March
The fictional character of Mr. March is taken from Louisa May Alcott’s children’s book, Little Women, and he represents the father who left his wife and four daughters to join the Union forces in the Civil War. He plays a minor role in Little Women, but Geraldine Brooks develops him into a dedicated army chaplain who finally returns home with many atrocities of war plaguing him.
While still in his teens, March traveled the eastern states as a book peddler. In Virginia he got his first glimpse of slavery at the Clement's estate. Here he met Grace, a Negro slave and the illegitimate daughter of Augustus Clement, who owned the plantation. While there, he witnessed slave auctions taking place next door to a Southern church, where "niggers were only animals, and not half as valuable as cattle." He also watched Grace being whipped for helping him teach Negro children to read, which was not allowed in the South. Ironically, she had once told him, "If you live with your head in the lion’s mouth, it’s best to stroke it some."
When he returned to Concord, Massachusetts, he married a minister’s daughter who was active in freeing Negro slaves through the "Underground Railroad". Mr. March became a strong supporter of the radical abolitionist, John Brown, as were Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, who were close friends with the March family. And regardless of the Fugitive Slave Act, the Marches hid a pregnant runaway slave girl in their attic, fooling the constable who was searching the homes of any "nigger lovers" in Concord.
Although he was actually a chaplain for the Union army, March ended up teaching Negro children in a plantation which had been taken over by a young Northern attorney. His closest friend there was a Negro girl and her son. She had been attacked by two drunken whites who cut out her tongue when she tried to fight them off. The men were taken to court but released because the victim "was unable to make a statement..."
March received many wounds when the Confederates invaded the plantation, and Grace was on hand at the hospital to act as his nurse. But when March’s wife later arrived there, she felt threatened by his closeness to Grace. She also feared that he would leave his home and daughters again and return to his duties as a Union chaplain.
Geraldine Brooks’s research into Little Women, the Alcott family, and finally their involvement in the Civil War, creates a vivid historical novel that brings to life slavery in the 1860s. The book was published in 2005.