Thomas Wentworth Higginson

American writer and social reformer

• Born: December 22, 1823
• Birthplace: Cambridge, Massachusetts
• Died: May 9, 1911
• Place of death: Cambridge, Massachusetts

Higginson wrote prolifically but is best known in the literary world as the discoverer of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. He is also noted for commanding a regiment of black enlisted men during the Civil War and for laboring in social causes such as the abolition of slavery and women’s rights.

Early Life

Although the large family into which Thomas Wentworth Storrow Higginson (HIHG-ahn-sahn) was the youngest child was not as wealthy as it had once been, there was never any doubt that Higginson would be educated at Harvard. In 1823 Stephen Higginson, then serving as Harvard University steward, had retained a library of one thousand books from more prosperous days, and by the age of four Thomas was rummaging among them. The boy’s grandfather and great-grandfather had been merchants and shipowners, and the former continued to live in style despite hard times. Thomas’s mother, Louise, was descended from Appletons and Wentworths, both colonial New England families of note, but she had been orphaned early and had lodged with relatives.

Thus the young Thomas Higginson knew early that he came from a privileged family with concomitant civic and social responsibilities but one forced to come to terms with the limitations and impediments of relative poverty. These lessons would later help guide him in his multifaceted career. Because his bright sister Louisa numbered the brilliant Margaret Fuller among her friends, Higginson, the future champion of women’s rights, also became aware that girls could not expect the Harvard education that young men of good families in his area could virtually take for granted. After five years in a “Dame School,” the nine-year-old Higginson began to study the obligatory Latin grammar in a private school, where one of his friends was the future poet James Russell Lowell. The next year Higginson’s father, who had been dismissed from his Harvard post several years earlier, died; in 1837, the thirteen-year-old boy entered Harvard as its youngest freshman.

Higginson’s next decade began and ended there, with several short-lived jobs sandwiched between. As an undergraduate, Higginson absorbed Harvard’s liberal intellectual atmosphere and took up one of its more extreme liberal positions: abolition. During the 1840’s he began to write poetry and grew a beard, then a symbol of defiance of the established order. At length he settled on a career as a minister, earned an impressive record at the Divinity School, and graduated in 1847.

Life’s Work

In 1847, after a long engagement, Higginson, buoyed by the prospect of a pastorate in Newburyport, Massachusetts, married Mary Channing. He also met and came to admire Lucy Stone, one of the pillars of the movement for women’s rights, but his own advocacy of women and black Americans won him few friends among the prominent white males in his congregation, and after two years he was asked to leave.

Shaken by the rejection, Higginson did not seek another pastorate but for the next three years worked for various liberal causes. In 1852, however, he accepted an appointment as the first pastor of the newly organized Free Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, and found there a congregation receptive to his abolitionist views. Increasingly, he preferred action to sermonizing on behalf of his causes, and his activities turned disruptive and even violent. He accompanied Stone and Worcester reformer Abby Kelley Foster to the World’s Temperance Convention in New York in 1853, and when the efforts of Higginson, Stone, and Susan B. Anthony to instill women’s rights issues into the convention split the delegations, they formed their own “Half World’s Convention.”

The following year, Higginson spearheaded an abortive rescue of a captured fugitive slave, Anthony Burns, in the course of which a police officer was killed. Those arrested and indicted for promoting a riot included Higginson, although he was never brought to trial. In the fall of 1856, he left his congregation to an assistant pastor and joined a group of Free-Soil activists in Kansas. Although he does not seem to have participated directly in violence there, this adventure acquainted him with the militant activities of John Brown, whom Higginson championed thereafter. One of Higginson’s more peaceful efforts of the 1850’s was performing the marriage ceremony of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, brother of Elizabeth Blackwell, the nation’s first female physician.

Higginson also wrote industriously during these years. His output included a considerable body of largely unsuccessful poetry and, more important, a series of essays on various topics in the Atlantic Monthly. The essay with the most far-reaching effects did not appear until early in 1862. Titled “A Letter to a Young Contributor,” it inspired some of the most intriguing letters ever written by a literary person.

After reading Higginson’s essay of advice to young writers, a totally unknown poet in Amherst, Massachusetts, responded in April of 1862 with an idiosyncratic letter enclosing four of her poems. A correspondence developed between Higginson and Emily Dickinson, and he befriended and encouraged this strikingly unconventional poet. Because Higginson has been accused of shortcomings as a critic of Dickinson’s poetry, it is appropriate to note that he stands as the first professional man of letters to recognize her as (to use his phrase) “a wholly new and original poet.”

Higginson’s letters to Dickinson have not survived, but hers to him make clear his importance to her. When she died in 1886 with her poems, nearly 1,800 of them, still in manuscript, Higginson coedited them with Mabel Todd, wife of an Amherst College professor. The volume that they produced in 1890, The Poems of Emily Dickinson , has suffered in comparison with the collection edited by Thomas H. Johnson more than a half century later, its most serious flaw being a tendency to “correct” not only her unusual punctuation but also, at times, her diction. It appears, however, that Todd, not Higginson, was mainly responsible for these editorial shortcomings.

The year that marked the beginning of the Higginson-Dickinson correspondence, 1862, also saw the beginning of Higginson’s military career. In March of that year he decided to forgo regular duties as a clergyman and began recruiting a Massachusetts regiment of volunteers for the war that had erupted between the North and the South the previous year. Before the regiment could join the conflict, Higginson, whose abolitionist sentiments had long been well known, was asked to command the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment made up of black southern refugees. Higginson learned to admire the spirit and resourcefulness of the African American soldiers. Wounded in his regiment’s unsuccessful attempt to cut the railroad between Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia, in the summer of 1863, Higginson, who had attained the rank of colonel, was in and out of hospitals for the duration of the war.

Thereafter Higginson wrote, lectured, and cared for his invalid wife. Along with Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and others, he organized the New EnglandWoman Suffrage Association and contributed to its publication, The Woman’s Journal. In 1870 he published Army Life in a Black Regiment . By this time his activities other than writing had slowed considerably. The abolition battle had been won, and though much remained to be done before anything like full civil rights would be extended to the freed slaves, the task would require the efforts of a new generation of reformers long after Higginson’s death.

The same pattern can be seen in Higginson’s struggle for women’s rights. In 1850, shortly after Elizabeth Blackwell obtained her medical degree, the first medical school for women opened in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the states gradually began admitting women to the bar. Property rights for married women and free universal secondary education for all girls were other goals that the women’s movement attained as the nineteenth century wore on. After about 1870, Higginson offered mainly moral support. For various reasons the suffrage movement lost momentum, and it was not until 1920 that the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed women the right to vote.

In 1877 Higginson’s first wife died; two years later he married Mary Thacher. His only two children, both daughters, were born in 1880 and 1881. Only one survived to adulthood. Poetry, both its composition and criticism, now engaged Higginson more than social reform. Between 1877 and 1904 he wrote all the poetry reviews for The Nation. His health, generally robust until about the age of sixty, declined. The women whose work he did so much to foster began to die. He spoke at funeral services for Dickinson in 1886 and Stone in 1893. Higginson’s later books—a good example is Cheerful Yesterdays (1896)—reflect the mellowing of this once-fire-breathing liberal activist. When he died in 1911, few remembered the social activist of the 1850’s and 1860’s; instead, he was mainly regarded as a “grand old man of literature.” However, in an appropriate gesture, the pallbearers at his funeral, a half century after the war in which he had accepted a command unprecedented in U.S. military history, were young black soldiers.

Significance

Because of their subject’s versatility, the biographers of Thomas Wentworth Higginson do not agree about his most important achievement. To lovers of American literature, his relationship to Emily Dickinson, a great poet who once wrote him, “You have saved my life,” stands out. Admirers of his activities on behalf of social justice cite his early championing of women’s rights initiatives and his militant—and military—efforts to abolish forever the evil of slavery. He combined literary competence and bold activism to an unusual degree; he impresses both by his word and deeds in his attack on injustices in American society.

Both women and black Americans continued to suffer from the heavy weight of injustice. From the perspective of several generations later, it is obvious that their battles had scarcely begun and that Higginson was limited by his vision, which was the vision of a white American male born early in the nineteenth century into an old New England family. Nevertheless, he contributed mightily to a great wave of social reform in the third quarter of that century. It would require further bursts of reforming energy in the twentieth century to consolidate and extend the earlier advances that Thomas Wentworth Higginson helped bring about.

Bibliography

Broaddus, Dorothy C. Genteel Rhetoric: Writing High Culture in Nineteenth-Century Boston. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Analyzes the work of Higginson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other nineteenth century writers who created a more refined rhetoric and aesthetics. Broaddus shows how this gentility was lost when the writers addressed slavery, abolition, and other serious topics related to the Civil War.

Edelstein, Tilden G. Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966. The best source of information concerning Higginson’s literary activity, including not only a substantial discussion of his literary criticism but also the only sustained criticism of Higginson’s little-known poetry.

Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Army Life in a Black Regiment. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984. A modern edition of Higginson’s account of his experiences as a commander of a controversial regiment of black soldiers in the Civil War. His assessments of his troops, though displaying the prejudices characteristic of even the most liberal thinkers of his time, stand out as beacons of enlightenment in that time.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Edited by Christopher Lobby. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. In his journal, Higginson recounts his experiences as commander of a Union regiment of black soldiers; his journal was the basis for his book Army Life in a Black Regiment. Also includes some of Higginson’s letters exploring changing racial relations in the South during the Civil War.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗.The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911). Edited by Howard N. Meyer. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2000. Collection of Higginson’s essays on various subjects, including his response to the Fugitive Slave Law, his advocacy of women’s suffrage, and his analysis of Sappho’s poetry.

Meyer, Howard N. Colonel of the Black Regiment: The Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New York: W. W. Norton, 1967. Emphasizes Higginson’s military distinction as the commander of a regiment of southern black fugitives, his interest in race relations, his early championing of Susan B. Anthony, and his later promotion of the woman suffrage movement.

Tuttleton, James W. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Stresses Higginson’s unusual relationship with Emily Dickinson as his chief contribution to American literature but also portrays Higginson as an original writer who illuminated the place of the professional man of letters in nineteenth century America.

Wells, Anna Mary. Dear Preceptor: The Life and Times of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963. The first of several biographies marking the resurgence of interest in Higginson during the 1960’s. As the title suggests, the book highlights the Dickinson connection, but at the same time it is the most balanced and readable life of Higginson.