Hospital Sketches

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of racism.

Across Hospital Sketches, Alcott identifies herself as an Abolitionist, and the collection was first published in an Abolitionist newspaper. To understand the intention and impact of her book, it is helpful to understand the social, political, and spiritual climate out of which it emerged.

The American Abolitionist movement was founded in the 1830s with two key events. One was The Liberator, a weekly Boston newspaper founded by William Lord Garrison in 1831. The paper’s purpose was to expose the evils of enslavement, inspire action against the institution, and promote the value of equal rights for all. It featured literary works, articles, and sermons, all of which exposed the inhumanity of enslavement and its brutal conditions. A second major force was the establishment of the Garrison-led American Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1833 in Philadelphia, which inspired similar organizations to form in Northern cities including New York and Boston.

The Abolitionist movement has been understood as an outgrowth of the 1790s-1830s Protestant revival movement known as the Second Great Awakening, which believed it was possible to recreate the conditions of Eden on earth, also known as Edenism. Among the Second Great Awakening’s objectives were cultivating a personal relationship to God, behaving in a morally upright fashion, and acting on one’s beliefs through social action. The Second Great Awakening led to a number of social reforms and the formation of new Protestant denominations. Its message of equality also empowered Black Americans to form their own churches.

While the Second Great Awakening was taking place in Kentucky, Tennessee, and western New York, author and Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson and Frederic Henry Hedge founded Transcendentalism in Massachusetts in 1836. Like the Second Great Awakening, Transcendentalism espoused Edenism. Transcendentalists believed in what they called the “over-soul,” which posited that all living things are connected to the divine and that humanity is inherently good. They rejected material pursuits in favor of finding inspiration in nature, and promoted individualism, self-reliance, and equality for all. Due to their belief in human goodness and equality, many Transcendentalists were drawn to the Abolitionist movement. Emerson, for example, was an outspoken critic of enslavement.

A subject of ongoing debate among Civil War historians is the extent to which Abolitionism contributed to the outbreak of the Civil War. Some Abolitionists, notably John Brown, who led the raid on Harper’s Ferry in Virginia, believed that the institution of enslavement would end only through violence. Brown was tried and hanged for treason in Virginia, but he was hailed as a martyr by some Northern newspapers. Both of Alcott’s parents were Transcendentalists and ardent Abolitionists who harbored runaway formerly enslaved persons and helped them escape through the Underground Railroad. 

While Alcott never suggests, in Hospital Sketches, that violence is the only means through which enslavement can be dismantled, her general stance toward the war is positive and supportive. Alcott portrays the war as the means to end an inhumane, and thus evil, system and to restore moral correctness in the United States. In this sense, the war is framed essentially as a spiritual war to save the soul of the nation. Hospital Sketches supports the Abolitionist agenda by exposing racism and encouraging social action among her readers.