Higginson

of these he was no mere anti-slavery theorist,
but, at twenty-two, a "disunion abolitionist,"
pledged "not only not to vote for any officer who
must take oath to support the U. S. Constitution,
but also to use whatever means may lie in my
power to promote the Dissolution of the Union"
(Ibid., p. 76). So pronounced a radical was
fortunate in finding- any pulpit of his own, but in
September 1847 Higginson became pastor of the
First Religious Society of Newburyport, Mass.;
in the same month he married Mary Channing.
In the Unitarian ministry of his time and region
there was abundant precedent for freedom of
speech and action, and Higginson followed it
heartily. Besides taking his place among tem-
perance, suffrage, and anti-slavery reformers, he
ran—unsuccessfully—for Congress as a Free-
Soil candidate, and dealt so outspokenly -with
politics in his sermons that, after two years, he
was found, in his own words, to have "preached
himself out of his pulpit." For over two years
more he remained in the neighborhood of New-
buryport, when, in the spring of 1852, he ac-
cepted a call to the pastorate of a "Free Church"
in Worcester—one of the precursors of later
"ethical societies/' and falling, as an organiza-
tion, under a definition of "Jerusalem wildcats,"
which Higginson evidently relished (Cheerful
Yesterdays, 1898, p. 130). In this post he re-
mained till the autumn of 1861, occupied with
many things besides his preaching—lecturing on
anti-slavery and other topics, school-committee
work, temperance and suffrage activities.

Through this period anti-slavery took more
and more the right of way over other reforms
with him. While still at Newburyport he was
summoned hurriedly to Boston on one occasion
to join a vigilance committee for the rescue of a
fugitive slave, and suffered genuine chagrin at
the government's thwarting of the rescue plans.
Three years later, in May 1854, he was similarly
summoned from Worcester to take part in the
liberation of another fugitive slave, Anthony
Burns [g.z>.], about to be returned from Boston
to his owner in the South. In this historic case"
Higginson bore an important part, helping to
batter a passage through a door of the court
house, and receiving a severe cut on the chin
from his encounter with the police. In such en-
terprises he continued as he began—in sharp
contrast with the leading anti-slavery reformers
who refused, on principle, to fight. Twice in 1856
he supplemented his work in the East for free-
dom in Kansas by going West himself in the in-
terest of organized settlers on debatable ground.
His first visit took him to Chicago and St. Louis,
his second into Kansas, on an adventurous, semi-

Higginson
military journey, chronicled in letters to the New
York Tribune, which were published also as an
anti-slavery tract, A Ride Through Kansas
(1856). This experience brought him into re-
lations with John Brown, which later became
those of close confidence and sympathy.
Holding no theories against the use of force,
Higginson found it natural soon after the out-
break of war to stop his preaching and prepare
for fighting. He was on the point of starting for
the front in November 1862, as captain of a
Massachusetts regiment he had helped to raise
and drill, when the colonelcy of the first negro
regiment in the Union army was offered to him.
This he accepted, and held the command of the
1st South Carolina Volunteers from November
1862 until May 1864, when the serious effects
of a slight wound obliged him to leave the army.
His regiment took part in no important battles,
but its experiences in camp at Beaufort, S. G,
and on skirmishing and raiding expeditions up
the St. Mary's and South Edisto Rivers afforded
abundant material for his excellent book, Army
Life in a Black Regiment (1870), besides placing
him in physical perils which he appears to have
met with fine courage.
When Higginson quitted the army in 1864 his
wife had moved, because of her delicate health,
from Worcester to Newport, R. I., the scene of
his one novel, Malbone (1869), and of his col-
lected sketches, Oldport Days (1873). Here
also he produced the two volumes of Harvard
Memorial Biographies (1866), a work of high
merit, for which he wrote thirteen of the ninety-
five memoirs of Harvard graduates and students
who gave their lives for the Northern cause in
the Civil War. In Newport he and his wife con-
tinued to live until her long invalidism was ended
by her death in September 1877,soon after which
he went abroad for some months before settling
in Cambridge, Mass., in the autumn of 1878, for
the remainder of his life. In February 1879 ^e
married his second wife, Mary Potter Thacher,
of Newton, Mass., who survived him. From his
return to Cambridge until his death his life was
that of a man of letters and a reformer, especially
in the field of women's rights. As a writer he was
primarily a "magazinist." His gifts of graceful
and agreeable writing, of broad sympathy, of
shrewd observation, both of men and of nature,
joined with the equipment of wide reading well
remembered, made him a welcome contributor
to many periodicals, particularly the Atlantic
Monthly in its earlier years. Through not quali-
fying as a specialist in any one field he felt con-
scious of a certain resemblance to a celebrated
horse, "which had never won a race, but which