An American social reformer and man of letters, Thomas Wentworth Higginson had a varied career that began with his association with the New England Transcendentalists during the 1840s and lasted into the twentieth century. He was an active abolitionist and campaigner for women’s rights as well as a prominent literary figure who wrote essays, criticism, history, biographies, and fiction.
Background
Thomas W. Higginson was born on December 23, 1823, in Cambridge, Massachussets, United States. He was the son of Stephen Higginson, a university administrator, and Louisa Storrow Higginson. His grandfather, also named Stephen Higginson, was a member of the Continental Congress.
The youngest of ten children, Higginson grew up in an environment that encouraged intellectual pursuits. His father served as the bursar of Harvard College and director of Harvard Divinity School, and literary figures, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Margaret Fuller, were often guests at the Higginson home.
When Higginson was ten, his father died, and he was raised by his mother and aunt.
Education
After attending local schools, Higginson entered Harvard at the age of thirteen. There he studied languages, history, mathematics and natural science, wrote verse, and became interested in Transcendentalism and in the reform movements, especially abolitionism, that were prominent in New England in the 1830s. Hichens became Bachelor of Arts at the Harvard University in 1841. In 1847 he graduated from the Harvard Divinity School.
In the 1840s Higginson took a position at a church in a small town north of Boston. Some members of the congregation found his abolitionist views unacceptable, however, and he was soon forced to resign.
For the next several years, Higginson supported himself by lecturing. In 1852 he became pastor of the Free Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, where his liberal interpretation of Christian doctrine and his emphasis on social reform were well received. During this period, he edited Thalatta, an anthology of poetry, and his essay “Saints and Their Bodies,” in which he asserted the importance of physical exercise for a person’s overall health, appeared in the Atlantic Monthly.
Throughout the 1850s he contributed essays to the Atlantic, often addressing social issues or describing nature. In 1862 Higginson was offered the command of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first regiment of former slaves organized by the Union Army. He served for two years before being wounded and discharged in 1864.
Following his military service, Higginson settled in Newport, Rhode Island, where he resumed his career of writing and reform. His essay “A Letter to a Young Contributor” in the Atlantic Monthly, in which he encouraged aspiring writers, inspired Emily Dickinson to send him four of her poems. Higginson corresponded with the poet until her death in 1886, and he visited her twice in Amherst. During the 1860s and 1870s, he contributed numerous essays to the Atlantic, recorded his experiences during the war in Army Life in a Black Regiment, and composed historical works, biographies, and fiction. He continued to promote such causes as women’s suffrage and the desegregation of Newport’s schools. He returned to Cambridge in 1877.
During the 1880s Higginson served in the state legislature, where he argued for civil service reform and encouraged religious and cultural pluralism and tolerance. In 1890, at the request of the Dickinson family, he and Mabel Loomis Todd, a Dickinson family friend, edited the first published volume of Dickinson’s poems. While trying to recruit a regiment to fight in the Civil War, Higginson continued publishing essays in the Atlantic. One, "A Letter to a Young Contributor", elicited a response from an unknown poet in Amherst, Massachussets, who enclosed four poems. The inquirer was Emily Dickinson. Thus Higginson became the first person outside Emily Dickinson's small circle of friends to read her verse and offer criticism. Through the last decades of his life, he continued to write and engage in reform activities, publishing Common Sense about Women, A Larger History of the United States, Such as They Are: Poems, and the autobiography Cheerful Yesterdays, and helping to establish the Anti-Imperialist League with Mark Twain, William James, and Andrew Carnegie.
Higginson wrote a number of essays, biographies and historical works. Higginson also wrote several full-length biographies, including one of his ancestor Francis Higginson, the first minister in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and another of his grandfather Stephen Higginson, a Revolutionary War-era patriot.
Critics suggest that Higginson’s biographical writing was strongest when he described people he knew and events he had experienced. He had been acquainted with Margaret Fuller, and his biography of her is often considered his best for the insight provided by his personal knowledge and his extensive use of unpublished manuscript sources. Higginson’s Young Folks' History of the United States is considered a pioneering work in history for children, and A Larger History of the United States, which Higginson wrote with his brother-in-law Edward Channing, has been praised for its engaging narrative. In the latter work, Higginson sought to correct misconceptions about the American past, and he also emphasized the role of women in American history.
For several decades after his death, Higginson’s works were largely ignored and he was remembered primarily as the editor of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Beginning in the 1960s, perhaps partly as a result of the reform movements of that decade, his life and works have received renewed attention. A prolific author who wrote in several genres, Higginson explored in his works a wide range of subjects that defined American life and culture of his time.
After the Civil War, Higginson became active in the Free Religious Association (FRA). Higginson spoke at the Parliament of the World's Religions in 1893 and praised the great strides that had been made in the mutual understanding of the world's great religions, which described the Parliament as the culmination of the FRA's greatest ambitions.
Politics
Higginson was a Republican, an Independent and a Democrat.
Views
Higginson was an active reformer, advocating abolitionism, women’s rights, temperance, and penal and labor legislation. His abolitionist activities included participation in an attempt to free an escaped slave being held in the Boston Court House, assisting Free Soil settlers in Kansas, and supporting John Brown’s raid at Harper’s Ferry.
Higginson’s reform interests inspired the writings that most critics consider his best. In Army Life in a Black Regiment, which is generally regarded as his most important work, Higginson hoped to correct what he viewed as Northern misconceptions about freed slaves by recounting their performance as soldiers. More than a simple diary of wartime experiences, however, the book has been praised for its evocative description of the American South and as an important source of folk history.
Among Higginson’s most influential writings were his essays on women’s rights. In “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” and other essays, Higginson argued that women were men’s equals, and he demanded equality of opportunity for women in all aspects of life, particularly education and politics.
Some biographers speculate that Higginson’s emphasis on women’s intellectual equality encouraged Emily Dickinson to write to him. Since Higginson’s letters to the poet have not survived, reconstructing their relationship is difficult. Some Dickinson biographers have attacked Higginson’s role, maintaining that he discouraged her from publishing and tried to change the style of her poetry, but other scholars, in support of Higginson, point out that the continued correspondence between Higginson and the poet suggests that Dickinson found value in Higginson’s comments and apparently did not ask for help with publication.
When editing Dickinson’s poetry after her death, Higginson and Todd added titles to her poems and “corrected” her unconventional grammar, punctuation, and capitalization. Higginson has been censured for this decision, but some scholars argue that other nineteenth-century editors would have made similar alterations and that Higginson deserves credit for presenting Dickinson’s unorthodox poetry to the reading public of the time.
As a literary critic, Higginson evaluated works by many of his contemporaries and expressed strong opinions on the state of American literature. Higginson believed, as he outlined in his essay “Americanism in Literature,” that circumstances unique to the United States—a democratic government and large numbers of immigrants—would contribute to the formation of a national character which would, in turn, produce a genuinely American literature. He thought that American literature should address indigenous subjects and should be concerned with social issues, but because his view of American society was essentially positive, he criticized many naturalists and realists for their pessimistic perspectives. In poetry, Higginson advocated the use of American subjects and preferred conventional rhyme and meter.
Higginson was a strong advocate of homeopathy.
Membership
American Antiquarian Society
,
United States
1874
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
“Higginson is a memorable example of what an American man of letters in the nineteenth century could be.” - James W. Tuttleton
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child
Connections
In 1847 Higginson married a distant cousin, Mary Channing. The couple moved to Newburyport, Rhod Island. Higginson's wife died in 1877.
His second wife, Mary Thatcher, was one of the many authors he had encouraged. Two daughters were born to the couple.