Higginson

member of the Massachusetts legislature in 1782
and in October of that year was elected a member
of the Continental Congress. By that time the
body had dwindled to a mere handful of mem-
bers in attendance but Higginson took his seat
and the votes show that he served on a number
of committees and was active in performing his
duties. In 1786 he was proposed as one of the
delegates from Massachusetts to the convention
at Annapolis but the state finally took no part in
that meeting, and Higginson appears to have
been an officer in the forces sent to suppress
Shays's Rebellion instead. The following year,
in a letter to General Knox, he outlined the meth-
od of adopting a federal constitution which was
finally applied to the United States Constitution,
but he himself had no part either in drawing up
the document or in its adoption. In February
and March 1789 he published a series of letters,
signed "Laco," in the Massachusetts Centinel,
bitterly attacking the character of John Hancock.
Although these were at one time condemned as
rather unfair, they have since been thought to
contain a truer estimate of the man than earlier
historians recognized. In 1791 Higginson was
appointed a member of a committee of twenty-
one to report on a more efficient method of han-
dling the affairs of the town of Boston. The
measures suggested by the committee were not
carried into effect until 1822. In the last decade
of the eighteenth century, Higginson was recog-
nized as one of the leading merchants, reputed to
be worth a half-million dollars—a large sum for
those days. He was a Federalist and his advice
was frequently sought by the government and
party leaders but he held no office for many years.
He acted for a while, however, as agent for the
federal navy and for a short time, in 1798, when
there was no secretary of the navy, he practically
performed the duties of that post. In his later
years he met with heavy losses, amounting to
about two-thirds of his fortune. His first wife
had died in 1788 and in 1789 he married Eliza-
beth Perkins, the daughter of an English mer-
chant living in Boston, She died also and he
then married her sister, Sarah Perkins, in Sep-
tember 1792.

[See Life and Times of Stephen Higginson (1907),
written by Higginson's grandson, Thos. W. Higginson,
and "Letters of Stephen Higginson," in the Ann. Re-
port of the Am. Hist. Asso. for the Year 1896 (1897),

voLIJ J.T.A.

HIGGINSON, THOMAS WENTWORTH

(Dec. 22, i823-May 9,1911), reformer, soldier,
author, was born and died in Cambridge, Mass.
His father, Stephen Higginson, a prosperous
Boston merchant, steward, or bursar, of Har-
vard College after his impoverishment by the

Higginson
Embargo of 1812, was the son of Stephen Hig-
ginson [g.^.], and was descended from Francis
Higginson [#.£>.], first minister in the Massa-
chusetts Bay Colony. Louisa Storrow, the sec-
ond wife of Stephen Higginson, Jr., bore him ten
children, of whom Thomas was the youngest.
The name with which he began life, Thomas
Wentworth Storrow Higginson, came direct
from his maternal ancestry, for his mother was
the daughter of an English army officer, Capt.
Thomas Storrow, a prisoner-of-war at Ports-
mouth, N. H., in the Revolution, and Anne Ap-
pleton, a great-grand-daughter of the first royal
governor of New Hampshire, John Wentworth
[q.v.~\. Higginson dropped the name of Storrow
before entering college. At the age of thirteen he
enrolled at Harvard in the class of 1841. "A
child of the college/' as he called himself in later
life, he had passed his boyhood in the very
shadow of it, and was better prepared than his
years would suggest to profit from its influences.
Graduated at seventeen, he stood second in his
class, and was already a voracious reader, with
a happily retentive memory. The out-door pur-
suits of a lover of nature and of such athletic
sports as the times afforded—swimming, skating,
loosely knit football—kept his tall, awkward body
in good physical condition. While an under-
graduate he could write in his journal, "I am
getting quite susceptible to female charms"
(Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, p. 31), and long afterwards had the
frankness to recall such tendencies, in their bud,
by writing, "I don't believe there ever was a
child in whom the sentimental was earlier de-
veloped than in me" (Ibid.). He found little
satisfaction in the two years of teaching that
followed his graduation from college. In 1843
he returned to Cambridge as a "resident grad-
uate" student, and for three years indulged his
taste for discursive reading, without a fixed pro-
fessional goal. The divinity school was reported
to be made up of "mystics, skeptics, and dyspep-
tics," and did not attract him immediately upon
his return to Cambridge, or hold him continu-
ously after he had entered it; but in 1846-47 he
was enrolled in its senior class, with which he
graduated.
When only nineteen and still employed in
teaching, Higginson became engaged to marry
his second cousin, Mary Elizabeth Channing.
Slender resources and uncertain prospects led to
a long engagement, in the course of which the
young student, charged with the idealism that
produced many "come-outers" of the time, began
his devotion to two favorite causes, woman suf-
frage and opposition to slavery. In the second