Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was born on this day in 1823 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He attended Harvard and was ordained a Unitarian minister, serving in Newburyport. He later served tne Free Church in Worcester before leaving the parish ministry to engage the issues of slavery full time. A fierce abolitionist, Higginson led a raid on Boston’s Court House to free Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave. He was a vocal supporter of John Brown. When the war came he was appointed Colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, a regiment of freed slaves, the first official unit of this sort. Jefferson Davies issued a proclamation that black soldiers captured would be sold back into slavery, while the white officers would be hung. Following the war Higginson became a literary critic and popular lecturer. He also continued his activism focusing on women’s rights. He was Emily Dickinson’s editor (for which he gets major props for publishing her, and major criticism for his editing of her) and, also, notes he made during the war about his troop’s songs and stories as well as documenting the Gullah dialect are credited as the foundation of African-American studies. He died on 9 May, 1911. An amazing man, an amazing life…