Thomas Wentworth Higginson
by Edwin W. Bowen
The Sewanee Review, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Oct., 1915), pp. 429-442
THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON
Stephen Higginson, the father of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, was bursar of Harvard University and the organizer of the famous Harvard Divinity School. It was during his term of office as bursar that his illustrious son Thomas Wentworth Higginson* was born at Cambridge on the twenty-second of December, 1823. The babe was not robust, and for that reason, all the more, became the special object of affection in Stephen Higginson's large family of eleven children. But the child's health improved with his increasing years, and at a tender age he was sent to school. In the Cambridge school young Wentworth had James Russell Lowell, familiarly called "Jimmy Lowell," as a companion; and here they were both prepared for college. The schoolmaster, Mr. Wells, an Englishman, laid the chief emphasis on athletics and the humanities; and when Wentworth was nine, his mother recorded that he had read a great many books and was especially fond of natural history and outdoor exercise.
In his college days young Higginson, according to his biographer, presented a curious combination of qualities,- "intellectual precocity with immaturity of character, and a marked love of study with a great fondness for athlectic sports." He is said to have been somewhat sentimental, and partly because of his extreme youth- he was only thirteen when, as a freshman, he entered Harvard, the youngest of the forty-five members of his class- he was unpopular with his fellow-students. His only intimate friend in the freshman class was Francis E. Parker, who wrote of his youthful classmate, "I like Wentworth rather, quite well. He is now young, but a good scholar- tolerable looking, awkward." While an undergraduate at Harvard Higginson won the friendship of Edward Everett Hale, a friendship which grew stronger with the passing years and which was only dissolved by death. In commenting on this friendship Colonel Higginson once wrote in his journal:
"There is a curious parallel in some respects between the life of Edward Everett Hale and my own. He is nearly two years older than myself, graduated at Harvard College two years before me (1839); each of us having the second rank in his class, a time when much more was thought of college rank than now.Each of us was six feet tall; each of us combined the love of three studies which are rarely com bined- Greek, mathematics and natural history- and had on this last point the invaluable influence of Dr. Thaddeus William Harris, librarian, botanist and entomologist. Each of us therefore was tempted out of doors, a very desirable temptation to naturally studious boys, and likely to strengthen their constitutions."
Young Higginson was always found of walking, and this characteristic was evident even in his college days, when he used to walk often nine or ten miles a day. A favorite walk of his during those days was from Cambridge to Boston. His college journal shows that he was every inch a boy, though precocious. It records that he engaged in such boyish escapades as cutting
recitations and prayers, breaking out window panes in the college chapel, taking off the hands of the college clock and staving in the dial, and decorating the walls of the chapel. In his diary an amusing comment on a certain recitation runs: "Snoozed
thro' it all comfortably." But, for all his pranks, he was a good student, as may be inferred from the fact that he was admitted
to the honor of the Phi Beta Kappa at the early age of sixteen. On the fly-leaf of one of his old text-books on conic sections he
wrote, in 1906:-
"When I left college at graduation in 1841, a few months short of eighteen, I was the best mathematician in the class.We studied this book in sheets as it came unbound from the press and I enjoyed it, and used to give my elder brother Waldo, who was a practicing engineer, lessons out of it. . . . Now, at eighty-three, I cannot comprehend one word of it. Do I know more or less than then?"
On graduation Higginson, like so many impecunious young men at the present time, undertook to teach school to tide him over a period of indecision till he determined upon the choice of a profession. The "young pedagogue," as he humorously referred to himself, was engaged in a school in Jamaica Plain, near Boston, where the daily exercises began at the early hour of 6:30 in the morning and continued till "the cursed evening school." It excites no surprise that his experience in this all-day school was unsatisfactory and unhappy and that after six months* service he resigned his post to accept less strenuous work as a private tutor in the family of his cousin. During his callow days he tells us that he spent most of his meagre salary upon fine clothes and was regarded as something of a dandy. His reading at this period of his career was largely in German, for which he had a special aptitude. He did not, how ever, allow his passion for reading to encroach too much on his love of nature, which found expression in long cross-country walks.
"Give me books and nature," he used to say, "and leisure and means to give myself up to them and someone to share my ideas with and I think I should be perfectly happy." But teaching was not to the young pedagogue's liking and he therefore abandoned it after a brief experience, and under the influence of Dr. James Freeman Clarke decided to study for the ministry. Accordingly, Higginson took up quarters as a theological student at Divinity Hall, Cambridge, living a very frugal life on his scant means. But his purpose wavered and he withdrew from the Divinity School. He wrote to his fiance, Miss Channing: "I should prefer poetry or, in general, literature because that lasts the longest, but should be content with blacking boots, if I could only feel that to be the thing for which I was intended." Yet a year later he re-entered the same school and wrote to his mother that he found there great improvement, -"a higher tone of spiritual life and mental activity, a fine liberal spirit such as had never prevailed before." Somewhat later he wrote again to his mother, "I have been writing more in these two months (or six weeks) than in the previous five years- I had begun to doubt whether I should ever feel the impulse to write prose- now I have been manufacturing sermons and essays (to be read before the class) with the greatest readiness- all being crammed with as much thought as I can put into them."
Meanwhile he had become quite radical, entertaining certain abolition views, and wrote in one of his hours of doubt, "I can't make up my mind whether my radicalism will be the ruin of me or not." But the young reformer persisted in his adopted course of radicalism despite the solicitude and concern his conservative Unitarian family felt as to the final outcome of his abolitionism.
In September, 1847, Higginson was ordained, and at once accepted a call to the pastorate of the First Religious Society of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Two weeks after his ordination he married Miss Channing and the pair lived happily together on a slender salary that afforded them abundant apportunity to practice frugality and to conduct their household without servants. This they did with perfect contentment. Apropos of the economy he practiced Higginson wrote:
"We have now no bill over $3.00 in Newburyport. We are amply provided for this year and the next must take care of itself.On looking back at our expenses, the clothing account surprises me most- our united expenses have never gone beyond $80.00, which is very little."
But in the meantime doubts about his call to preach began to assail the young pastor and to harass him, greatly disturbing his peace of mind. In a letter to his aunt he confessed that he sometimes felt "terribly false, like Mr. Emerson with a hole in the heel of his stocking. 'Why, nobody will know it,' urged his friend. 'I shall know it,' replied the sage, gently. But as regards preaching power I have no sort of doubt about its being my mission?in some form or other- that is, speaking to men, in the pulpit or elsewhere. . . . But enough of churches and preachers and future botherations; what trifles they all seem when spring is opening and the tardy blue anemones are almost ready to open their blue eyes."
Higginson began to develop an interest in social work in his community and preached and lectured there and elsewhere on slavery and temperance. He employed his facile pen no less than his tongue in these humane interests, writing constantly for various newspapers. He even went into politics and accepted the nomination of the Free Soil Party for Congress. But this proved a forlorn hope and he was doomed to defeat, as he was some years later when he became a candidate for Congress. Various movements then, in succession, enlisted his attention and earnest efforts. But it was the anti-slavery movement that made the strongest and most lasting appeal to this young reformer's heart; and writing to a friend he once said, "The worst trait of the American race seems to me this infernal colorphobia."
His frequent sermons against slavery had the effect of creating opposition to him in his pulpit, and after two years he resigned his pastorate, as he expressed it, "preaching himself out of his pulpit." In his resignation he remarked, "An empty pulpit has often preached louder than a living minister." In writing to his devoted mother of the step he had taken he said:-
"The case was perfectly simple. Mr. W. distinctly stated that they had no fault to find with me personally, they liked me and respected me; they were always interested in my preaching; they had no complaint as to my pastoral matters; the only thing he had ever heard mentioned was slavery and politics; my position as an Abolitionist they could not bear. This, he admitted, could not be altered; and he tacitly recognized that I had but one course to pursue."
After his resignation Higginson remained at Wewburyport for two years, interesting himself in the welfare of the people and writing for the newspapers. In cooperation with his friend Samuel Longfellow he undertook to edit a volume of sea-poems called Thalatta. But just at that time Mrs. Stowe's great book Uncle Tom's Cabin was given to the world, spreading like wild fire, and Higginson remarked concerning his own enterprise, "Thalatta is at a standstill because Mrs. Stowe exhausts all the paper mills." At this juncture the Fugitive Slave Law was enacted and Higginson became so much aroused over it that he threw himself heart and hand into the anti-slavery agitation. He delivered a revolutionary speech in Tremont Temple that induced some Abolitionists to undertake the forcible rescue of the slave Sims then held as a fugitive in the Boston jail.
In 1852, when Higginson fancied his preaching days were over, he received an invitation to become the pastor of the Free Church in Worcester and accepted. Here during his pastorate his policy was to make a special appeal to the young people of his community- a class that was always an unfailing source of inspiration to him- and he enjoyed a successful ministry. His craving for larger opportunities was relieved by lecturing in other towns and by his active participation in Free Soil, Temperance, and Anti-Slavery conventions. Commenting in a spirit of light banter on one of his lectures, in a letter to his aunt, he says: "I spoke in Springfield on Sunday, to the Spiritualists, so called. My name was paraded in the streets in the largest capitals I ever had as the Rev. T. W. H., 'the eminent clergyman, popular author (!!) and eloquent lecturer.' Directly over it were the remains of a theatrical handbill in large letters, 'The Fool of the Family'!"
During Higginson's ministry at the Worcester Free Church the slavery question was seething and the exciting Anthony Burns episode occurred. Higginson was one of several daring men who formed a conspiracy to thwart the operation of the law of the land and to rescue this fugitive slave in Court Square, Boston. The result was that Higginson bore for the rest of his life a scar on his body received from a policeman in the violent encounter of resisting the Fugitive Slave Law. This incident created great public agitation throughout New England, and Higginson was among those arrested by United States officers for causing a riot. But "the indictment," to quote from his Cheerful Yesterdays, written many years later, "was ultimately quashed as imperfect and we all got out of the affair, as it were, by the side door."
The episode is interesting, however, as showing that Higginson had the courage of his conviction and acted from principle in this unpleasant affair, which terminated merely in what his mother designated a "horrid trial." But Higginson had other matters to engage his attention besides the "underground railway," as the frustration of the Fugitive Slave Law was popularly called. He kept up his interest in botany and outdoor life and he devoted considerable time to writing. Indeed, some of the best literary work of his life was done during those perilous times in which our great Civil War was brewing. In 1853 he was solicited to contribute a series of essays to the new "literary and anti-slavery magazine," and the essays he wrote in response to this invitation appeared anonymously in the Atlantic Monthly. These essays attracted considerable public attention. "Saints and Their Bodies," the first of the series, so impressed Dr. D. A. Sargent that he decided to adopt physical training as a profession, and afterwards became director of the Harvard gymnasium.
Another essay entitled "Ought Women?" was said to have resulted in the founding of Smith College and to have formed the entering wedge for the opening of Michigan University to women. Referring to his literary work about this period, in a summary of his life at thirty-six, the author of these essays says:
"I do not expect any visible sphere or position except in literature- perhaps not there, because I do not find that my facility grows so fast as my fastidiousness. . . . Certainly nothing short of severe starvation shall make me write and print what does not in some degree satisfy my own conception of literary execution."
But the daily routine of parish work together with Higginson's various other activities proved to be too great a strain on his own nerves and actually undermined his wife's health, thus rendering an assistant for him imperative. Accordingly, in 1855 the Free Church voted him the desired relief; and so the way was paved for the Higginsons to spend the winter in the Azores, whither they decided to go for the benefit of their health.
His strange experiences in those picturesque islands of the Atlantic Higginson describes in his essay "Fayal and the Portuguese," and while there he prepared a paper entitled "Sympathy of Religions," which he read many years later before the Parliament of Religions at the Chicago World's Fair. (This essay was subsequently printed in England and translated into French.) His return home from Fayal in June, 1856, he thus describes in a letter to his mother:
"We arrived last night! . . . The world looks very odd, people talking English, lighted shops last night, and horses. Today everybody with bonnets and shoes! People so well dressed, so intelligent and so sick- so unlike the robust baseness of Fayal and Pico. And the foliage is so inexpressibly beautiful. Houses agonizingly warm after the fireless rooms of Fayal and the chilly ocean."
Immediately upon his return Higginson threw himself with all his energy into the furious conflict then in progress between the free and slave states for the possession of the territory of Kansas. He helped to equip emigrants to Kansas and himself made a juorney through that territory. He wrote letters and frequent articles to the newspapers, reporting the progress of the different groups of immigrants and solicited contributions for the promotion of immigration to Kansas. These letters to the New York Tribune he subsequently published in pamphlet form, under the title A Ride Through Kansas. In a passage in one of these letters he says:
"Coming from a land where millionaires think themselves generous in giving fifty dollars to Kansas, I converse daily with men who have sacrificed all their property in its service, and are ready at any hour to add their lives."
In January, 1857, having returned to Massachusetts, Higginson was among the first to join in a call for a "State Disunion Convention" to discuss the expediency of a separation between free and slave states. After this he cooperated with William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and many others in the endeavor to hold a national convention for this purpose. While engaged in the "underground railway," as the rescue of fugitive slaves was called, Higginson had an interview with John Brown who asked him as a true Abolitionist for a contribution for the furtherance of the "secret service." In reply Higginson wrote him with perfect frankness, "I am always ready to invest money in treason, but at present I have none to invest."
When the noted insurrectionist was arrested, Higginson, unlike many others who had aided and abetted him, did not desert him in his hour of trial, but resolutely stood his guard, declaring it a duty "to at least give him [Brown] their moral support on the witness stand." But Higginson did not stop here simply. He helped to raise money to provide able counsel for John Brown and even desired to rescue him from the clutches of the law after sentence had been pronounced against him. Apropos of the case Higginson recorded in his journal in 1860:-
"Last year at this time I was worn and restless with inability to do something for John Brown. Not that I grudged him his happy death- but it seemed terrible to yield him to Virginia. The effort to rescue Stevens and Hazlett- undertaken on my sole responsibility- restored my self-respect. It did not fail like the Burns rescue through the timidity of others, but simply through the impractibility of the thing. ... So far as John Brown is concerned, I should like this for an epitaph, 'The only one of John Brown's friends and advisers who was not frightened by the silly threats of Hugh Forbes into desiring that year's delay which ruined the enterprise.' "
When the war broke out in 1861 Coloned Higginson threw himself with complete abandon, of course, on the side of the Union. He was offered the position of major of the fourth battalion of the Worcester infantry, but declined to accept the offer. But he severed his connection with the Free Church of which he had been pastor for some years, and in the autumn of 1861 undertook to raise a regiment and a few months later received his commission in the 51st Massachusetts. He soon resigned this commission, however, and was ordered to take charge of a new regiment of freed slaves in South Carolina- "a thousand men, every one as black as a coal." He was very proud of the distinction of commanding the first negro regiment of ex-slaves. Colonel Higginson's Black Regiment operated chiefly in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, doing for the most part picket duty. He was himself incapacitated by a wound received in July, 1863, which rendered him an invalid for several years.
He used to tell with a keen appreciation of humor how the town of Higginsonville, near Beaufort, South Carolina, where were the headquarters of his Black Regiment the greater part of the war,- the place being so named as a special honor to him and his regiment,- some years later was blown away in a hurricane. His war experiences in general Colonel Higginson subsequently described in his book Army Life.
About the end of the war, when Colonel Higginson had been honorably discharged from the service on the ground of invalidism, he settled in Newport, Rhode Island, whither his wife had removed during his absence. His wife had meanwhile become a helpless invalid, and on his return he devoted himself to making her comfortable. Moreover, he resumed his literary work which had been interrupted by his military service. At Newport he made the acquaintance of La Farge, the artist whom he used to delight to converse with and whom he greatly admired. Here, too, he first met Mark Twain, who impressed him as "something of a buffoon, though with earnestness underneath."
"When afterwards, at his own house in Hartford I heard him say grace at table," said he, "it was like asking a blessing over Ethiopian minstrels." His residence in Newport, of course, offered Colonel Higginson abundant opportunity to meet various public men and naval officers. But his social engagements did not absorb his entire attention by any means, for he found time to write monthly articles for the Atlantic, some of which were published later in a volume under the quaint title of Oldport Days.
After his military career ended, Colonel Higginson resumed his activity as a public speaker, never again to abandon it entirely. His lecture tours took him over various parts of the country. On one of these tours, in 1867, he wrote:
"I have a great renewal of interest in the Atlantic Monthly from my trip out West where it preceded me everywhere and I have realized what a clientele it gave. In two places people came twelve miles to hear me because they had subscribed from the beginning."
Again, speaking of a farmer he met, he says: "He and his father always looked for my articles in the Atlantic, and cut these leaves first- the best compliment I ever had." Once when lecturing in Concord, he was entertained by Emerson and wrote: "I staid at Mr. Emerson's, and it was very sweet to see him with his grandchildren. . . . tending the baby of seven months on his knee and calling him 'a little philosopher.' " Apropos of Emerson's dictum, "Better that the book should not be quite so good, and the book-maker abler and better and not himself often a ludicrous contrast to all that he has written," Colonel Higginson once wrote:
"Perhaps no sentence ever influenced my life so much as this since 1844. It has made me vary my life and work for personal development, rather than to concentrate it and sacrifice myself to a specific result. . . . The trouble with me is too great a range of tastes and interests. I love to do everything, to study everything, to contemplate, and to write. I never was happier than when in the army entirely absorbed in active duties; yet I love literature next - indeed almost better; and I need either two lives, or forty-eight hours in the day to do all. How plain that there must be other spheres."
In 1866 Colonel Higginson finished his Memorial Biographies containing sketches of those graduates of Harvard who had fallen in battle, and the following year he compiled a small volume called Child Pictures from Dickens, which he published very appropriately on the occasion of Dickens's second visit to America. In the meantime Colonel Higginson continued his Atlantic essays, such as "A Driftwood Fire," and, inspired by Hawthorne's Marble Faun, undertook to write a romance, Malbone, which he published in 1869. During this same year appeared his Army Life in a Black Regiment. He then projected a book destined to be his magnum opus,- The Intellectual History of Woman,- but this project proved an iridescent dream that was never to materialize and the book never saw the light.
However, he compiled a History of the United States for Young People, an excellent piece of work, which he published in 1874. This work set a new high standard in writing history for children, and Emerson, the Concord sage, gave it as his opinion that Higginson had done the world a great service by this juvenile history. The book, which turned out to be a great financial success for its author, was translated into French, German, and Italian, and in 1905 was printed in raised letters for the blind.
A great domestic calamity came upon Colonel Higginson in 1877 in the death of his invalid wife. A short while after this sad event, to divert his mind from his grief, he went abroad for a brief visit. On his return he removed to his old home town of Cambridge and planned him a new home. In February, 1879, he quietly married his second wife (who is the author of the present biography). Of this marriage two children were born, of whom the first died in infancy; the second lived to prove the joy and hope of her father's declining years.
In 1880 Colonel Higginson entered politics for the second time and was a delegate to the State legislature, serving two years. About this period he began his Larger History of the United States, which appeared first as a serial in Haider's Magazine, before being issued in book form. Meanwhile he was a regular contributor to The Nation and The Independent, and wrote a special series of weekly articles on "Women and Men" for Harper's Bazar. During the Mugwump movement in 1884 Colonel Higginson was an ardent supporter of Cleveland and delivered a number of anti-Blaine speeches in the campaign.
In 1886 he produced his imaginative story, The Monarch of Dreams, of which he wrote, "It is a great and almost unexpected delight to me to find that I can really write an imaginative story." Two years later he published Travellers and Outlaws and his first volume of verse, An Afternoon Landscape, though he had been writing fugitive poems for many years. Two of these poems stand out above all the rest, viz., "Decoration Day" and "The Things We Miss." Of the latter he once wrote to a friend, "I published the verses in 1870 without initials and nobody knew who wrote them .... but they have been twice as much praised by strangers as all I have written besides in verse."
This poem made an especially wide appeal, and its author himself remarked concerning it that it was his "best bid for immortality." His poetic genius also found expression in his translation of Petrarch's sonnets, - a very meritorious effort. Colonel Higginson made several trips to Europe and met a number of distinguished men. In his little book Carlyle's Laugh he describes a memorable walk in Hyde Park he took on one occasion in company with Froude and the rugged sage of Chelsea. As a notable incident of this walk we learn that all three came very near being run over while crossing Rotten Row, and "dear old Carlyle had to run for his life."
In England Colonel Higginson was entertained by such eminent men in various avenues of life as Gladstone, Huxley, Tyndall, Rawlinson, Freeman, Anthony Trollope and others. At the Voltaire Centenary in Paris he heard Victor Hugo speak. His impression of all these distinguished Europeans he has preserved for us in his Cheerful Yesterdays. During his journeys abroad Colonel Higginson was generally taken for an Englishman, and one day an Englishman he had met said to him in the course of the conversation, "Then you have been in America?" to which Colonel Higginson replied, "Very much so." Among other observations he made abroad anent this point of mistaken identity his diary records the following:
"We pick up lots of Americans we never heard of at home and learn a good deal that is new about our country. . . . An Englishman watched me through a knot-hole for some Americanisms. Said he detected a good many in Holmes."
In the latter years of his life Colonel Higginson used to spend his summers at Dublin, New Hampshire, engaged in his literary work. One summer there he met Mark Twain, whom he had for a neighbor and of whom he wrote in his diary: "Called on Clemens. Found him in bed where he prefers to write, a strange picturesque object, in night-clothes, with curly white hair standing up over his head. The bed was covered with written sheets which his daughter carried off at intervals, to be copied by her on typewriter, his secretary only writing his corre spondence. He often leaves off anything in the middle and begins on something else and goes back to it. He has always worked in this way and likes it."
One of Colonel Higginson's characteristic traits was his sympathy for struggling young authors whose work possessed merit and real promise. And many a one of this class did he help to get on his feet by writing him a word of encouragement. But many a man, not included in this class, learning of the Colonel's widespread reputation for sympathy and generosity, used to apply to him for aid of a more substantial character and none came who did not go away richer than he came. In 1896 Colonel's Higginson's health broke down under the strain of overwork and he was compelled to spend a twelvemonth or more in bed. But his facile pen was never idle, and during this period of ill-health he records that he earned more by writing than in several previous years.
"Some people," said he, "think I write better than formerly, in my horizontal attitude!" After recovering his health he produced Tales of the Enchanted Inlands of the Atlantic, Book and Heart, and Old Cambridge. In 1900, when almost an octogenarian, he undertook his Life of Longfellow, and two years later his Life of Whittier, the former for the American Men of Letters series and the latter for the English Men of Letters series, respectively. Many years before he had written a Life of Margaret Fuller Ossili. During his long literary career his prolific pen hardly had any vacation, but ever kept busy till the hand that guided it was stilled in death, May, 1911. Moreover, his tongue continued almost as active as his pen, for he was in constant demand as a lecturer or public speaker, even down to the crowning year of his long life of service.
In view of his marvelous fertility as a writer it is interesting to observe in his journal a comment he once made on his own style: -
"I have fineness and fire, but some want of copiousness and fertility which may give a tinge of thinness to what I write. What an abundance, freshness and go there is about the Beechers, for instance. They are egotistic, crotchety and personally disagreeable and they often 'make fritters of English,' but I wish I could, without sacrificing polish, write with that exuberance and hearty zeal. Shakespeare may have written as the birds sing, though I doubt it- but minor writers at least have to labor for 'form as the painters labor?the mere inspiration of thought is not enough. . . . There must be a golden moment, but also much labor within that moment. At least it is so with me, and I cannot help suspecting that it is even so with the Shakespeares."
Colonel Higginson is portrayed in this biography as kindly and sympathetic and generous, a man of noble impulses whose achievement, at least in the realm of letters, was far greater than the promise of his early years. But the biography does not represent the interest of its subject as being by any means confined to the world of letters. Like Chrimes in the play of Terence, Colonel Higginson is portrayed as being interested in all humane endeavors that have for their object the uplift and better ment of mankind; and the Terentian motto is peculiarly appli cable to the subject of this biography, since nothing pertaining to humanity did Colonel Higginson deem foreign to himself. Of course, it is not to be expected that one's wife should write other than a sympathetic biography. But the present biography shows more than a mere sympathetic insight into the life of its subject. It shows evident literary skill and judgment in the selection of the salient facts to be presented and no inconsiderable grace in the simple and straightforward narration of those facts. The result is that the present story of Colonel Higginson's life is one that is admirable in wellnigh every respect and leaves but little to be desired.
Edwin W. Bowen.
Randolph
* Thomas Wentworth Higginson: The Story of His Life. By Mary Thacher Higginson. New York : Houghton Mifflin Co. 1914.