Thomas Wentworth Higginson
From Philosopedia
Higginson, Thomas Wentworth (22 December 1823 - 9 May 1911)
Higginson, the poetry critic known today as Emily Dickinson’s friend [[1]], was a commander of the First South Carolina Volunteers (freedmen), a regiment of Negro troops. He championed the rights of Negroes at a time when the cause was unpopular.
Previously, he had been the Unitarian minister of the First Religious Society (Unitarian) in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and of the First Church in Worcester, Massachusetts.
An abolitionist political activist, he wrote Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870), hailed by some as an overlooked masterpiece. In Boston, he led a raid on the Court House to try to free fugitive slave Anthony Burns and was wounded in his attempt. He aided the Free Soil fight in Kansas and was a supporter of John Brown.
He contributed to Atlantic Monthly, Nation, and Harper’s Bazaar. He also became a spokesman for the rights of women, feeling that this was “the next great question” facing the country after the liberation of the slaves.
Meanwhile, he was a prodigious writer and critic. His books include Malbone (1869), a novel; sketches, including Oldport Days (1873) and Old Cambridge (1899); the lives of Whittier (1902) and Longfellow (1902) for the “Men of Letters” series; biographies of Margaret Fuller (1884) and of his ancestor, Francis Higginson (1891); and an autobiographical account, Cheerful Yesterday (1898).
Emily Dickinson is said to have been entranced by Higginson, who was the first to encourage her, although he tended to “correct” her poems. Later, he edited two volumes with Mabel L. Todd of Dickinson’s verse (1890—1891). A married man, he is believed by some not to have had the sexual attraction for her which she possibly had for him.
- One explanation: Higginson once wrote of William Henry Hurlbert, “I never loved but one male friend with a passion,” having found him “like some fascinating girl” and modeling the hero of his Malbone (1869) after him. Complained Mrs. Higginson, the letters the two exchanged were “more like those between man and woman than between two men.”
In Edward J. Renehan Jr.’s The Secret Six (1995), Higginson is described as the toughest-minded of a group of men who conspired with John Brown. The others included Theodore Parker, Samuel Gridley Howe, Julia Ward Howe, and Gerrit Smith.
