Thomas Wentworth Higginson Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (22 December 1822-9 May 1911), known through most of his mature life as "Colonel Higginson" because of his Civil War service with black troops, is to be remembered as a man of letters, author, speaker, radical religionist, and advocate of equality for women. He was born, raised, and died in Cambridge. Higginson was married twice, first to his cousin, Mary Channing, and upon her death, to Mary Thacher, who survived him. His father, Stephen Higginson, after having gone bankrupt, was Bursar of Harvard College when Thomas Wentworth attended. During his years at Harvard, where he was graduated in 1841, he had the reputation of being a dilettante, reading literature, poetry, or whatever struck his fancy. He was given to roaming the fields outside of Cambridge or dreaming under a tree on the banks of the Charles River, but after teaching and maturing a year or so, he entered the Divinity School and was graduated in 1847. This was a vintage period which produced the leaders of a religious revolt against the mild Unitarianism of the age. At Divinity Hall Higginson met Samuel Johnson, Samuel Longfellow, and Octavius Brooks Frothingham. Together they listened to the sermons of Theodore Parker, frowned on by the Harvard authorities, and formed some of their radical views of religion. Higginson was called to be pastor of Newburyport Unitarian Church in 1847, but after three years he was asked to leave because of his anti-slavery sermons. In 1852 he settled in Worcester, Massachusetts, and established the Free Church, a congregation of radicals with loose Unitarian connections, modeled after Parker's Twenty-Eighth Congregational Society in Boston.

This became the first Free Church of his generation of Unitarian ministers and, doubtless, pointed the way for Johnson, Longfellow, and Frothingham. During Higginson's Worcester years he became involved in the anti-slavery dispute, was wounded by a police saber during the Anthony Burns affair in 1854, helped raise money and equipment for the anti-slavery side in the Kansas struggle, and was on the scene writing firsthand reports for publication in the Atlantic Monthly. When the Civil War broke out, he volunteered as Captain in the 51st Massachusetts Regiment, and later as a Colonel led the 1st South Carolina Volunteers (33rd colored U. S. Troops), the first freedmen mustered into the Federal service in the Civil War. In small diversionary campaigns, his troops captured and held Jacksonville, Florida, and invaded and held an area in Tide Water, South Carolina. Confederate artillery disabled him near Willow Bluff and he resigned from the Army in 1864. After his military career, he moved to Newport, Rhode Island, where he free-lanced as a writer and speaker until 1878. The rest of his life was spent in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he continued his life as writer, speaker, and mentor of aspiring intellectuals. After the Civil War, he enlarged his already-wide reputation by his work in the Free Religious Association for which he often spoke, wrote for the Index, the Free Religious Association journal, and later served as president following Frothingham and Felix Adler. In 1880-1881 he served in the Massachusetts legislature and on the State Board of Education. He is remembered as one of Emily Dickinson's mentors and an early advocate of black equality and woman's rights. His memory lives on as a man of genial spirit and humor, humane, broad-visioned, if not profound, but able to understand his age and speak to it.