Higginson - Army Life in a Black Regiment

THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

I NTRODUCTION BY K AREN F ISHER Y OUNGER

Introduction and Suggested Reading
2009 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2011 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-3508-7

I NTRODUCTION TO THE N EW E DITION

F ROM A TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY PERSPECTIVE T HOMAS W ENTWORTH Higginson was on the right side of every important issue of his day, even when from a nineteenth-century perspective it was a difficult side to take. He fervently fought for the abolition of slavery and women's rights. He passionately campaigned against alcohol use and was a pioneering critic of tobacco (he was one of the first to link smoking with cancer). He was an early advocate of environmentalism, physical exercise, and anti-imperialism, and crusaded for integrated public schools. Beyond this he was a minister, soldier, and prolifically popular author. His writings span the fields of history, biography, literature, education, nature, and politics. Higginson is probably best remembered today as the individual who "discovered" the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson. But it is Higginson's record as a radical reformer who fought for human liberty and equality that set him apart. The high point of his career as a freedom fighter came in late 1862 when he was appointed the head of the first federally authorized black regiment. His experiences as a soldier inspired his most famous and finest work in his enormous corpus of writing. Army Life in a Black Regiment is a riveting and strikingly empathetic account of the lessons learned from an encounter between a New England intellectual and nearly a thousand newly freed slaves.

Higginson was born on December 23, 1823, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to parents who were both from old, established New England families. He entered Harvard at the age of fourteen, the youngest in his class. After graduation he returned to Harvard Divinity School, seeking ordination as a Unitarian minister. In 1847 he became the minister of the First Religious Society of Newburyport, Massachusetts, and married Mary E. Channing. Increasingly controversial in his views, he was forced to resign just two years later. Higginson went on to become a prolific author and a popular speaker on the Lyceum circuit. He eventually found his way back to the pulpit in 1852 as the minister of the Free Church in Worcester, Massachusetts; the church had the highest attendance in the city his first Sunday there. It is while a minister at Worcester that he shocked America by leading an attack on the Boston Court House to free Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave being held there. During this time he supported John Brown as one of the Secret Six, the group of conspirators who supported Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry. But the high point of his career as a freedom fighter came in late 1862, when he entered military service as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers of African Descent. After the war, he told his story in articles in the Atlantic Monthly, which were published in 1869 as Army Life in a Black Regiment. After the Civil War other causes won his interest, including women's rights and anti-imperialism. He developed a correspondence with Emily Dickinson, eventually editing her first volume of verse titled Poems in 1890. He continued writing until his death in 1911.

Higginson entered pastoral ministry to effect change. Heavily influence by several liberal activist ministers, notable among them were his cousin, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, and especially Theodore Parker, Higginson was convinced that it was as a minister that he would best be able to devote himself to what he called the "sisterhood of reforms." These reforms addressed a whole host of social causes including among others temperance reform, equal treatment of women, the abolition of the death penalty, extending the franchise, elimination of child labor, reduction of worker's hours, and the establishment of public education. By his ordination Higginson had come to believe that the abolition of slavery was the most urgent cause of all. He believed that the religious establishment had compromised when it came to slavery, and sought to reform the church and the clergy. He hoped to tear down the division that existed between the clergy and the secular reformers like abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, in order to preach a "Christlike spirit of love and moral indignation."

Higginson's unconcealed radicalism and attack on his own profession were daring and made it difficult for him to find and keep a pulpit. At Newburyport his politicization of the pulpit, especially his antislavery sermons, estranged the wealthy leaders of the church. Congregants, many merchant Whigs, were mortified when he accepted the nomination for Congress of the Free Soil party, which was formed in 1848 and opposed extending slavery into the western territories and whose motto was "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men." And they could not have appreciated Higginson's Thanksgiving sermon in 1848 that berated them for voting for Zachary Taylor, the Whig presidential candidate and a man he viewed as "the slave power candidate." In the end, his devotion to abolition alienated church leaders who demanded and secured Higginson's resignation.

Higginson eventually left the ministry in 1858 after several years as minister of the Free Church in Worcester. However, he continued to convert his creed into deed. His conviction in an anti-institutional, ethical Christianity based on humanity's intuition of the Divine, the true, and the good, however, remained a source of inspiration for his radical actions. Higginson believed that a Higher Law, the law of human freedom, must always be sought and secured, even if that meant the unfortunate use of violence. In the immediate aftermath of the failed Burns' rescue, Higginson justified his actions in his sermon, "Massachusetts in Mourning," arguing that the time for words, and law and order was past. "Words are nothingwe have been surfeited with words for twenty years," he proclaimed. "I am thankful that this time there was action also ready for Freedom." Resistance to the authorities, he said, was in fact obedience to God.

Higginson became increasingly hostile to slavery through the 1850s. In 1854, Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which ruled that the decision of whether a state should be slave or free was determined by the state's inhabitants at the ballot box. This ruling revoked the longstanding Missouri Compromise of 1820 that prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the 36 30' line of latitude (both Kansas and Nebraska were north of the Missouri Compromise line). The Kansas-Nebraska Act produced widespread and lethal violence as anti- and pro-slavery forces battled for control of the Kansas territory. Higginson went to Kansas as the envoy of the Kansas Aid Committee, with supplies, including rifles and ammunition, for the antislavery settlers, hoping to take part in the fighting. Later, back in Worcester, his abolition extremism continued. He supported the peaceful disunion movement as one of the principal supporters and a keynote speaker at the Worcester Disunion Convention in 1857. Peaceful disunion, a popular, but by no means universally accepted, sentiment among some radical abolitionists, was the belief that letting the South go in peace would lead inexorably to the death of slavery and the emancipation of the slaves. In 1859, Higginson boldly defended one of the most dramatic acts against slavery, when John Brown and twenty-one followers seized the Federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now in West Virginia). As a member of the Secret Six, Higginson had encouraged Brown's plan to arm a group of men and start a guerilla war against slavery in the Appalachian Mountains. After the raid failed and Brown was sentenced to death for treason, Higginson was the only one of the Secret Six who did not abandon Brown. Higginson raised funds for his defense and even planned, but never executed, an armed expedition to rescue Brown.