is gone, Louisa May Alcott mourned. Mrs. Hawthorne finds herself still patiently and hopefully awaiting his return. Many of us will have the same feeling, I fancy. But he was one of those who are more felt than seen, and so we shall not really miss him till we turn the last leaf of his story, which is without an end.

Ellery Channing wrote my pregnant wife, Sanborn noted, saying of Hawthorne that he was the dearest, sweetest, kindest of all human creatures, and that he had loved him as one loves a pet.

He was all love and sweetness and dearness to me, Channing wrote. Where is all that now?

It was that fall, Sanborn recalled, that we learned the magnanimous Thomas Cholmondely also was dead. Like Theodore Parker, he had died in Florence.

Despite these deaths of friends and mentors, Sanborn was in a good mood, very glad of his radiant, pregnant wife and their cozy living quarters in Mrs. Ripley's home. Ellen Emerson noted, The Sanborns are living in the Old Manse in perfect bliss.

The year began, Louisa May Alcott wrote in January, 1865, with plays at the Town Hall, to raise funds for the Lyceum. We did very well. Father lectured and preached a good deal, being asked like a regular minister, and getting paid like one. Criticisms of my new book, Moods, have come from all directions. There have also been favorable notices. I had letters from Mrs. Parker, Sanborn, Higginson, and others, all friendly and flattering.

Curtis and Higginson both lectured recently at the Lyceum, Louisa wrote in February. The first performed, like an actor, speaking on Political Infidelity; the other spoke like a man who had lost himself in his subject, which was the Freedmen of South Carolina. I have followed Frank Sanborn's advice, she noted, and have sent a copy of my book Moods to Moncure Conway, in England.

Sanborn recognized the central character of Louisa’s book, Moods, was loosely based on Henry Thoreau. He also recognized that, as far as moodiness went, he was himself an even moodier and far less cheerful man than Thoreau, though nowhere so moody as the mercurial old codger Channing, thank God.

The baby was born on February 23, 1865, the proud father wrote of his son years later. He was born within gunshot of the famous battle-ground, and close beside the river Musketaquid.

When my wife gave birth to our first child, Sanborn recalled, we thought first to name him Theodore, after Parker; we then considered Thomas, after Cholmondeley; we even considered naming him for Higginson! Back and forth we went, the baby crying out for a name. Clearly, Theodore Cholmondeley Wentworth Leavitt Sanborn would not do. We finally settled on what we agreed was a splendid name: Thomas Parker Sanborn.

On becoming a father, Sanborn, who had lost his own father when he was sixteen, found himself regarding the world with greater love agape, and also greater wariness, weariness, and a nagging, hardly Transcendental faith in redemption through work, despite time's being but the stream Thoreau had fished in. He sat up, night after night, exhausted, at his large, dark oak desk covered with his inspection notes, or stood and paced the floor, nervously running his long fingers through his thick black hair, struggling to finish his Special Report on Prisons and Prison Discipline.

In the meantime, acting on the Board of State Charities proposal for the founding of a national charities organization, Sanborn again joined forces with Samuel Gridley Howe and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, throwing himself headlong into the work of founding the American Social Science Association. Characteristically, Sanborn agreed to be ASSA Secretary. On behalf of both the Massachusetts Board of Charities and the new ASSA, Sanborn set out on a tour of Massachusetts jails. He was perplexed to learn that the number of young prisoners locked up in them had not gone down, but had in fact increased. -- Among the prisoners were mere infants, Sanborn reported. -- One child I found, in the Plymouth House of Correction, had been sentenced to thirty days. The child was 6 years old.

He was by turns cheerful and morbid through that spring, sometimes rolling on the floor with baby Tommy, or standing at his desk, gazing blankly at his unfinished Report to the Board of State Charities. The papers, piled high amid the myriad books and documents, triggered in him a waking state of nightmare and dream. Madness sometimes seemed near, in no wise terrible. In this ensconcement, Sanborn met the power of the impossible, and his innermost demons, face to face. When news came to him of Will Forbes' engagement to Edith Emerson, Sanborn felt mild panic, phobic not about the pending wedding, but about his Report. It loomed before him unfinishable, though his resolve to finish it was unshakeable. It was as physical and real to him as his own hand, holding pen, but like a fist tight inside him, clenched around his heart. He vowed he'd see the thing through to print, if it killed him.

Edith is engaged to William Forbes, Ellen Emerson informed a friend. Will is Lieutenant Colonel of the 2nd Massachusetts Cavalry, a long-tried friend of hers who loved Edith from first sight, seven years ago. We are all of us very happy in the engagement, overjoyed to have such a brother. I would have chosen him out of the whole world. He has been in prison down South for five months, and was lately released on parole. He has a leave of absence from Annapolis at present, but he doubts the authorities will extend it. He and Edith, at his parent's home in Washington, fear he must go back in another week. That would give them in all only thirteen days together. I don't wonder that they think it short.

Today we heard of Lee's surrender to Grant, Ellen wrote on April 10th. In Concord we had the salute, and the bells, and promenaded through the town, each with a little flag. We spent the rest of the morning in devouring the newspaper. How happy every soldier must be, and all their families! A letter this morning from Mrs. Forbes, Will's mother, tells of the rejoicings over Richmond and a report of the killed and wounded in Will's Regiment, him not among them.

On April 14th came the crucial, haunting tragedy, Abe Lincoln shot dead in a theater by an actor, John Wilkes Booth.

Mother often says adversity is really the best happiness, Ellen wrote a friend. When I think now of war, and peace, I begin to be afraid that I agree with Mother. I am sorry to have Colonel Russell again be plain Mr. Russell, and Major Higginson again just Mr. Higginson. Our Will, young Mr. Forbes, has come home from the war honourably discharged. His father has taken him and Mr. Russell into partnership. So now he is in business, and can have no holidays.