“The idea of poetic genius is now utterly foreign to me,” Higginson informed his mother. Instead he had a gospel to sing, its providential ends consistent with his reading of scripture, its goals to be realized on earth. If it brought him some measure of the fame he sought, so much the better.
Higginson applied for readmission to the divinity school in the fall of 1846, oddly explaining his decision in a clumsy third person: “He has abandoned much that men call belief, but seems to himself to have only won former ground to believe more deeply than ever.” That is, he would shuck poetry for the moment but not forgo the brass ring: he intended to reform America to make it, and himself, great.
Mary should be warned. “Setting out, as I do, with an entire resolution never to be intimidated into shutting either my eyes or my mouth,” Higginson told her, “it is proper to consider the chance of my falling out with the world.”
Mary did not blink. She never would through all the trials ahead, and the couple was married on September 22, 1847, James Freeman Clarke presiding.
IF HIGGINSON DID NOT YET KNOW the extent of his agenda, neither did the congregation of the First Religious Society of Newburyport, thirty-eight miles north of Boston, a staid port community that in its salad days was a hub of maritime trade and shipbuilding. The gracious homes of the old shipowners still lined High Street, the main thoroughfare, but by 1847 only their ghosts strolled on the decaying wharves, where they were joined by the factory workers, mostly women, who kept spindles running dawn to dusk for the rich textile men—a poor match all around.
The Higginsons adjusted slowly. Mary found the congregants dull and uncouth. Wentworth hated their materialism, their intolerance, their complacency. Since he also deplored the Mexican War as a means to extend the reach of slavery, he alienated his conservative parishioners, merchants and bankers mostly, who regarded him as a crank. “There are times and places where Human Feeling is fanaticism,” he archly reminded them, “times and places where it seems that a man can only escape the charge of fanaticism by being a moral iceberg.”
With human feeling flowing from every principled pore, Higginson lambasted the Whig candidate for president, Zachary Taylor, as a slaveholder; he invited the abolitionist William Wells Brown, a former slave, to speak at his church. He established a newspaper column to agitate for higher wages, and when the town’s clergy tried to prevent Emerson from lecturing at the Newburyport Lyceum, Higginson chastised them in print. He argued for women’s rights and set up more than one night school for factory workers, particularly women. “Mr. Higginson was like a great archangel to all of us then,” recalled the writer Harriet Prescott Spofford, a protégé from those days. “And there were so many of us!”
And he entered politics. Though pledged, at least in his private journal, to disunion—he could not endorse a constitution that sanctioned slavery—in 1850 he ran for Congress as a Free-Soil candidate in this Whig stronghold. “It will hurt my popularity in Newburyport for they will call it ambition &c,” he shrugged.
Enthusiastic and naive, Higginson innocently assumed he was invincible. Certainly no harm could come to him for advocating fair wages, literacy, temperance, generosity, and above all, abolition in this, the birthplace of Garrison. “They are so much more dependent on me than I on them that I am in no danger,” he informed his family with nonchalance. Yet this was also the town that had clobbered Whittier with sticks, stones, and rotten eggs when the Quaker tried to address an antislavery rally.
Higginson lasted in Newburyport just two years. “My position as an Abolitionist they could not bear,” he concluded when his congregation asked him to resign in 1849. “This could not be altered.”
He took his dismissal with composure, and years later, when he chalked it up to the inexperience of youth, he also admitted that even if he had been more tactful, “I think I would have come to the same thing in the end.”
Leaving Newburyport, he and Mary moved into the home of a relative in nearby Artichoke Mills, a rural retreat deep in the piney woods, and seeking the like-minded, he befriended the gentle Whittier, who lived in Amesbury, just four miles away. For fifteen years, Whittier had been an outspoken abolitionist, publishing (at his own expense) in 1833 the polemical Justice and Expediency; or, Slavery Considered with a View to Its Rightful and Effectual Remedy, Abolition. “Slavery has no redeeming qualities, no feature of benevolence, nothing pure, nothing peaceful, nothing just,” Whittier said, calling for immediate emancipation. A shy Quaker most comfortable operating behind the scenes, he had helped found the Liberty party (precursor of the Republican party), and it was he who insisted Higginson run for United States Congress. (Higginson lost by a wide margin.)
But Higginson was already growing skeptical about politics. The Free-Soilers mainly wanted to keep slavery out of the territories, not abolish it altogether, as he did. And the Fugitive Slave Act, recently passed, permitted slave catchers to pursue escaped slaves into the free states—all the way to Massachusetts, for instance. Plus, the reprehensible law was a rider to the Compromise of 1850, which presumably maintained a balance between slave and free states—and in so doing preserved the status quo, which was slavery itself. “There are always men,” Higginson observed with disgust, “who if anyone claims that two and two make six, will find it absolutely necessary to go half way, and admit that two and two make five.”
To Higginson, armed resistance, not civil disobedience, more and more seemed the only alternative to such legalized inhumanity, and his increasingly militant rhetoric was put to the test when a seventeen-year-old black man, Thomas Sims, was arrested in Boston in the spring of 1851.
Higginson rushed to the city. As a member of the Vigilance Committee, an organization of blacks and whites established several years earlier to assist fugitive slaves, he went straight to the grimy offices of Garrison’s Liberator for a meeting but found to his dismay that only he and two other men—Lewis Hayden and Leonard Grimes, black community leaders—advocated taking action on Sims’s behalf. (Hayden had famously hidden Ellen and William Craft, two fugitive slaves, in his home on Phillips Street, threatening to blow it up rather than surrender the couple.) Garrison, a committed pacifist whose preferred weapon was moral suasion, typically disputed the long-term results of overt action, or violence; his reasoning, Higginson later recalled, “marched like an army without banners.” Others wanted to argue the case in court. This seemed to Higginson to legitimate the very system he believed perfidious: in fact the gloomy granite Court House in which Sims now sat, manacled, was itself a symbol of judicial failure.
Arguing for legal redress, the political abolitionists won the day, and while the case dragged on, Higginson addressed a massive crowd gathered to protest at the Tremont Temple, urging them to do something. No one did. Discouraged, Higginson and his two coconspirators hatched a plot: Sims would leap out of the third-floor Court House window onto a mattress, placed below, and then jump into a carriage waiting to whisk him to the docks, where a sloop stood ready to take him to Canada. But someone must have leaked the plans because on the evening of the intended rescue, fierce iron gratings were installed in the windows of the Court House.
Higginson was livid.
On April 13, Thomas Sims, in tears, was paraded through Boston in chains. Placed on the brig Acorn, he was deported to Savannah, where he was publicly whipped until he bled. Two hundred fifty armed federal deputies had stood at the Boston wharves, their faces impassive, while witnesses chanted “Shame! Shame!”—themselves ashamed for not having done more.
WITH MERRY CONDESCENSION, Henry James once said that Thomas Wentworth Higginson reflected almost everything in the New England air—those agitations, that is, “on behalf of everything, almost, but especially of the negroes and the ladies.” Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss Higginson’s commitment to abolition or woman suffrage as faddishness—or, equally, to disparage it as a calculated scramble for la gloire once he realized poetry was not his métier. Of course reform was in the New England
air. Of course Higginson was ambitious. He sought approval, no doubt. He liked to move large audiences. And he was in awe of men like Emerson, Parker, and Channing, who, commanding platform, pulpit, and pen, swayed minds and warmed hearts: what better way to satisfy personal vanity and at the same time salve one’s own conscience for being vain in the first place.
But Higginson was also a true believer and, to put it in unfashionable terms, a very good man.
It would also be a mistake to ignore the sacrifice a man like Higginson was willing to make for his convictions. “Remember that to us, Anti-Slavery is a matter of deadly earnest, which costs us our reputations today, and may cost our lives tomorrow,” he told a friend less exercised about the issue than he. This was not braggadocio. Abraham Lincoln, the most successful antislavery politician of his day, regarded the word abolitionist as odious. At best an abolitionist was a foggy-headed dreamer; at worst, a zealot rabble-rouser, even an atheist willing to abolish churches, the Bible, Christianity. (“Assent—and you are sane—/ ,” Dickinson would write. “Demur—you’re straightway dangerous—/ And handled with a Chain—.”)
“Without a little crack somewhere,” Higginson sharply agreed, “a man could hardly do his duty to the times.”
Lacking a formal pulpit once he lost his Newburyport congregation, Higginson frequently traveled whatever distance it took to speak at abolitionist or women’s rights or Free-Soil rallies. Committed to all three often-overlapping movements, he was still uncertain about the efficacy of Free-Soil. Politics was a stopgap measure more than a real solution to the problem of slavery, he reasoned. And in 1850, when the Whigs split over slavery, he was particularly chary of a proposed Free-Soil coalition with Democrats, which meant to him compromising the party’s antislavery platform. “I hope, however, that there is less real danger of our being corrupted than of our being deluded; deluded by too sanguine hopes of a sudden regeneration of the Democratic Party,” he wrote to a Free-Soil newspaper. When the editor refused to publish his letter, calling it impolitic, Higginson brought it to The Liberator, which did print it. He would not be silent. He would not be silenced. He had joined the Free-Soilers because he thought there he could speak his mind. Now, he noted with contempt, it was said he “‘might damage the cause.’”
At home in Artichoke Falls, his life veered in a different direction. He was quiet, helpful, considerate, and depressed, for Mary was slowly losing control of her muscles. She sat in a special chair and walked with such difficulty that in later years Higginson had to carry her up and down the stairs. Today a diagnosis might reveal rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis; then, there was nothing known, nothing to do. And though her symptoms occasionally remitted, as is the case with multiple sclerosis, their recurrence left her weaker and more querulous than ever.
But it wasn’t illness alone that tugged at her husband’s heart. The couple had no children, a cruel blow to Higginson, who loved them so unabashedly that he was constantly on the lookout for excuses to bring them into his home. For many years the couple took care of Mary’s niece, a daughter of Ellery and Ellen Fuller Channing, after Ellen Channing died. Mary, however, preferred to avoid children—and, it seems, sex with her husband.
He bore the rebuff with outward equanimity, assuming he had been asked to renounce that which he had no right to claim. For he believed a woman should be able to choose to live as she wished. Mainly, of course, he referred (at least in public) not to sex, though he hinted as much, but to a woman’s right to educational and professional opportunities, signing (along with Mary) the petition for the first national women’s rights convention and urging the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention to reform qualifications for voting. “If Maria Mitchell can discover comets, and Harriet Hosmer carve statues; if Appolonia Jagiello can fight in European revolution…,” he insisted, “then the case is settled so far—…Nor can any one of these be set aside as an exceptional case, until it is shown that it is not, on the other hand, a test case; each person being a possible specimen of a large class who would, with a little less discouragement, have done the same things.”
In his address to that convention, Higginson eloquently spoke on behalf of suffrage and professional opportunities for women: A woman “must be a slave or an equal; there is no middle ground,” he bluntly declared. “If it is plainly reasonable that the two sexes shall study together in the same high school, then it cannot be hopelessly ridiculous that they should study together in college also. If it is common sense to make a woman deputy postmaster, then it cannot be the climax of absurdity to make her postmaster general, or even the higher officer who is the postmaster’s master.” And what of the men who stand in her way? They are primarily anxious, he said, about whether an educated woman, happy and productive, would still make them dinner.
“I, too, wish to save the dinner,” he concluded. “Yet it seems more important, after all, to save the soul.”
Printed as a pamphlet, the speech was considered so alarming that Harper’s New Monthly Magazine immediately ran a rebuttal. “A woman such as you would make, her teaching, preaching, voting, judging, commanding a man-of-war, and charging at the head of a battalion would be simply an amorphous monster not worth the little finger of the wife we would all secure if we could.” Higginson, as usual, was unperturbed. He continued to support the rights of women, his enthusiasm tempered by good humor and rational argument. For like a carefully swept and sunlit room, Higginson’s mind was free of cobwebs and clutter, and while he was heir to the Enlightenment in his thought, his heart throbbed with the idealism of the New. In his superb “Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?” an article printed in 1859 in The Atlantic, he summarized his argument with characteristic and unassailable intelligence: “What sort of philosophy is that which says, ‘John is a fool; Jane is a genius: nevertheless, John, being a man, shall learn, lead, make laws, make money; Jane, being a woman, shall be ignorant, dependent, disfranchised, underpaid’?” James Russell Lowell, then editor of The Atlantic, shuddered.
When Isabelle Beecher Hooker wrote to Higginson to praise his stand, he answered with some annoyance: “Nothing makes me more indignant than to be thanked by women for telling the truth—thanked as a man—when those same persons are recreant to the women who, at infinitely greater cost, have said the same thing. It costs a man nothing to defend woman—a few sneers, a few jokes, that is all—but for women to defend themselves, have in times past cost almost everything. Without the personal knowledge & influence of such women as Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and Antoinette Brown, I should be nothing.”
Some might say he spoke more truly than he knew, for the most amazing of them all, Emily Dickinson, was not yet on his horizon.
THREE
Emily Dickinson: If I Live, I Will Go to Amherst
Biography first convinces us of the fleeing of the Biographied—,” Emily Dickinson would tell Thomas Wentworth Higginson, as if already flouting the scholars—and busybodies—who might in future years try to dig beneath the surface of her life. For of all people, she is the biographied par excellence: elusive, inexplicable, inscrutable, like the light that exists in spring: “It passes and we stay—.”
Even so, one can’t help pummeling her with questions: Why retire so completely from the public world, never even to cross her father’s lawn, as she told Higginson? Why dress in white? Not want her poems published? And why write to Thomas Wentworth Higginson, of all people, when she could have contacted any number of the luminaries she admired: Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickens, the Brownings, George Eliot?
Yet she did confide in Higginson, and we are grateful—or should be—for only to him, outside her family, did she reveal herself, sharing with him revelations that still puzzle and intrigue us. Coy but not capricious, she was the “only Kangaroo among the Beauty,” as she told him, referring not so much to her looks as to her work, and then purposely warning us, again by means of Higginson, that “when I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a s
upposed person.”
Convinced regardless that the key to her poetry lies in her life, generations of biographer-critics have scurried to their desks, her cryptic letters in hand. The best of these is Richard Sewall, whose scrupulous and standard two-volume biography of Dickinson appeared in 1974. Amassing a huge archive on the poet’s family and friends in order to glimpse her, as he says, through Jamesian reflectors, Sewall handles her reticence by circumventing it; as a matter of fact, the poet herself isn’t born until the first chapter of his second volume. The result is astonishing and reliably balanced in all things—except the matter of Higginson, whom Sewall unfailingly dismisses with a presumption typical of his generation.
Since Sewall’s biographical feat appeared, scholars as talented or dogged as Cynthia Griffin Wolff, Polly Longsworth, Vivian Pollak, Susan Howe, Judith Farr, Christopher Benfey, and Alfred Habegger—to name a very few—have probed Dickinson’s religiosity, her family, her artistry, and her ravishing, often blistering verse. Yet Dickinson teases us, winks at us, and escapes, leaving us begging for more.
What, then, is known of her, particularly in the days before she wrote to Thomas Higginson? Like him, she was the beneficiary of a long line, her paternal ancestor having arrived on one of John Winthrop’s vessels in the port of Salem in 1630. But the Dickinsons settled in the fertile Connecticut River Valley, not in the bustling suburbs of Boston or Cambridge, and, mostly farmers, they did not own ships or command markets or aspire to adventure on high seas and to the gratifications of high office—except in the case of the poet’s grandfather, Samuel Fowler Dickinson, a man well educated, devout, and long remembered in his native village of Amherst as a leading citizen of “unflagging zeal.” That was an understatement.
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