Thomas Wentworth Higginson

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Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives from the 1st Middlesex district
In office
January 7, 1880 – January 4, 1882
Serving with George W. Park (1880) and Henry W. Muzzey (1881)
Preceded byEdwin B. Hale
Succeeded byChester W. Kingsley
Personal details
Born(1823-12-22)December 22, 1823
Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
DiedMay 9, 1911(1911-05-09) (aged 87)
Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.
Political partyFree Soil (1850–51)
Republican
Democratic (1888)
OccupationMinister, author, soldier
Signature

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (December 22, 1823 – May 9, 1911), who went by the name Wentworth,

1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized black regiment, from 1862 to 1864.[2] Following the war, he wrote about his experiences with African-American soldiers and devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for the rights of freed people, women, and other disfranchised peoples. He is also remembered as a mentor to poet Emily Dickinson
.

Early life and education

Higginson was born in

John Wentworth.[5]

Education and abolitionism

Higginson entered Harvard College at age 13 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at 16.[6] He graduated in 1841 at age 18 and taught at a private school for four months, but he detested it and became "a tutor of the three children of his Brookline cousin, Stephen Higginson Perkins".[7][3] After that, in 1843, he became "a nonmatriculated student at Harvard".[8] In 1842 he became engaged to Mary Elizabeth Channing.

He then studied theology at the Harvard Divinity School. In 1845, at the end of his first year of divinity training, he withdrew from the school to turn his attention to the abolitionist cause. He spent the subsequent year studying and, following the lead of Transcendentalist Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, fighting against the expected war with Mexico. Believing that war was only an excuse to expand slavery and the Slave Power, Higginson wrote antiwar poems and went door to door to get signatures for antiwar petitions. With the split of the antislavery movement in the 1840s, Higginson subscribed to the Disunion Abolitionists, who believed that as long as slave states remained a part of the Union, the Constitution could never be amended to ban slavery.

Marriage and family

Higginson re-entered divinity school, and after graduating in 1847 and being ordained as the minister of a Newburyport Unitarian church (see below), he married Mary Channing.

feminist author, Margaret Fuller.[10] Mary Channing died in 1877. Two years later Higginson married Mary Potter Thacher, with whom he had two daughters, one of whom survived into adulthood.[11]

Higginson was also related to Harriet Higginson, whose Wooddale, Illinois, home was the first commission of famed architect Bertrand Goldberg in 1934.

Career

Ministry

Having graduated from divinity school, Higginson was called as pastor at the First Religious Society of Newburyport, Massachusetts, a Unitarian church known for its liberal Christianity.[12][13] He supported the Essex County Antislavery Society and criticized the poor treatment of workers at Newburyport cotton factories. Additionally, the young minister invited Theodore Parker and fugitive slave William Wells Brown to speak at the church, and in sermons he condemned northern apathy towards slavery. In his role as board member of the Newburyport Lyceum and against the wishes of the majority of the board, Higginson brought Ralph Waldo Emerson to speak.[14] Higginson proved too radical for the congregation and resigned in 1849.[15][16] After that, he lectured on the Lyceum circuit, initially receiving about $15 for each talk (Theodore Parker and Ralph Waldo Emerson could command $25).[17]

Politics and militant abolitionism

The Compromise of 1850 brought new challenges and new ambitions for the unemployed minister. He ran as the Free Soil Party candidate for Massachusetts's 3rd congressional district in 1850 but lost. Higginson called upon citizens to uphold God's law and disobey the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.

He joined the Boston Vigilance Committee, an organization whose purpose was to protect fugitive slaves from pursuit and capture.[16] His joining of the group was inspired by the arrest and trial of the free black Frederick Jenkins, known as Shadrach. Abolitionists helped him escape to Canada. He participated with Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker in the attempt at freeing Thomas Sims, a Georgia slave who had escaped to Boston. In 1854, when the escaped Anthony Burns was threatened with extradition under the Fugitive Slave Act, Higginson led a small group who stormed the federal courthouse in Boston with battering rams, axes, cleavers, and revolvers.[6] They could not prevent Burns from being taken back to the South. A courthouse guard was killed, proof that "war had really begun."[18]: 85  Higginson received a saber slash on his chin; he wore the scar proudly for the rest of his life.[18]: 85 

In 1852, Higginson became pastor of the "fervently anti-slavery" Free Church in Worcester.[18]: 85  During his tenure, Higginson not only supported abolition, but also temperance, labor rights, and rights of women.

Returning from a voyage to Europe for the health of his wife, who had an unknown illness, Higginson organized a group of men on behalf of the

Massachusetts State Kansas Committee. He returned to the Kansas territory as an agent of the National Kansas Aid Committee, working to rebuild morale and distribute supplies—crates of rifles, revolvers, knives, ammunition, and a cannon[18]: 85 —to settlers. Higginson became convinced that abolition could not be attained by peaceful methods.[19][20] He celebrated Kansas as the equivalent of Bunker Hill; he called it a rehearsal for the violence to come.[18]
: 85 

As sectional conflict escalated, he continued to support disunion abolitionism, organizing the

Harper's Ferry, West Virginia. When Brown was captured, Higginson tried to raise money for a trial defense and made plans to help the leader escape from prison, though he was ultimately unsuccessful. Other members of the Secret Six fled to Canada or elsewhere after Brown's capture, but Higginson never fled, despite his involvement being common knowledge. Higginson was never arrested or called to testify.[16]

In 1879, Higginson was elected to represent Cambridge's first and fifth wards in the

U.S. House of Representatives in 1888 as a Democrat, but was defeated by Nathaniel P. Banks
.

Women's rights activism

Higginson was one of the leading

Atlantic Monthly,[25] "Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?"[26] A close friend and supporter of women's rights leader Lucy Stone, he performed the marriage ceremony of Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell in 1855 and, by sending their protest of unjust marriage laws to the press, was responsible for their "Marriage Protest" becoming a famous document.[27] Together with Stone, he compiled and published[28]
The Woman's Rights Almanac for 1858,[29] which provided data such as income disparity between the sexes as well as a summary of gains made by the national movement during its first seven years.

He also compiled and published, in 1858, "Consistent Democracy. The Elective Franchise for Women. Twenty-five Testimonies of Prominent Men," brief excerpts favoring woman suffrage from the speeches or writing of such men as Wendell Phillips, Henry Ward Beecher, William Henry Channing, Horace Greeley, Gerrit Smith, and various governors, legislators, and legislative reports.[30] A member of the National Woman's Rights Central Committee since 1853 or 1854, he was one of nine activists retained in that post when that large body of state representatives was reduced in 1858.[31]

After the Civil War, Higginson was an organizer of the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868,[32] and of the American Woman Suffrage Association the following year. He was one of the original editors of the suffrage newspaper Woman's Journal, founded in 1870, and contributed a front-page column to it for fourteen years. As a two-year member of the Massachusetts legislature, 1880–82, he was a valuable link between suffragists and the legislature.[33]

Civil War years

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, circa Civil War years

During the early part of the Civil War, Higginson was a

Edwin M. Stanton required that black regiments be commanded by white officers. "We, their officers, did not go there to teach lessons, but to receive them," Higginson wrote. "There were more than a hundred men in the ranks who had voluntarily met more dangers in their escape from slavery than any of my young captains had incurred in all their lives."[34]

Higginson described his Civil War experiences in Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870),[35] He contributed to the preservation of Negro spirituals by copying dialect verses and music he heard sung around the regiment's campfires. In his book, Drawn With the Sword, historian James M. McPherson cited Higginson as an example of a white officer in a black regiment who did not share the "[p]owerful racial prejudices" of others during the time period.[36]

Religious activism

After the Civil War, Higginson became active in the Free Religious Association (FRA) and in 1870 delivered the speech The Sympathy of Religions, which was later published and circulated. The address argued that all religions shared essential truths and a common exhortation toward benevolence. Division among the faiths was ultimately artificial, he said: "Every step in the progress of each brings it nearer to all the rest. For us, the door out of superstition and sin may be called Christianity; that is an historical name only, the accident of a birthplace. But other nations find other outlets; they must pass through their own doors."[37] He pushed the FRA to tolerate even those who did not accept the liberal principles the Association espoused, asking, "Are we as large as our theory? ... Are we as ready to tolerate ... the Evangelical man as the Mohammedan?" Although his own relationship to evangelical Protestants remained strained, he saw the exclusion of any religious mindset as fundamentally dangerous to the organization.[38] Higginson spoke at the Parliament of the World's Religions in 1893 and praised the great strides that had been made in the mutual understanding of the world's great religions, describing the Parliament as the culmination of the FRA's greatest ambitions.[38]

Later years and death

Grave of Thomas Wentworth Higginson

After the Civil War, he devoted most of his time to literature.[39] His writings show a deep love of nature, art and humanity. In his Common Sense About Women (1881) and his Women and Men (1888), he advocated equality of opportunity and equality of rights for men and women.[3]

In 1874, Higginson was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society.[40]

In 1891, Higginson became one of the founders of the

Society of American Friends of Russian Freedom
(SAFRF). He edited its public appeal "To the Friends of Russian Freedom". Later, in 1907 Higginson was the vice-president of the SAFRF.

In 1905, he joined with Jack London, Clarence Darrow, and Upton Sinclair to form the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.[41] Higginson was an Advisory Editor for the second attempt at the Massachusetts Magazine.

Higginson died May 9, 1911. Although his death record states that he was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he is actually buried in Cambridge Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the intersection of Riverview, Lawn, and Prospect paths.[42][43]

Beliefs

Higginson's deep conviction in the evils of slavery stemmed in part from his mother's influence. He greatly admired abolitionists, who, despite persecution, showed courage and commitment to the cause. The writings of

An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, first convinced him to speak against slavery.[44]

Homeopathy

Higginson was a strong advocate of homeopathy. In 1863, he wrote to his wife Mary Channing Higginson: "and also Miss Laura Towne, the homeopathic physician of the department, chief teacher and probably the most energetic person this side of civilisation [sic]: a person of splendid health and astonishing capacity ... I think she has done more for me than anyone else by prescribing homeopathic arsenic as a tonic, one powder every day on rising, and it has already, I think (3 doses) affected me."[45]

Political parties and ideology

In 1850, Higginson was the Free Soil Party candidate for Congress and lost.[46] Subsequently, he was successively a Republican, an Independent, and a Democrat.[3] He described having had an interest in his early youth in Brook Farm and Fourierism.[47]

Relationship with Emily Dickinson

Letter and envelope from Emily Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Higginson is remembered as a correspondent and literary mentor to the poet Emily Dickinson.

In April 1862, Higginson published an article in the

Atlantic Monthly, titled "Letter to a Young Contributor," in which he advised budding young writers to step up. Emily Dickinson, a 32-year-old woman from Amherst, Massachusetts
, sent a letter to Higginson, enclosing four poems and asking, "Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?" (Letter 260) He was not – his reply included gentle "surgery" (that is, criticism) of Dickinson's raw, odd verse, questions about Dickinson's personal and literary background, and a request for more poems.

Higginson's next reply contained high praise, causing Dickinson to reply that it "gave no drunkenness" only because she had "tasted rum before"; she still, though, had "few pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you, my tears would block my tongue" (Letter 265). In the same letter, Higginson warned her against publishing her poetry because of its unconventional form and style.

Gradually, Higginson became Dickinson's mentor and "preceptor," and he visited her twice, in 1870 and 1873, at her home in Amherst. Higginson never felt that he fully understood Dickinson. "The bee himself did not evade the schoolboy more than she evaded me," he wrote, "and even at this day I still stand somewhat bewildered, like the boy." ("Emily Dickinson's Letters," Atlantic Monthly, October 1891) After Dickinson's death, Higginson collaborated with Mabel Loomis Todd in publishing volumes of her poetry – heavily edited in favor of conventional punctuation, diction, and rhyme. In White Heat (Knopf, 2008), an account of Higginson's friendship with Dickinson, author Brenda Wineapple credits Higginson with more editorial sensitivity than literary historians have previously noted. Higginson's prominence within intellectual circles helped to promote Dickinson's poetry, which remained strange and startling even in its altered form.

Selected list of works

His works included:[3][48]

See also

Notes

  1. ^
    ISBN 051759028X
    .
  2. ^ Ash, Stephen V., Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments that Changed the Course of the Civil War. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Chisholm 1911.
  4. ^ Wilson, J. G.; Fiske, J., eds. (1892). "Higginson, Stephen" . Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography. New York: D. Appleton.
  5. ^ Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: The Story of His Life. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914, pp. 2–3
  6. ^
    ISBN 0-618-05013-2
  7. ^ Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, p. 38.
  8. ^ Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, p. 45.
  9. ^ Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, pp. 77–78.
  10. ^ Frederick T. McGill, Jr., Channing of Concord: A Life of William Ellery Channing II, Rutgers University Press, 1967.
  11. ^ Family Tree of Thomas Wentworth Higginson
  12. ISBN 1-57003-244-0
    .
  13. ^ Owen, Barbara. "History of the First Religious Society" Archived December 29, 2008, at the Wayback Machine, First Religious Society (Unitarian Universalist), Newburyport, MA. Accessed on August 14, 2010.
  14. ^ Beck, Janet Kemper. Creating the John Brown Legend: Emerson, Thoreau, Douglass, Child and Higginson in Defense of the Raid on Harpers Ferry. McFarland, April 7, 2009, p85-87
  15. ^ Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, pp. 93–94.
  16. ^
    ISBN 1-57003-244-0
    .
  17. ^ Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, p. 97.
  18. ^ a b c d e Faust, Drew Gilpin (December 2023). "The Men Who Started the War". The Atlantic: 82–89.
  19. ^ Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, "A Ride Through Kanzas". Letters to the New York Tribune, 1856 (via archive.org)
  20. ^ Sanborn, F.B. "Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Tributes)" The Massachusetts Magazine, Vol. IV (1911), No. 3, p. 142 (via archive.org)
  21. ^ Manual for the Use of the General Court. Boston: Commonwealth of Massachusetts. 1880. p. 362.
  22. hdl:2452/40659
    .
  23. ISBN 0-275-97877-X
    , pp. 136–37, 173.
  24. ^ Wendell Phillips, Harriet Hardy Taylor Mill, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Clarina I. Howard Nichols, Theodore Parker (1854). "Woman's Rights Tracts". Boston: Robert F. Wallcut – via Internet Archive.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  25. ^ "Women and the Alphabet, by Thomas Wentworth Higginson". www1.assumption.edu.
  26. ^ Meyer, 2000, pp. 266–82.
  27. ^ Million, 2003, p. 195.
  28. ^ Stone, Lucy; Susan B. Anthony Collection (Library of Congress) DLC; National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection (Library of Congress) DLC (March 6, 2019). "The Woman's Right's Almanac for 1858. Containing Facts, Statistics, Arguments, Records of Progress, and Proofs of the Need of it". Worcester, Mass.: Z. Baker & Co. – via Internet Archive.
  29. ^ The Woman's Rights Almanac for 1858, Containing Facts, Statistics, Arguments, Records of Progress, and Proofs of the Need of It. Worcester, Mass: Z. Baker & Co.; Boston: R. F. Walcutt. [1857]
  30. ^ "The Elective Franchise for Woman," National Anti-Slavery Standard, March 27, 1858, p. 3.
  31. ^ New York Times, May 15, 1858, p. 4.
  32. ^ Dubois, Ellen Carol, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848–1869, Cornell University Press, (1978), p. 168.
  33. ^ Merk, Lois Bannister, "Massachusetts and the Woman Suffrage Movement," Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1958, Revised, 1961, pp. 16–17.
  34. ^ "The Color of Bravery: United States Colored Troops in the Civil War." Battlefields.org. Retrieved September 29, 2019.
  35. Houghton, Mifflin
    .
  36. ISBN 9780199727834
    . Retrieved March 31, 2015.
  37. ^ Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (June 2, 1870). The Sympathy of Religions. First printed in The Radical (Boston, 1871). Retrieved from Gutenberg.org, 2018-05-05.
  38. ^ a b Schmidt, Leigh Eric (2005). Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality from Emerson to Oprah. New York: HarperCollins, pp. 134–135.
  39. ^ Alexander K. McClure, ed. (1902). Famous American Statesmen & Orators. Vol. VI. New York: F. F. Lovell Publishing Company. p. 222.
  40. ^ "MemberListH". American Antiquarian Society.
  41. ^ Nichols, Richard E. (August 20, 2000). "THE MAGNIFICENT ACTIVIST The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson". The New York Times. His radicalism never dimmed; in 1906, at the age of 83, he joined with Jack London and Upton Sinclair to form the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.
  42. ISBN 0-618-05013-2
  43. ^ "Massachusetts, Deaths, 1841–1915," Vol.1911/26 Death: Pg.402. State Archives, Boston.
  44. ^ Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, p. 51.
  45. ISBN 0-226-33330-2.[page needed
    ]
  46. ^ Edelstein, Tilden G., Strange Enthusiasm, pp. 106–107.
  47. ^ Higginson, Thomas W. "Views on Socialism". p. 9. I grew up in the Brook Farm and Fourierite period and have always been interested in all tendencies in that direction.
  48. ^ Drew Gilpin Faust writes, "Higginson published in February 1860 the first of a series of articles in The Atlantic that he referred to as his 'Insurrection Papers.' After writing essays on 'The Maroons of Jamaica' and 'The Maroons of Surinam'—Black groups who had escaped enslavement to establish their own independent societies on the fringes of white settlement—he proceeded to publish admiring essays on Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and Gabriel, men who had embraced violence in their efforts to overturn American slavery". Drew Gilpin Faust, "The Men Who Started the War", The Atlantic, December 2023, p. 87.
  49. ^ Geller, William W., "Mount Katahdin — March 1853: the Mysteries of an Ascent" (2016). Maine History Documents. 119. Page 10 identifies Higginson as the anonymous author of "Going to Katahdin", omitting "Mount", but endnote 13 on page 19 makes clear that it is the same article as "Going to Mount Katahdin".

References

Further reading

  • Bauch, Marc A. Extending the Canon: Thomas Wentworth Higginson and African-American Spirituals. Munich, Germany: Grin, 2013.
  • Edelstein, Tilden G. Strange Enthusiasm: A Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968.
  • Egerton, Douglas R. A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024.
  • Higginson, Mary Thacher. Thomas Wentworth Higginson: The Story of His Life Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914.
  • Kytle, Ethan J. "An American Romantic Goes to War," The New York Times, April 15, 2011.
  • Meyer, Howard N. Colonel of the Black Regiment: The Life of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 1967.
  • Meyer, Howard N., ed. The Magnificent Activist: The Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1823–1911. DaCapo Press, 2000.
  • Tuttleton, James W. Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Twayne Publishers, 1978.
  • Wells, Anna Mary. Dear Preceptor: The Life and Times of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963.
  • Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1962, pp. 247–256.
  • Pritzker Military Library
    on February 20, 2009.

Historiography

  • Muccigrosso, Robert, ed. Research Guide to American Historical Biography (1988) 5:2543-46

Primary sources

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