A Man on Fire

Abstract

“He was a man on fire,” one editor wrote in his 1911, obituary of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. A descendant of the first families of Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Harvard-educated Higginson devoted his life to helping the poor, oppressed, and enslaved. Higginson was also a dedicated feminist, and late in life embraced the radical term “socialist.” If there was a just cause to be fought for, he was ever the willing ally. Higginson largely devoted his pen to the cause of antislavery, but he also devoted his sword. A disunionist, Higginson became an early Free Soil Party member. He also found time during these years to advocate for temperance and to agitate for better conditions and wages for cotton textile workers in Newburyport. He joined the Boston Vigilance Society and in 1854 took part in the assault on the federal courthouse in a failed attempt to free Anthony Burns. Higginson also helped to organize the New England Emigration Aid Society, a group dedicated to funding and arming free soil settlers in Kansas Territory. In the months after Sumter, joined the Fifty-first Massachusetts Infantry at the rank of captain, but at the request of General Saxton, he took command of the First South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of lowcountry freedmen. He later wrote of his years as colonel in 1870’s Army Life In a Black Regiment. Higginson was finally mustered out after a cannonball grazed his side, cracking several ribs and leaving him weak and in a military hospital for several months.