“Everything Here Strikes Me as Very Odd”: Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War Letter
Louisa May Alcott’s Civil War Letter
In December 1862, Louisa May Alcott traded her writer’s desk for a nurse’s cot. The 30-year-old author, not yet famous for Little Women, volunteered at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, D.C., tending to soldiers wounded in the Civil War.
Her experiences were grueling, tender, and transformative and she recorded them in a series of letters to friends at home. The letter below, written to Miss Hannah Stevenson on December 26, 1862, captures her humor and humanity in the middle of unimaginable fatigue.
This is one of the rare documents that show Alcott not as a novelist but as a witness: a woman working, enduring, and reflecting; all through the simple act of writing.
The Letter
“
Union Hospital, Washington, D.C.
December 26, 1862
My Dear Miss Stevenson,
If I had not been sure that you knew better than I can tell you how little time one gets for letter writing in this big bee hive I should have reproached myself with broken promises, but as you probably have a very realizing sense of my employments I will make no apologies but tell what you were kind enough to express an interest in, viz. How I like hospital life & how I get on.
If I had come expecting to enjoy myself I should have paraded home again a week ago as an all pervading bewilderment fell upon me for the first few days, & when Miss Kendall calmly asked me to wash and put clean clothes on some eight or ten dreary faced, dirty & wounded men who came in last week I felt that the climax was reached & proceeded to do it very much as I should have attempted to cut off arms or legs if ordered to. Having no brothers & a womanly man for a father I find myself rather staggered by some of the performances about me but possessing a touch of Macawber's spirit--I still hope to get used to it & hold myself "ready for a spring if anything turns up."
My ward is the lower one & I parade that region like a stout brown ghost from six in the morning till nine at night haunting & haunted for when not doing something I am endeavoring to decide what comes next being sure some body is in need of my maternal fussing. If we had capable attendants things would go nicely but sick soldiers being mortal will give out, get cross or keep out of sight in a surprisingly successful manner which induces the distracted nurse to wish she were a family connection of Job's.
I have old McGee whom you may remember & a jolly old soul he is but not a Mercury, my other helper is a vile boy who gobbles up my stores, hustles "my boys," steals my money & causes my angry passions to rise to such an extent that he was this morning deposed & a mild youth much given to falling flat with soap bowls in his new-broomish desire to do well reigns in his stead.
My chief afflictions are bad air & no out of door exercise, bad odours are my daily bread so to speak & in the course of time I may learn to relish them, the other matter must take its chance & if I get hopelessly stupid by being roasted & stifled they must turn me out to pasture on the Heights, other people live without & I must learn this also.
I find Mrs. Ropes very motherly & kind, Miss Kendall the most faithful of workers, too much so for her own good I take the liberty of thinking, but now that her friend is with her she sometimes consents to rest. The other people are all more or less agreeable & friendly but they might be archangels & I not know it as there is no time for conversation or merrymaking of any sort. Our Christmas dinner was a funny scramble but we trimmed up the rooms & tried to make it pleasant for the poor fellows & they seemed to enjoy it after a fashion.
This is a very hasty scribble but half a dozen stumps are waiting to be wet & my head is full of little duties to be punctually performed so I write to a sort of mental tune that goes on all day -
Skinners broth, Marble's tea,
Blister Swift, & write for Lee,
Somethings wanting, so I see.
Please tell the sister who sent it that the pear was my water bottle all the way to Baltimore.
Everything here strikes me as very odd & shiftless both within & without, people, manners, customs & ways of living, but I like to watch it all & am very glad I came as this is the sort of study I enjoy. If you find a minute in your busy life to send a few lines to the embryo nurse she will feel much honored for letters are our only excitement.
Very truly yours,
L. M. Alcott
“
(Source: Massachusetts Historical Society, Curtis–Stevenson Papers, Item #2168 — View the original letter)
The Original Letter
The actual letter she penned
(Source:- MHS collections online)
Louisa May Alcott’s handwritten letter to Hannah Stevenson, December 26, 1862. Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Small details from the manuscript reveal Louisa’s state of mind.
Part of the letter, a note about a pear she used as a water bottle was written upside-down across the top of page three and continued at the top of page two, as though squeezed in later.
Another short reflection, beginning “Everything here strikes me as very odd …,” appears perpendicular to the main text in the white margin of page one.
It’s a glimpse of the letter not just as text, but as an object of living movement: written in haste, turned, flipped, and layered with the rhythm of her life’s momentum.
The Nurse, the Humorist, the Human
What makes this letter unforgettable is its tone: brisk, observant, and wryly affectionate.
She calls herself a “stout brown ghost”, jokes about her “vile boy” assistant, and writes a little rhyme to keep track of her patients’ needs. Even while surrounded by sickness, Louisa’s pen never loses its spark. This is how she copes, through language. The same dry humor that kept her sane in the hospital would later define her prose in Hospital Sketches and Little Women.
A Study in Compassion
“This is the sort of study I enjoy,” she writes near the end. It’s a striking phrase not of detachment, but of deep observation.
She sees everything: the smells, the exhaustion, the disorder, the humanity.
Through this act of witnessing, Alcott transforms her labor into literature and her fatigue into empathy.
Lettre’s Reflection
Every so often, a letter survives that still sounds alive.
Louisa’s words, turned sideways and written upside-down, are more than ink; they’re motion, urgency, care.
In them, we see a woman mid-stride between duty and destiny: one hand holding a pen, the other tending to the wounded.
At Lettre, we read her voice as a reminder of what letters do best: preserve the human pulse behind history.
Even amid war and weariness, Louisa wrote not of despair, but of doing.
And in that, her letter endures steady, compassionate, and beautifully alive.
