Blue, Gray and Red: Two Nurse's Views of the Civil War

Louisa May Alcott · Kate Cumming

Jan 2008 · Fireship Press

About this ebook

Two Nurses - Two Experiences - One Civil War Blue, Gray and Red presents the hard reality of the Civil War. There are no stirring bugle calls, only the calls of the wounded. There are no battlefield heroics, but there is also no lack of heroism. It presents the suffering and courage of both sides, as written by two people-two nurses-who lived through it. Not many people realize that Louisa May Alcott, the author of Little Women, was also a Civil War nurse. While serving at the Union Hospital in Washington DC, she wrote a series of letters to her family describing her experiences. These were published in Commonwealth magazine. and eventually became the basis for Hospital Sketches-the book that is presented here. In 1862 Kate Cumming volunteered to be a nurse for the Confederacy and saw duty until the end of the war in 1865. During that period she kept a journal, which was later turned into a book called A Journal of Hospital Life in the Confederate Army of Tennessee. This was later re-edited and published as Gleanings from Southland, which is the version used here. Her account is made all the more tragic by the fact that she was not only reporting on the horrors of the battlefield, but on the horrors of a country that was literally being dismantled around her. No understanding of the Civil War can be complete without appreciating this side of the war as well.

About the author

Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1832. Two years later, she moved with her family to Boston and in 1840 to Concord, which was to remain her family home for the rest of her life. Her father, Bronson Alcott, was a transcendentalist and friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Alcott early realized that her father could not be counted on as sole support of his family, and so she sacrificed much of her own pleasure to earn money by sewing, teaching, and churning out potboilers. Her reputation was established with Hospital Sketches (1863), which was an account of her work as a volunteer nurse in Washington, D.C. Alcott's first works were written for children, including her best-known Little Women (1868--69) and Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo's Boys (1871). Moods (1864), a "passionate conflict," was written for adults. Alcott's writing eventually became the family's main source of income. Throughout her life, Alcott continued to produce highly popular and idealistic literature for children. An Old-Fashioned Girl (1870), Eight Cousins (1875), Rose in Bloom (1876), Under the Lilacs (1878), and Jack and Jill (1881) enjoyed wide popularity. At the same time, her adult fiction, such as the autobiographical novel Work: A Story of Experience (1873) and A Modern Mephistopheles (1877), a story based on the Faust legend, shows her deeper concern with such social issues as education, prison reform, and women's suffrage. She realistically depicts the problems of adolescents and working women, the difficulties of relationships between men and women, and the values of the single woman's life.