And the hands were black that held the gun,
and white that held the sword,
But the difference was none and the color but one,
When the red, red blood was poured.
So mused a seminal American hero whose 87-year-long action-packed life is the subject of a masterful new biography by historian Douglas R. Egerton. Thomas Wentworth Higginson commanded the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first authorized Union regiment made up of freed black men in the Civil War. But that historic accomplishment barely scratches the surface of the poet, boxer, warrior, Harvard Divinity School graduate, essayist, novelist, feminist, abolitionist, spiritualist, and politician.
Born in Massachusetts in 1823, Higginson was a crusader for many causes, encouraged by his mother’s wish that he set himself “on a course that will lead to perfection.” A boxer in his teens and a graduate of Harvard by 17 (he later returned for his graduate studies), Higginson dedicated his life to fighting for what he called a “Sisterhood of Reforms” that would enable America to live up to the promise of its principles. Though he was the descendant of New England’s first white settlers, he, as Egerton puts it, “cast his lot with the persecuted and oppressed.” Along the way, he interacted and often befriended his era’s most seminal figures. He mentored a young Emily Dickinson, sipped tea with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and maintained close ties with Mark Twain and Henry David Thoreau. He debated abolitionist strategies with Frederick Douglass, hosted Ralph Waldo Emerson, and had frequent dinners with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
In one of his 100 essays in the Atlantic Monthly, Higginson argued for the compatibility of “physical vigor and spiritual sanctity.” Though he treasured the quiet that would enable his writing, brashness was his preferred strategy. “Loud language,” he once asserted, was needed to reach those whose ears were “stuffed with southern cotton.”
Though Higginson was ordained in 1847, the pulpit was not for him. His congregation forced him out, upset over his advocating for women’s inclusion in a local club.
Higginson was supportive of John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. So much so that after Brown’s arrest, prior to his execution, he wrote to Higginson “expressing deep feelings of gratitude for your journey to visit & comfort my family as well as myself.” Higginson’s refusal to abandon Brown earned him the respect of even those abolitionists like Douglass more inclined toward pacifism.
His fights came in ink and with fists. He critiqued, in a pamphlet, Tocqueville’s observation in his 1840 Democracy in America that “there is no class of persons who do not exercise the elective franchise,” in most New England states. The Frenchman, Higginson scoffed, “dropped women from the human race.” In 1854 Higginson was arrested for storming a Boston courthouse with a battering ram in a failed attempt to free Anthony Burns, a former slave who had run away shortly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. Higginson’s chin was scarred by a policeman’s sword in the skirmish. (Charges were eventually dismissed.)
After pro-slavery settlers burned down Lawrence, Kan., the free-staters undertaking the town’s rebuilding asked Higginson to offer words of encouragement. He preached about Nehemia’s fourth chapter, the account of the Israelites returning from exile and rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem (Egerton mistakenly refers to the city as Jericho).
He also dabbled in spiritualism, a belief popular in his time that the living could contact the dead, though the publications he wrote for often blanched at his abolitionist leanings.
When he assumed command of the First South Carolina Volunteers in 1862, Higginson did so with full faith that his troops, despite their earlier brutalization as slaves, would make mighty and courageous soldiers. The role was a dream realized. Earlier he had written that leading free blacks in defense of those enslaved would be “the most important service in the history of the War,” though, Egerton notes, he never imagined he would be the one to do it. The unit’s success earned Lincoln’s praise.
Alas, the colonel’s military career ended after a cannonball nearly took off his head. The sword was quickly replaced with a pen. Higginson petitioned Congress for equal pay for black soldiers and never forgave Lincoln, even after he had been assassinated, for not achieving this goal. His book about the experience, Army Life in a Black Regiment, emphasized his troops’ heroism while downplaying his role. Though Egerton doesn’t mention it, Army Life, written as it was by the pugilist preacher, stresses the biblically infused sense of mission his troops held. “Their memories,” Higginson wrote, “are a vast bewildered chaos of Jewish history and biography; and most of the great events of the past, down to the period of the American Revolution, they instinctively attribute to Moses.”
Higginson fathered his first child in his late 50s. When she died after two months, Dickinson wrote him a condolence letter. His second daughter, born a year later, was named Margaret Waldo, in tribute to his good friend, Emerson.
Following the success of the wartime memoir, Higginson went on to compose novels and traveled to London where he was hosted by H.G. Wells. He also campaigned with politicians against President Grant seeking a third term, and, with his friend Twain, in favor of James Garfield’s candidacy because Garfield favored black voting rights. He authored a 500-page history of the United States aimed at teens that sold 200,000 copies and was translated into French, German, and Italian. He ran unsuccessfully for Congress and was briefly considered as a candidate for the president of the University of Michigan. He shared a bicycle ride with a 16-year-old Helen Keller and, in 1900, had dinner with a young author from England named Winston Churchill, who was visiting New England on a book tour.
Noting his interactions with these vastly more recognized figures, Egerton notes how Higginson is barely remembered today. “Higginson’s lifelong refusal to tether himself to a single issue has today kept him from fame by association with one,” Egerton suggests.
After his death in May 1911, one obituary aptly noted, “Colonel Higginson was a man on fire. He had convictions, and lived up to them in the fullest degree.” No doubt Higginson would have been pleased. Thirty years prior, in his diary, he recorded, “the key to my life is easily to be found in this, that what I longed for from childhood was not to be eminent in this way or that, but to lead a whole life, develop all my powers, & do well in whatever came my way to do.”
A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson
by Douglas R. Egerton
Oxford University Press, 352 pp., $35
Stuart Halpern is senior adviser to the provost and deputy director of the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.
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