Part One
TWO
Don’t you think it rather a pity that all the really interesting Americans seem to be dead?” an Englishwoman once asked the aging Colonel Higginson, who, slightly startled by the insult, sadly agreed.
There was a belated quality about Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Born in 1823, almost two decades after Emerson and Garrison and Theodore Parker, he was of a generation fated to admire and emulate but never outshine them. For they were the giants of what Higginson called the sunny side of the transcendental period, spawned by a German philosophical idealism in which the love of nature and humanity routed out the bogey of Puritan gloom, substituting idealism for depravity and sin.
Yet Thomas Wentworth Higginson, their beneficiary, had been at the banquet, unbelievable as that might be to future chroniclers. “It would seem as strange to another generation for me to have sat at the same table with Longfellow or Emerson,” Higginson admitted with characteristic modesty, “as it now seems that men shld hv. sat at the table with Wordsworth or with Milton.”
Perhaps; but perhaps not.
DESCENDED FROM SEVEN GENERATIONS of Higginsons in America, Thomas Wentworth bore the mixed blessing of a long New England lineage. His ancestor the Reverend Francis Higginson had sailed to the New World from England in the spring of 1629 along with six goats, about two hundred other passengers (not including servants), his eight children (one of whom died during the voyage), and his wife, Higginson’s fare on the Talbot paid by the Massachusetts Bay Colony. For one hundred acres of land and thirty pounds per annum, Reverend Francis had been commissioned to save souls in Naumkeag, and he would perform so conscientiously—changing the name of the village to Salem and establishing its first church—that Cotton Mather would dub him the Noah of New England.
When the Reverend Higginson died, just a year after setting foot on Massachusetts soil, his son John took up his mantle by promptly banishing Quakers and then signing a nefarious share of arrest warrants during the witchcraft hysteria of 1692. But John’s rather lackluster commitment to killing witches compromised his own daughter, who was soon accused of the dark art. Not surprisingly, in later years he apologized in public for the terrible delusion he had helped incite and, always one to admit a mistake, at age ninety backed Judge Samuel Sewall’s efforts to abolish slavery and the slave trade, the foundation of much of Salem’s wealth. The local historian Charles Upham, who approved of very few, called Higginson a man of sterling character.
Conscience was a Higginson inheritance, or at least the legacy insisted on by its nineteenth-century descendant Thomas Wentworth. Of course the family had by then distinguished itself in commerce. Higginson’s paternal grandfather, Stephen, shipowner, merchant, and soldier, was the Massachusetts delegate to the Continental Congress in 1783 and the reputed author of The Writings of Laco, published in 1789, which, arguing for freedom of the press, scathingly denounced John Hancock. A member of what was called the Essex Junto, a group of well-to-do Federalist merchants who, despising Jefferson, considered seceding from the United States to protect their interests, he opposed the Embargo Act of 1807, which choked off trade in the port of Salem, but he managed to turn a profit during the War of 1812. No wonder his grandson Wentworth (as Thomas was called) long remembered this imposing specter, attired in black, as wielding a gold-headed cane.
Wentworth Higginson would write laudatory biographies of his ancestor Francis and his grandfather but kept largely silent on the subject of his own father. An improvident investor and lavish spender, Stephen Higginson Jr. had to liquidate most of his colossal library after the War of 1812 and move his family from Boston’s fashionable Mount Vernon Street to a sheep farm in Bolton, where they remained until well-placed friends landed him a job as steward of Harvard College. He immediately built a house on Kirkland Street, then a sandy plain, but doubtless the good-hearted profligate was not the best man to guard the Harvard treasury.
By then his family was quite large. After his first wife died, leaving him five children, Stephen wed his daughters’ governess, Louisa Storrow, a New England Jane Eyre with a pedigree eminently respectable (Appletons, Wentworths, and Storrows) as well as swashbuckling (she was also descended from an English officer who had been imprisoned in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, during the Revolution). Stephen Higginson’s ward since her eleventh year and his wife at nineteen, she bore ten children, six of whom lived to adulthood. Named for her forebears, Thomas Wentworth Storrow Higginson was her last, “the star that gilds the evening of my days—and he must shine bright and clear,” she ominously continued, “or my path will be darkened.” Later in life, Higginson identified his mother as the woman who influenced him most, particularly since he had been a feeble, sickly infant “half dead,” as she had liked to remind him.
Higginson’s childhood was comfortable, privileged, and difficult. A charitable man who helped organize the Harvard Divinity School, his father had not mended his ways. “I think sometimes he will offer his wife and children to somebody who has not got any,” Mrs. Higginson grumbled, and Wentworth would comment, with some aspersion, that “his hospitality was inconveniently unbounded.” When the Republicans in the state legislature (along with Emily Dickinson’s grandfather) chartered the Congregationalist Amherst College in protest against Harvard’s balmy Unitarianism, Harvard lost its annual appropriation, and Stephen Higginson Jr. faced a crisis he could not contain. (The families of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Higginson were thus linked, and though they sat on different sides of the theological fence, each was intimately connected to the way in which that fence had been built.) The deficit mounted, salaries were cut, students were charged for the wine they drank in chapel, and the college sloop was sold. He resigned his post in disgrace, and the Harvard Corporation held him personally responsible for the bills.
The family crated their household goods, auctioned much of their furniture, and took up residence on the far side of Cambridge Common, where Mrs. Higginson could support her brood with boarders in a house built by her eldest son, Francis, now a physician. Another son began to tutor, and yet Stephen Higginson sank deeper into debt, squandering what remained of his own father’s legacy until, at age sixty-four, he suddenly died.
“In works of Love he found his happiness,” read his double-edged epitaph, hinting at promises left unfulfilled. By this time, Wentworth was ten.
HIS HEALTH HAD IMPROVED, he learned to read and recite at four, and as a docile child, good-natured and by many accounts good-looking, he soaked up the scholarly, status-minded standards of the neighborhood, which happened to be Harvard College. Boyhood memories were bookish: he recalled a good set of Dr. Johnson’s works, an early edition of Boswell, the writing of Fanny Burney, and his mother reading Walter Scott. Harvard professors brought by volumes of Collins, Goldsmith, and Campbell to woo his brilliant aunt, Ann Gilliam Storrow, who lived with them; Jared Sparks, later Harvard’s president, entertained the family with portfolios of Washington’s letters to his mother; John G. Palfrey, dean of the divinity school and the historian of New England subsequently adored by Henry Adams, recited aloud all of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.
At the private school run by William Wells, a place to “fit” for Harvard College, Wentworth hopefully memorized the list of undergraduate classes and at thirteen, well versed in Latin grammar and something of a prodigy, entered the freshman class. “Born in the college, bred to it,” as he later said. (His three elder brothers had also attended Harvard, and each remained involved with it during their lives.) But Wentworth was a lonely, awkward boy who had spurted up to six feet and, desperate to excel, worried lest he be fated for second place.
He studied Greek with the poet Jones Very, French literature with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and chemistry with John Webster, soon notorious for the gruesome murder of George Parkman. He enrolled in a class in entomology, which he adored, and he helped form a makeshift natural history society. He long remembered Edward Tyrrel Channing’s courses in rhetoric. “I rarely write for three hours without half consciously recalling some caution or suggestion of his,” Higginson later recollected of Channing, who also taught Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and Charles Eliot Norton.
At Harvard his friend Levi Thaxter (future husband of the poet Celia Laighton Thaxter) introduced him to the writings of Emerson, Browning, and Hazlitt. Another acquaintance, if not quite a friend, was James Russell Lowell, with whom he felt rivalrous, particularly since he adored Lowell’s fiancée, Maria White, a grand woman flushed with consumption, poetry, and abolition. (Years later Higginson would print her poems whenever he could.) Mainly, though, in the presence of women outside the family, Wentworth was clumsy and tongue-tied until, fed up, he scribbled out topics of conversation on scraps of paper, which he would pull out of his pocket whenever the banter between him and a pretty young woman lagged. Even in flirtation he was something of a pedant.
Emotionally unprepared for college, in 1841 he was equally unready to leave it. Though he toyed with the idea of growing peaches—the communal living experiment at Brook Farm, then in its halcyon days, stirred his suggestible imagination—he took a job teaching in nearby Jamaica Plain, his mother and two sisters having decamped to Vermont, where his brother Francis had opened a medical practice. Wentworth lasted just six months in Jamaica Plain. Fortunately, a rich older cousin, Stephen Perkins, rescued him with an offer to tutor his three sons, one of whom would be cut down at Cedar Mountain in the summer of 1862.
At the Perkins estate in rural Brookline, Higginson entered a world of cultured, self-conscious wealth. Cousin Perkins owned paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West, eventually bequeathed to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; he avidly read Continental literature and talked volubly about the need for social change. For this was the period of what Higginson would call the Newness, when the skies of New England rained reform. The estimable Ralph Waldo Emerson had himself resigned the pulpit in 1832, yearning for a more humane form of belief, one that squarely put divinity in the soul of the individual. Four years later, when Higginson was an impressionable twelve-year-old, Emerson published the very bible of Newness, Nature, which asked, “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” (“God incarnates himself in man,” Emerson declared at the Harvard Divinity School in 1838 and was not to be invited back for thirty years.) In 1840, Elizabeth Peabody opened her atom of a foreign bookshop (Higginson’s description) on West Street in Boston, where she talked up Brook Farm and in the back room printed the transcendentalist organ, The Dial, while so-called transcendentalists—like Emerson and Bronson Alcott—snatched French or German volumes from her shelves. And Higginson’s sister Anna was friends with the peerless Margaret Fuller, the bookstore’s resident sibyl, who organized a series of “Conversations” for Boston women. Fuller sat on a tripod in a velvet gown, demanding no less of herself than of the women assembled before her: What are we, as women, born to do, she asked, and how do we intend to do it?
James Russell Lowell and William Story quit the legal profession to give their all to art, and women writers from George Sand to Lydia Maria Child sympathized with the downtrodden poor. And the slaves. In 1833, Child published her abolitionist Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, and in 1834, Wentworth’s brother Francis published Remarks on Slavery and Emancipation, a rational argument demolishing any and all excuses for chattel slavery. In 1841 the courts ruled that the Africans who had staged a revolt aboard the Amistad were but kidnapped people unlawfully traded, and Frederick Douglass spoke at the antislavery convention in Nantucket about the abominations he himself had endured.
Buoyed by the Newness, Higginson disdained the predictable professions of law and medicine, and though shaken by the phrenologist who told him he had “splendid talents but no application,” he dreamed of the ideal, inchoate as it was. “I feel overflowing with mental energies,” he told his mother; “I will be Great if I can.” But the only thing he knew how to do was study, so in 1843 he returned to Harvard, where he could dabble in an institutionally sanctioned way, letting greatness find him. (The college permitted resident graduates to take courses without working toward a degree.) “If I have any genius, I must have a fair chance to cherish it,” he pleaded with his dubious mother. “The point I wish to insist upon about all this you see is that it is sensible & rational—not at all utopia.” For money, he applied for a proctorship, and when denied he earned a pittance by tutoring and copying. “I have been brought up poor & am not afraid to continue so,” he declared, more vehement than ever, “and certainly I shall be glad to do it, if it is a necessary accompaniment to a life spent as I wish to spend it.”
Renting a room with a view on the third floor of the College House, he could see pigs and cows meandering on the muddy streets. He was nineteen. He was free. Living on his own, he could redo his college years with no mother waiting up nights for the sound of the latch. And he had at last decided on a profession. He would be a poet. There was no higher calling.
The Higginson household had for years consumed Byron with delight, and the great Emerson had himself said that “all the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.” Poets unfix the world, banish our habits, dwell in possibilities of change and daring action. They make the world whole; they allow us to catch what we ordinarily miss. “What I would not give to know whether I really have that in me which will make a poet,” he mused, “or whether I deceive myself and only possess a mediocre talent.”
But the latter seemed the case. When the boy’s verses had been summarily rejected by The Dial, Emerson let him down with a thud. “They have truth and earnestness,” the Concord philosopher told him, “and a happier hour may add that external perfection which can neither be commanded nor described.”
Reading De Quincey and Coleridge, Wentworth experimented with opium, hoping for a New England version of “Kubla Khan,” but with no visions forthcoming, he threw himself back into his books, sowing intellectual wild oats, as he later said: Newton, Homer, Hesiod, Chaucer, George Sand, Linnaeus, and more Emerson. He learned German in order to read Jean Paul Richter, whom he worshipped, and Goethe, whom everyone did; he kept up his Greek, and one of his first projects after the Civil War would be a translation of Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, born a slave, who taught that all souls were equal.
“I did not know exactly what I wished to study in Cambridge,” Higginson would later reminisce. “Indeed, I went there to find out.” At the time, though, he figured his scheme of promiscuous apprenticeship would take ten to fifteen years. “I think I have a fair right to expect, in the then state of my powers, to make my living as a literary man without a profession,” he calculated. Yet something was missing. “I cannot live alone,” he informed his family. “Solitude may be good for study sometimes, but not solitude in a crowd for a social-hearted person like me.”
Actually, with statements like these Wentworth was trying to brace his family for news of his precipitous and wholly unexpected engagement to Mary Channing. A second cousin two years his senior (she was twenty-one) and neither wealthy nor submissive, Miss Channing was not the woman Mrs. Higginson would have chosen for her gilded boy. Intelligent and tart—a real conversational gymnast—she was also pert, churlish, and frequently abrupt. “Whatever be her faults of manner,” Higginson gallantly defended her, “I do like her very much.”
Perhaps Mary Channing was his first rescue mission. Her mother had died when Mary was two, and though her father, an obstetrician esteemed in Boston, had happily remarried, his second wife died in childbirth when Mary was but twelve. This second loss and her father’s inadvertent hand in it devastated her, and as Higginson would later learn, Mary had concluded then and there not to have children herself. The decision predated the onset of a chronic malady that would grip her in her twenties, never to let her go, crippling her limbs and scarring her soul. “Mrs. Higginson is very queer, a great invalid from rheumatism,” an acquaintance once remarked, “a perfect mistress in the art of abuse, in which she indulges frequently with peculiar zest & enthusiasm.”
If Higginson’s mother had not been pleased by her son’s precipitous engagement, the name of Channing had calmed her. Channings occupied the upper reaches of Brahmin Boston, their intellectual and cultural influence radiating from the golden dome of the new State House to the clatter at Quincy Market—and this despite their commitment to such outré causes as women’s rights, prison reform, and abolition. Mary’s own uncle was the celebrated Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing, who had liberated an entire generation from old-line Congregationalism, and Mary’s brother (William) Ellery, the poet with the orange shoes, had married Margaret Fuller’s sister. Then there was William Henry Channing (who happened to be Higginson’s cousin), the Christian socialist with the honeyed voice who dared scold Emerson for his asocial individualism. (Ironically Channing served as one of the models for Hawthorne’s Hollingsworth, the egomaniacal reformer in The Blithedale Romance.)
As for Higginson, it was Mary herself and her prickliness that pleased him. Besides, he might help with her grief. Hadn’t he lost his own father at a tender age? Certainly both of them were lonely. But Higginson sheepishly admitted that while he could dally at Harvard, picking and choosing courses of study, women were slated for marriage, caretaking, and the so-called domestic arts. Yet his sisters, his mother, and his exceptional aunt demonstrated every day that there was no distinction of sex in intellect, and his sister Anna, as he noted, had written the part of his commencement speech that received the most applause.
“I don’t care about outside show, but I do go for the Rights of Women,” he bolstered Mary, “as far as an equal education & an equal share in government goes.” He meant every word.
He and Mary attended James Freeman Clarke’s liberal Church of the Disciples, the ecumenical congregation that she had helped organize, and together they discussed religion and reform. But Higginson referred to Theodore Parker, not Freeman Clarke, as his spiritual guide. A polymath contemptuous of the status quo, a transcendentalist long before the group rated a name, and the most blasphemous of all preachers in the public’s eye, Parker had the audacity to doubt miracles and champion the enslaved, a bad combination. “God’s fanatic,” Higginson later called him, “pompous, annoying, and eminently good.” (A book by Parker was given to Emily Dickinson, though not by Higginson, some years after the preacher’s untimely death. “I heard that he was ‘poison,’” Dickinson thanked her donor. “Then I like poison very well.”) In old age, Higginson still dreamed about hearing him preach.
Parker’s fire-and-brimstone sermons damning the sin of slavery; William Henry Channing’s dulcet oratory sketching out the shape of a better world; Margaret Fuller, intrepidly insisting it belonged to woman; the cantankerous tongue of Mary Channing taking nothing for granted; and in the Concord distance, Emerson counseling self-trust, self-reliance, and the triumph of good—together they swept Higginson forward into the Newness. He might become Great after all.
POETRY ASIDE, he still needed a paying profession.
Maybe he could be a preacher. Yet as one of his biographers observes, though Higginson assumed the goodness of people, he was far less certain about the nature of God. To him Jesus was a brother, the Bible a book, and all religion an activity shared by all humans regardless of creed; the latter belief he traced to an event in his boyhood, when in 1834 he watched flames demolish the Ursuline convent, on Mount Benedict in Charlestown, torched by an anti-Catholic mob. The rioters were acquitted of arson, and the ringleader, also acquitted, later became head of the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party. Higginson never got over it.
Warmed by an inner light “not infallible but invaluable,” Higginson read Emerson as if the Concord sage wrote to him alone, and he staked his future on a democracy of perfectible love, what Emerson had called a “just and even fellowship, or none.” “The career of man has grown large, conscious, cultivated, varied, full,” Higginson wrote in later years. “He needs India and Judaea, Greece and Rome; he needs all types of spiritual manhood, all teachers.”
In 1844 he enrolled halfheartedly in the Harvard Divinity School, a court of last resort, but within months scoffed at his teachers, whose theology he considered as weak as the spines of his fellow students. “Any man with some Yes in him would be a blessing,” Higginson loudly complained, feeling belated once again. Gone, he feared, was the heyday of the divinity school, when his father had charge of a crop of superior young men, like Emerson himself.
And besides, events taking place outside the cloistered halls of Harvard concerned him more: Texas, for instance, and its possible admission to the Union as a slave state. “In Cambridge we are in peace,” he wrote in some relief, “since the Texas petition—764 names, 13 ft. long, double column—went off.” Abolition had rapidly become the focus of his frustration, his sense of injustice, his desire to accomplish something tangible. “I crave action…, unbounded action,” he burst out. “I love men passionately, I feel intensely their sufferings and short-comings and yearn to make all men brothers.”
Years later Higginson traced his abolitionist leanings not just to Emerson or his brother’s book (which he hardly mentioned) or Lydia Child’s treatise, all formative, but to his mother and an incident in her life, which trifling though it seems, also associates the abolition of slavery with the emancipation of women, as he and many others would do. Mrs. Higginson had visited cousins in Virginia, who provided her with a male slave to drive her about, and as she’d never encountered a slave before, she asked him if he was satisfied with his life, since, it seemed, he was well fed, well treated, well cared for. Life is good, she prompted. Without hesitation he shot back, “Free breath is good.” So it was, for her too.
Dissatisfied and impatient, Higginson withdrew from divinity school within a year of his enrollment, for despite his failure at getting The Dial to recognize him as a writer, he still guiltily craved literature. “I have repented of many things,” he justified himself to his mother, “but I never repented of my first poetical Effusion.” Again he presented his verse to various magazines but this time chose more hospitable editors. “La Madonna di San Sisto” went to his activist cousin William Henry Channing, who published it in The Present in 1843; Channing then published Wentworth’s poem “Tyrtaeus” in his Brook Farm magazine, The Harbinger.
Tyrtaeus appealed to Higginson: his martial poems had allegedly inspired Spartan soldiers during the Second Messenian War, and Higginson himself hoped to sing on the barricades:
Times change,
And duties with them; now no longer
We summon brothers to take brothers’ lives;
But rouse to conflict higher, holier, stronger
…Against the seeds of ruin now upsurging
Here in this sunny land we call the Free.
Poetry: one might take up the pen for a cause and infuse “a higher element” (Higginson’s term) into, say, the entire antislavery movement, much as the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier had done. Isn’t this what Emerson meant by a just and even fellowship—though Emerson’s antislavery views were as yet ill-formed. And although antislavery verse encumbered Whittier’s literary career, at least initially (he was scolded by the important literary magazine The North American Review), by lashing poetry to politics, Higginson might still be a poet and yet take action, use himself, say something that could move or change people. In 1846 he dedicated a sonnet to William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist editor of the staunch antislavery paper The Liberator, and composed a hymn for an antislavery picnic in Dedham. “The land our fathers left to us / Is foul with hateful sin,” the crowd sang; “When shall, O Lord, this sorrow end, / And hope and joy begin?”
“The idea of poetic genius is now utterly foreign to me,” Higginson informed his mother. Instead he had a gospel to sing, its providential ends consistent with his reading of scripture, its goals to be realized on earth. If it brought him some measure of the fame he sought, so much the better.
Higginson applied for readmission to the divinity school in the fall of 1846, oddly explaining his decision in a clumsy third person: “He has abandoned much that men call belief, but seems to himself to have only won former ground to believe more deeply than ever.” That is, he would shuck poetry for the moment but not forgo the brass ring: he intended to reform America to make it, and himself, great.
Mary should be warned. “Setting out, as I do, with an entire resolution never to be intimidated into shutting either my eyes or my mouth,” Higginson told her, “it is proper to consider the chance of my falling out with the world.”
Mary did not blink. She never would through all the trials ahead, and the couple was married on September 22, 1847, James Freeman Clarke presiding.
IF HIGGINSON DID NOT YET KNOW the extent of his agenda, neither did the congregation of the First Religious Society of Newburyport, thirty-eight miles north of Boston, a staid port community that in its salad days was a hub of maritime trade and shipbuilding. The gracious homes of the old shipowners still lined High Street, the main thoroughfare, but by 1847 only their ghosts strolled on the decaying wharves, where they were joined by the factory workers, mostly women, who kept spindles running dawn to dusk for the rich textile men—a poor match all around.
The Higginsons adjusted slowly. Mary found the congregants dull and uncouth. Wentworth hated their materialism, their intolerance, their complacency. Since he also deplored the Mexican War as a means to extend the reach of slavery, he alienated his conservative parishioners, merchants and bankers mostly, who regarded him as a crank. “There are times and places where Human Feeling is fanaticism,” he archly reminded them, “times and places where it seems that a man can only escape the charge of fanaticism by being a moral iceberg.”
With human feeling flowing from every principled pore, Higginson lambasted the Whig candidate for president, Zachary Taylor, as a slaveholder; he invited the abolitionist William Wells Brown, a former slave, to speak at his church. He established a newspaper column to agitate for higher wages, and when the town’s clergy tried to prevent Emerson from lecturing at the Newburyport Lyceum, Higginson chastised them in print. He argued for women’s rights and set up more than one night school for factory workers, particularly women. “Mr. Higginson was like a great archangel to all of us then,” recalled the writer Harriet Prescott Spofford, a protégé from those days. “And there were so many of us!”
And he entered politics. Though pledged, at least in his private journal, to disunion—he could not endorse a constitution that sanctioned slavery—in 1850 he ran for Congress as a Free-Soil candidate in this Whig stronghold. “It will hurt my popularity in Newburyport for they will call it ambition &c,” he shrugged.
Enthusiastic and naive, Higginson innocently assumed he was invincible. Certainly no harm could come to him for advocating fair wages, literacy, temperance, generosity, and above all, abolition in this, the birthplace of Garrison. “They are so much more dependent on me than I on them that I am in no danger,” he informed his family with nonchalance. Yet this was also the town that had clobbered Whittier with sticks, stones, and rotten eggs when the Quaker tried to address an antislavery rally.
Higginson lasted in Newburyport just two years. “My position as an Abolitionist they could not bear,” he concluded when his congregation asked him to resign in 1849. “This could not be altered.”
He took his dismissal with composure, and years later, when he chalked it up to the inexperience of youth, he also admitted that even if he had been more tactful, “I think I would have come to the same thing in the end.”
Leaving Newburyport, he and Mary moved into the home of a relative in nearby Artichoke Mills, a rural retreat deep in the piney woods, and seeking the like-minded, he befriended the gentle Whittier, who lived in Amesbury, just four miles away. For fifteen years, Whittier had been an outspoken abolitionist, publishing (at his own expense) in 1833 the polemical Justice and Expediency; or, Slavery Considered with a View to Its Rightful and Effectual Remedy, Abolition. “Slavery has no redeeming qualities, no feature of benevolence, nothing pure, nothing peaceful, nothing just,” Whittier said, calling for immediate emancipation. A shy Quaker most comfortable operating behind the scenes, he had helped found the Liberty party (precursor of the Republican party), and it was he who insisted Higginson run for United States Congress. (Higginson lost by a wide margin.)
But Higginson was already growing skeptical about politics. The Free-Soilers mainly wanted to keep slavery out of the territories, not abolish it altogether, as he did. And the Fugitive Slave Act, recently passed, permitted slave catchers to pursue escaped slaves into the free states—all the way to Massachusetts, for instance. Plus, the reprehensible law was a rider to the Compromise of 1850, which presumably maintained a balance between slave and free states—and in so doing preserved the status quo, which was slavery itself. “There are always men,” Higginson observed with disgust, “who if anyone claims that two and two make six, will find it absolutely necessary to go half way, and admit that two and two make five.”
To Higginson, armed resistance, not civil disobedience, more and more seemed the only alternative to such legalized inhumanity, and his increasingly militant rhetoric was put to the test when a seventeen-year-old black man, Thomas Sims, was arrested in Boston in the spring of 1851.
Higginson rushed to the city. As a member of the Vigilance Committee, an organization of blacks and whites established several years earlier to assist fugitive slaves, he went straight to the grimy offices of Garrison’s Liberator for a meeting but found to his dismay that only he and two other men—Lewis Hayden and Leonard Grimes, black community leaders—advocated taking action on Sims’s behalf. (Hayden had famously hidden Ellen and William Craft, two fugitive slaves, in his home on Phillips Street, threatening to blow it up rather than surrender the couple.) Garrison, a committed pacifist whose preferred weapon was moral suasion, typically disputed the long-term results of overt action, or violence; his reasoning, Higginson later recalled, “marched like an army without banners.” Others wanted to argue the case in court. This seemed to Higginson to legitimate the very system he believed perfidious: in fact the gloomy granite Court House in which Sims now sat, manacled, was itself a symbol of judicial failure.
Arguing for legal redress, the political abolitionists won the day, and while the case dragged on, Higginson addressed a massive crowd gathered to protest at the Tremont Temple, urging them to do something. No one did. Discouraged, Higginson and his two coconspirators hatched a plot: Sims would leap out of the third-floor Court House window onto a mattress, placed below, and then jump into a carriage waiting to whisk him to the docks, where a sloop stood ready to take him to Canada. But someone must have leaked the plans because on the evening of the intended rescue, fierce iron gratings were installed in the windows of the Court House.
Higginson was livid.
On April 13, Thomas Sims, in tears, was paraded through Boston in chains. Placed on the brig Acorn, he was deported to Savannah, where he was publicly whipped until he bled. Two hundred fifty armed federal deputies had stood at the Boston wharves, their faces impassive, while witnesses chanted “Shame! Shame!”—themselves ashamed for not having done more.
WITH MERRY CONDESCENSION, Henry James once said that Thomas Wentworth Higginson reflected almost everything in the New England air—those agitations, that is, “on behalf of everything, almost, but especially of the negroes and the ladies.” Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Higginson’s commitment to abolition or woman suffrage as faddishness—or, equally, to disparage it as a calculated scramble for la gloire once he realized poetry was not his métier. Of course reform was in the New England air. Of course Higginson was ambitious. He sought approval, no doubt. He liked to move large audiences. And he was in awe of men like Emerson, Parker, and Channing, who, commanding platform, pulpit, and pen, swayed minds and warmed hearts: what better way to satisfy personal vanity and at the same time salve one’s own conscience for being vain in the first place.
But Higginson was also a true believer and, to put it in unfashionable terms, a very good man.
It would also be a mistake to ignore the sacrifice a man like Higginson was willing to make for his convictions. “Remember that to us, Anti-Slavery is a matter of deadly earnest, which costs us our reputations today, and may cost our lives tomorrow,” he told a friend less exercised about the issue than he. This was not braggadocio. Abraham Lincoln, the most successful antislavery politician of his day, regarded the word abolitionist as odious. At best an abolitionist was a foggy-headed dreamer; at worst, a zealot rabble-rouser, even an atheist willing to abolish churches, the Bible, Christianity. (“Assent—and you are sane—/ ,” Dickinson would write. “Demur—you’re straightway dangerous—/ And handled with a Chain—.”)
“Without a little crack somewhere,” Higginson sharply agreed, “a man could hardly do his duty to the times.”
Lacking a formal pulpit once he lost his Newburyport congregation, Higginson frequently traveled whatever distance it took to speak at abolitionist or women’s rights or Free-Soil rallies. Committed to all three often-overlapping movements, he was still uncertain about the efficacy of Free-Soil. Politics was a stopgap measure more than a real solution to the problem of slavery, he reasoned. And in 1850, when the Whigs split over slavery, he was particularly chary of a proposed Free-Soil coalition with Democrats, which meant to him compromising the party’s antislavery platform. “I hope, however, that there is less real danger of our being corrupted than of our being deluded; deluded by too sanguine hopes of a sudden regeneration of the Democratic Party,” he wrote to a Free-Soil newspaper. When the editor refused to publish his letter, calling it impolitic, Higginson brought it to The Liberator, which did print it. He would not be silent. He would not be silenced. He had joined the Free-Soilers because he thought there he could speak his mind. Now, he noted with contempt, it was said he “‘might damage the cause.’”
At home in Artichoke Falls, his life veered in a different direction. He was quiet, helpful, considerate, and depressed, for Mary was slowly losing control of her muscles. She sat in a special chair and walked with such difficulty that in later years Higginson had to carry her up and down the stairs. Today a diagnosis might reveal rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis; then, there was nothing known, nothing to do. And though her symptoms occasionally remitted, as is the case with multiple sclerosis, their recurrence left her weaker and more querulous than ever.
But it wasn’t illness alone that tugged at her husband’s heart. The couple had no children, a cruel blow to Higginson, who loved them so unabashedly that he was constantly on the lookout for excuses to bring them into his home. For many years the couple took care of Mary’s niece, a daughter of Ellery and Ellen Fuller Channing, after Ellen Channing died. Mary, however, preferred to avoid children—and, it seems, sex with her husband.
He bore the rebuff with outward equanimity, assuming he had been asked to renounce that which he had no right to claim. For he believed a woman should be able to choose to live as she wished. Mainly, of course, he referred (at least in public) not to sex, though he hinted as much, but to a woman’s right to educational and professional opportunities, signing (along with Mary) the petition for the first national women’s rights convention and urging the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention to reform qualifications for voting. “If Maria Mitchell can discover comets, and Harriet Hosmer carve statues; if Appolonia Jagiello can fight in European revolution…,” he insisted, “then the case is settled so far—…Nor can any one of these be set aside as an exceptional case, until it is shown that it is not, on the other hand, a test case; each person being a possible specimen of a large class who would, with a little less discouragement, have done the same things.”
In his address to that convention, Higginson eloquently spoke on behalf of suffrage and professional opportunities for women: A woman “must be a slave or an equal; there is no middle ground,” he bluntly declared. “If it is plainly reasonable that the two sexes shall study together in the same high school, then it cannot be hopelessly ridiculous that they should study together in college also. If it is common sense to make a woman deputy postmaster, then it cannot be the climax of absurdity to make her postmaster general, or even the higher officer who is the postmaster’s master.” And what of the men who stand in her way? They are primarily anxious, he said, about whether an educated woman, happy and productive, would still make them dinner.
“I, too, wish to save the dinner,” he concluded. “Yet it seems more important, after all, to save the soul.”
Printed as a pamphlet, the speech was considered so alarming that Harper’s New Monthly Magazine immediately ran a rebuttal. “A woman such as you would make, her teaching, preaching, voting, judging, commanding a man-of-war, and charging at the head of a battalion would be simply an amorphous monster not worth the little finger of the wife we would all secure if we could.” Higginson, as usual, was unperturbed. He continued to support the rights of women, his enthusiasm tempered by good humor and rational argument. For like a carefully swept and sunlit room, Higginson’s mind was free of cobwebs and clutter, and while he was heir to the Enlightenment in his thought, his heart throbbed with the idealism of the New. In his superb “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” an article printed in 1859 in The Atlantic, he summarized his argument with characteristic and unassailable intelligence: “What sort of philosophy is that which says, ‘John is a fool; Jane is a genius: nevertheless, John, being a man, shall learn, lead, make laws, make money; Jane, being a woman, shall be ignorant, dependent, disfranchised, underpaid’?” James Russell Lowell, then editor of The Atlantic, shuddered.
When Isabelle Beecher Hooker wrote to Higginson to praise his stand, he answered with some annoyance: “Nothing makes me more indignant than to be thanked by women for telling the truth—thanked as a man—when those same persons are recreant to the women who, at infinitely greater cost, have said the same thing. It costs a man nothing to defend woman—a few sneers, a few jokes, that is all—but for women to defend themselves, have in times past cost almost everything. Without the personal knowledge & influence of such women as Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and Antoinette Brown, I should be nothing.”
Some might say he spoke more truly than he knew, for the most amazing of them all, Emily Dickinson, was not yet on his horizon.