“You were not aware that you saved my life,” wrote Emily Dickinson late in life to Thomas Higginson. Years earlier, having read his article encouraging aspiring writers, she had sent him several poems, and he recognized her “wholly new and original genius.” They met twice and corresponded for decades; she called him “dear Preceptor” and signed herself “Your Scholar” or “Your Gnome.” After her death he would co-edit and find a publisher for her first volume of poems.
But the Cambridge intellectual—A.B. 1841, Dv ’47, A.M. ’69, LL.D. ’98 —now remembered mainly as a footnote to Dickinson was also a steadfast activist who vowed to reform his country’s “fossilized system of injustice” in “a wave of desire for a freer and more ideal life.” His mother had instilled the motives driving her youngest son’s life: “the love of personal liberty, of religious freedom, and of the equality of the sexes.”
Higginson initially hoped to achieve reform through a ministry, but was forced to resign from his first church within two years, after preaching that some parishioners were complicit in evil as bankers for slave plantations and owners of slaving ships. Convinced that overt racists like Chief Justice Roger Taney had turned the Constitution into a “dead letter,” he advocated Northern secession from the Union and in 1850 helped form the Boston-based Vigilance Committee to defy the Fugitive Slave Act. In 1854 he was indicted (though never prosecuted) for riot after a marshal was killed during the committee’s failed attempt to rescue the fugitive Anthony Burns. He also helped recruit and arm settlers who would vote, and fight, to make Kansas a free state. After his comrade John Brown was captured in an attack at Harper’s Ferry, Higginson plotted to free him, but Brown prohibited any rescue.
Once civil war broke out, he shipped to the Georgia Sea Islands as a colonel leading the Union’s first all-black regiment to see combat. He thrilled to fulfill Brown’s dream of commanding an “outcast race.” His Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870) testifies to his troops’ courage under fire, rebuts stereotypes dehumanizing black people as a “brutal race” unfit for military service, and incorporates a pioneering study of the spirituals that inspired his men. After the war he pressured Congress to give his soldiers their back pay. Battling the “fetish of colorphobia,” he accused President Andrew Johnson’s faction of trying “to keep the Negroes in a condition just as near slavery as possible.” Only years later would he realize that by supporting withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877, he had failed black men who fought for freedom and the Union. As Jim Crow and the KKK took hold, erasing voting and other rights, he knew he had underestimated white supremacists’ ruthless tenacity.
Higginson often paralleled this erasure to his other great battle, against the denial of suffrage and self-determination for women. A lifelong feminist, he helped convene and addressed the 1856 Woman Suffrage Convention: “We men have been standing for years with our hands crushing down the shoulders of woman.” He wrote a study of feminist Margaret Fuller, a major influence, for the American Men of Letters series, and in Atlantic Monthly essays like “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” and “The Pleasing Art of Self-Extinction,” he mocked the idea that “self-surrender” would bring women fulfillment: “Woman must be a subject or an equal: there is no middle ground.”
Higginson relentlessly fought battles that progressives still fight, over issues ranging from vilification of immigrants to plutocratic concentration of wealth. His critique of fundamentalism, “Scripture Idolatry,” advocated inclusiveness of all religions. His many books include the nature-celebrating Outdoor Papers, a history for “young folks,” and biographies of Harvard’s Civil War causalities.
Throughout his political struggles, Higginson’s most trusted confidantes were his mother and Mary Channing, his wife since 1847, a wry commentator on life and his astute critic. His deepest sorrow came from intractable illnesses that kept Mary mostly bedridden from her early thirties until her death in 1877. He found a “new love for life” when he married Mary Thacher—an aspiring young writer who became his biographer—and she gave birth to his only child, Margaret, with whom he loved to play, talk, and duet.
As he aged, Higginson felt his “attitude of revolution” fading, but his activism was revived when, after the Spanish-American War, he co-founded the Anti-Imperialist League, protesting use of American troops to prevent Philippine independence. In “How Should a Colored Man Vote in 1900?” he chastised legislators who called Filipinos “unfit for freedom” and warned readers to “cut adrift from any organization which wars on the dark races as such and begins to talk again of the natural supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon.”
When he died in 1911, an honor guard of black soldiers carried Higginson’s casket down the aisle of the Cambridge First Parish Church. He had worried late in life that his legacy would suffer from “having too many irons in the fire,” yet he knew that fame was fickle and held on to a conviction that a lifetime committed to activism could help bring about a social revolution.
