Hannah Ropes: The Other Woman behind “Little Women”
Louisa May Alcott’s brief stint as a nurse is well known, but did you know that another Civil War nurse played a crucial role in bringing the March girls to the nation’s bookshelves?
Union Hotel Hospital
The evening of December 13, 1862 volunteer nurse Louisa May Alcott reported for duty at Georgetown’s Union Hotel Hospital where she was received by the facility’s matron, Hannah Ropes. Four days later, Union casualties from the Battle of Fredericksburg began pouring into the hospital. The demands upon Ropes and her staff over the ensuing weeks grew so great that she and Alcott probably had little opportunity to discover the remarkable parallels in their lives.
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Born June 13, 1809, Hannah Anderson Chandler was the seventh child of Bangor attorney Peleg Chandler and his wife, Esther. Intelligent, well-read, articulate, and independent, Hannah might have followed her father into the legal profession had she been a boy. Instead, she took the traditional career path for women in 19th-century New England by marrying William Ropes in January of 1834.
The groom was principal of the Foxcroft Academy near Bangor, Maine. In 1836, he took a similar position at Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and the couple moved to Milton. The following year, they moved to nearby Waltham, Massachusetts, where William served as principal of the city’s high school until 1840 when he relinquished his administrative duties to focus on teaching and farming.
During the first six years of her marriage, Hannah bore four children, but only two survived. In his introduction to Diary and Letters of Hannah Ropes, John R. Brumgardt asserts that Hannah was nonetheless happy with her domestic situation.
Hannah also enjoyed other aspects of life in Massachusetts. Two of her brothers were prominent Boston attorneys. Theophilus Chandler served as the Assistant U. S. Treasurer for Boston, and Pegleg, Jr. was active in Massachusetts state politics. Through her family connections, Hannah met many notables who shared her views on social issues, particularly feminism and abolition. Her list of friends included avowed abolitionist Charles Sumner, who would become U. S. Senator Sumner in 1851; Nathaniel Banks, who would be elected to the United States Congress in 1853; and John Andrew, who would help organize the Republican party in Massachusetts in the mid-1850s and eventually become governor.
Circumstances triggered upheavals in both halves of Hannah Ropes’ life by the 1850s. Records are sketchy, but it appears William quit teaching in 1847 and moved to Florida sometime before 1855, leaving Hannah in charge of raising their son and daughter. Hannah had expressed concern for William’s health in letters to family members, and Brumgardt suggests William may have sought a warmer climate to recuperate. The separation, however, proved permanent. According to Rebecca Lyons, whose article “The Hannah Ropes Family of Massachusetts: A Struggle for American Values” can be found on the History E-Library at nps.gov, Hannah divorced William in 1860 on grounds of abandonment.
As Hannah adjusted to her new personal status, changes on the national level aroused the abolitionist community. The Compromise of 1850 admitted California as a free state but enacted a stringent fugitive slave law. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act permitted residents of those territories to determine whether they would be admitted to the Union as slave or free states, making the territories contested ground to which both free-soil and pro-slavery homesteaders rushed.
Kansas became the epicenter of the conflict in 1855, and Hannah, who considered stopping the spread of slavery a noble cause, involved her family in it. After her 18-year-old son, Edward, built a cabin near Lawrence, she and 14-year-old Alice joined him.
Hannah and her children quickly realized Kansas was a dangerous place. Pro-slavery raiders from neighboring Missouri posed a constant threat, compelling the family to keep loaded guns and Bowie knives close at hand. Members of the community fell ill from diseases such as malaria and typhoid and looked to Hannah to nurse them back to health. Eventually, she contracted malaria. In the face of such adversities, the Ropes family left what would soon become known as Bleeding Kansas after six months. Edward prospected for gold in Colorado; Hannah and Alice returned to Massachusetts.
Hannah next plied her pen to bring the trauma of Kansas before the public. Six Months in Kansas: By a Lady, based on her descriptive letters to family members, was published in 1856, followed by Cranston House: A Novel, an idealized account of prairie life, in 1859.
When war finally broke out in 1861, Hannah used her contacts with influential people to gather supplies to aid wounded soldiers. In June of 1862, she offered her services to the Office of U. S. Army Nurses and was named Head Matron of the Union Hotel Hospital in Georgetown.
Upon taking charge of the dilapidated former tavern, Hannah began her own war against corruption and prejudice. Many hospital staffers– stewards, waiters, and even surgeons– treated patients poorly, robbed them, or stole hospital supplies to line their personal pockets. Female nurses represented a new concept in military hospitals, one often tolerated by army surgeons only on the assumption that the nurses would be totally subservient to them. Hannah Ropes, however, was honest and assertive.
Hannah trained her nurses to treat patients with common sense and compassion, to ignore their own poor accommodations, meager meals, and long hours to bring comfort to the ill and wounded. If any failed to place the needs of the soldiers ahead of their own, she would fire them. She could not do the same for other hospital staffers working under the head surgeon or executive officer.
Nevertheless, when Hannah Ropes observed maltreatment of patients or examples of graft, she went on the attack with the same passion she had brought to her anti-slavery activities. She had one steward arrested. She reported another to the head surgeon and the Surgeon General for stealing soap from the laundry but received no satisfaction from them. When she saw the same steward strike a patient, she enlisted the aid of her old friend Nathaniel Banks– now General Banks– and of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton. In addition to issuing an order forbidding the head surgeon from removing Ropes from her post, Stanton also had the man incarcerated in Old Capitol Prison.
A few days after Louisa May Alcott reported for duty, she and the other nurses were overwhelmed with wounded from Ambrose Burnside’s disastrous attempt to take Fredericksburg, Virginia. They dispensed rations and medications, changed dressings, bathed patients, wrote and read letters for soldiers, and– too often– held the hands of dying men. Hannah worked even longer hours, making reports, ordering supplies, and keeping a diary of each day’s events.
As they worked to save the lives of the soldiers they looked upon as heroes, both women contracted typhoid pneumonia. On January 9, 1863, Hannah wrote that both she and nurse Alcott were ill but continuing to work. Alcott soon became so weak she could not assist on the wards but insisted on sewing as she sat in bed. Soon, she could no longer do that and began suffering hallucinations.
Hannah sent a telegram to Alcott’s parents , urging someone to come for the young woman at once. The Alcotts received the wire on January 14; Bronson Alcott arrived at the hospital the morning of January 16, finding his daughter so dangerously ill doctors deemed it unsafe for her to make the 500-mile trip to the family home.
Amazingly, under the care of army doctors and her fellow nurses, Louisa May recovered sufficiently to travel on January 20, but rain delayed the trip until the following day. Her condition deteriorated during the journey; she was delusional by the time she reached home.
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Home was Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts. Louisa May had been born in Pennsylvania in 1832, but her parents soon relocated to Massachusetts and brought up their daughters in the Concord/Boston area. In Massachusetts they embraced the same causes that inspired Hannah Ropes. Abigail, Louisa’s mother, was an early advocate of women’s suffrage; Bronson admired John Brown, whose widow had been a guest in the Alcott home. While Ropes knew influential politicos, the Alcotts’ acquaintances included prominent authors and philosophers. Concord neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson gave young Louisa May access to his considerable library, and Henry David Thoreau tutored her in natural sciences and philosophy.
Louisa May Alcott never married, but like Hannah, she also shouldered family responsibilities. Bronson was a respected member of the intellectual community, but he was a poor provider, and his daughters worked as seamstresses, servants, governesses, and teachers to meet household expenses. Louisa May also experienced personal loss when her sister Elizabeth died of scarlet fever in 1856.
In familiar surroundings and cared for by loving family members, Louisa May Alcott gradually recovered her strength and began writing about her experience at the Union Hotel Hospital. As Hannah Ropes based Six Months in Kansas on her letters to home, Louisa May used the letters she sent to Concord as the basis for Hospital Sketches, initially published in an abolitionist magazine in installments between May 22 and June 26, 1863 and later as a book. Alcott had been writing for a few years with only moderate success, but the public was hungry for information about the war, and Hospital Sketches gained her critical acclaim. From 1863 until her death in 1888, she produced numerous novels popular with the public, the best known of which is Little Women.
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Louisa May Alcott had no opportunity to thank Mrs. Ropes for saving her life by telegraphing the Alcotts of her grave condition. On January 20, 1863, the day doctors deemed her young nurse well enough to be taken home, Hannah Ropes lost her bout with typhoid pneumonia.