The Negro Character in Northern Magazine Fiction of the 1860's

Abstract

IN 1862 Louisa May Alcott enlisted for a short tour of duty as an Army nurse in Washington; her experiences are recounted in Hospital Sketches (1863) and used as the basis for Camp and Fireside Stories (1869). As a self-declared red-hot abolitionist, she felt the appropriate antipathy for the rebel, the requisite sentimental admiration for the Northern soldier, but a frank confusion in the face of the black man, who was, after all, neither a respectable adjunct to Boston's abolitionist societies nor a realization of Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom. Miss