The struggle against slavery was now an armed insurrection. “Massachusetts antislavery differs much from New York or Pennsylvania antislavery,” one citizen would note in dismay; “it is fanaticism & radicalism.” But Higginson was pleased. “That attack was a great thing for freedom, & will echo all over the country,” he told his mother.
As for Batchelder, Higginson informed Samuel May that the Committee should offer to assist his family, “supposing it to be so arranged as to show no contrition on our part, for a thing in which he had no responsibility, but simply to show that we have no war with women and children.” Willingly, in other words, Higginson adopted the rationalization of a radical: that the death and suffering of combatants or bystanders are the inevitable if regrettable byproduct of the greater struggle. It was a position that in later years he would disavow. For now, though, the customarily compassionate Higginson preferred to see Boston in flames rather than tolerate one person’s reenslavement, but he also chafed at the idea, then bruited about, of Burns’s being repurchased by New Englanders and set free, which would undermine his effectiveness as a symbol. As it happened, the United States district attorney, a Democratic party operative, delayed the proposed sale and then outlawed it, citing Batchelder’s death as his reason.
Not blind to the inherent cruelty of his position, Higginson brooked no qualms about the morality of force. “A revolution is begun!” he shouted in Worcester. “If you take part in politics henceforward, let it be only to bring nearer the crisis which will either save or sunder this nation—or perhaps save in sundering.”
A warrant was issued for Higginson’s arrest, indicting him for treason or what he scorned as “the crime of a gentleman.” An uncle, the businessman George J. Higginson, sent money. “It is the only way you know that we traders dare to show any sympathy,” he told Wentworth. Urged to leave the country, Wentworth refused. “My penalty cannot be very severe; & I shall consider it the highest honor ever attained by a Higginson,” he explained to his mother. Backing him fully, Mary said that the jail should open an annex for antislavery wives, and jesting only by half, Lucy Stone noted that “it would be best for the ‘cause’ if they should hang you.” Higginson granted “that months & years in jail would be well spent as a protest against slavery. The men now arrested are obscure men,” he continued; “their sufferings will be of comparatively little service; but I have a name, a profession, & the personal position which make my bonds a lesson & a stimulus to the whole country. What better things could I do for liberty?”
Anthony Burns: broadside depicting the former slave’s escape, capture, imprisonment, and, finally, deportation from Boston, 1855.
No doubt wishing to avoid that very showdown, the government reduced the charge to disturbing the peace, and the indictment was quashed.
Yet nothing could rub out the memory of Bad Friday, June 2,1854. Thousands of faceless troops on horseback patrolled the gray streets, shops closed their doors, women draped dark shawls from upper-story windows, and a small coffin, the word Liberty painted on it, hung on State Street. As many as fifty thousand citizens lined the streets to watch Burns, six feet tall, well dressed, and escorted by a martial entourage—the soldiers’ bayonets fixed, their swords drawn—make his way down to the docks, where the United States cutter Morris placidly waited to ferry him to Virginia.
Burns aboard, the glum crowd grew quieter, its stiff Yankee back broken.
The following Sunday in church, Higginson denounced the whole sorry affair with the resolution of one ready to amputate a gangrenous limb. Invoking the names of the revolutionary heroes of Europe, Giuseppe Mazzini and Lajos Kossuth, in a sermon he called “Massachusetts in Mourning,” he exhorted his congregation not to “conceal Fugitives and help them on, but show them and defend them. Let the Underground Railroad stop here! Say to the South that Worcester, though part of a Republic, shall be as free as if ruled by a Queen! Hear, O Richmond! and give ear, O Carolina! henceforth Worcester is Canada to the Slave!”
No longer did he believe the Fugitive Slave Act—or any of the laws supporting slavery—would be repealed. “I am glad of the discovery (no hasty thing, but gradually dawning upon me for ten years) that I live under a despotism,” he said. “I am glad to be deceived no longer.”
A revolution had begun.
“LIBERTY IS AGGRESSIVE,” Emerson wrote in his journals. “It is only they who save others, that can themselves be saved,” he added, referring to Higginson, transcendentalist in arms.
“I knew his ardor & courage,” Richard Henry Dana remarked, “but I hardly expected a married man, a clergyman, and a man of education to lead the mob.”
Thoreau also praised him as “the only Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, Unitarian minister, and master of seven languages who has led a storming party against a federal bastion with a battering ram in his hands.”
Whether or not the failure to save Burns was a national watershed, it was one for Higginson. For as a Higginson scholar commented, his action was the deliberate and strategic culmination of his years of preaching, lecturing, and working for a cause—and of his progressive disillusionment with antislavery politics. Now, as stalwart hero or fanatic or both, Higginson was a staple of New England newspapers, his sermons reprinted or quoted, especially his enraged requiem of the Burns affair. Had Emily Dickinson read those accounts—or the sermon? Doubtless both had been discussed at the Dickinson dining table. Did she know of him, too, from Amherst gossip? After all, it had been a local Baptist clergyman, the Reverend G. S. Stockwell, who, learning the whereabouts of Anthony Burns, had contacted Burns’s owner, asking to purchase him with the intention of then letting him go.
And now there was Kansas, the next battleground, where Higginson would be known as the Reverend General and preach at what he called the makeshift Church Militant, a hodgepodge of packing crates covered in buffalo robes. “Ever since the rendition of Anthony Burns, in Boston, I have been looking for men,” he said. “I have found them in Kanzas.”
After the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, proslavery men and what were termed border ruffians—violent proslavery mobs mainly from the slave state of Missouri—had armed themselves to fight the antislavery homesteaders sent to the territory by New England emigrant aid societies, a Bible in one hand, a rifle in the other, according to Stephen Douglas, the author of the bill. Douglas wasn’t entirely wrong. In Worcester, for instance, Higginson’s friend Eli Thayer (a man of more brag than action, Higginson later noted) might have established the New England Emigrant Aid Company to supply Kansas-bound homesteaders with food and clothes, advertising the territory as a good place to live, but Theodore Parker shipped them rifles and six-shooters in boxes labeled “Bibles.”
With hundreds of nonregistered voters pouring into Kansas, the proslavery majority swiftly elected a proslavery legislature and passed the so-called bogus laws forbidding antislavery talk of any kind. (David Rice Atchison, proslavery senator from Missouri, encouraged Missourians in Kansas “to kill every God-damned abolitionist in the district.”) Free staters countered by setting up their own legislature in Topeka. Violence between the two groups escalated, and in the spring of 1856, a gang of fuming proslavery men mobbed the Free-Soil town of Lawrence, burned the hotel, sacked the governor’s house, and demolished two antislavery newspaper offices. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis dispatched federal troops to the territory, and the fifty-six-year-old abolitionist crusader John Brown rounded up four of his sons—he had sired twenty children—along with his son-in-law and two other men and rode out to Pottawatomie County, where they dragged five proslavery settlers from their cabins and hacked them to death with cavalry broadswords.
Appointed unofficial agent of the Massachusetts Kansas Aid Committee in the spring of 1856, Higginson had traveled west briefly to assist a band of what he called bona fide homesteaders (not like those ruffians from Missouri) and equip them with pistols, cartridges, and the cash raised in Boston. “These are times,” said Henry Ward Beecher, “when sel
f-defense is a religious duty.” The National Kansas Committee then authorized Higginson to buy what he figured the homesteaders needed most: rifles, muskets, pistols (ninety-two of them), knives, and plenty of ammunition—fifty-nine hundred caps for the revolvers alone.
In September he returned to the Plains, hoping to help emigrants cross from Nebraska into Kansas. He found them cold, hungry, beleaguered; for breakfast they ate squash and green corn; for lunch and dinner they ate squash and green corn. In Nebraska City, Higginson purchased them cowhide boots, plaid flannel shirts, and warm blankets before setting off for Topeka, which he reached on September 24, riding with twenty-eight wagons and about 150 people. “Never before in my life,” Higginson later remembered with decided pleasure, “had I been outside the world of human law.” But he was often discouraged. Settlers herded their wagons in the opposite direction, back toward Iowa—some to avoid arrest, some to avoid starving, some with stolen horses—and in any event away from what many of them, in ignorance, had hoped would be the Promised Land.
Yet to Higginson the mission was clear, as he wrote—ghoulishly—of his Kansas trip in a series of letters to the New York Tribune. “I almost hoped to hear that some…lives had been sacrificed,” he said, “for it seems as if nothing but that would arouse the Eastern states to act. This seems a terrible thing to say, but these are terrible times.”
But late in October, back at home, Higginson slumped into a depression. Although the situation in Kansas was improving, to his mind the clear-headed John Geary, appointed by Pierce as governor of the territory, managed to bring peace only by co-opting the settlers and ignoring the larger struggle against slavery. In addition, that fall, James Buchanan, sympathetic to slaveholders, was elected president of the United States. Then came the Dred Scott decision: the Supreme Court ruled in a stunning 7–2 vote that blacks had no rights of citizenship, that slaves were property, and that all congressional acts excluding slavery from the territories were unconstitutional. Racism was pervasive, north and south. In exasperation, Higginson cried, “Colored men are thrust illegally out of cars in New York, and to take their part is Fanaticism.”
Though he continued to vote in national and local elections, he preferred to see the North secede from the South than to submit to the likes of a President Buchanan, and early in 1857 he spearheaded the Worcester Disunion Convention. “We the Undersigned invite the citizens of Massachusetts to meet in Convention at Worcester on Thursday January 15 to consider the practicality, probability and expediency of a separation between the free and slave states,” the convention circular proclaimed. “It is written in the laws of nature the two antagonistic nations cannot remain together,” Higginson exclaimed to his fretting mother. “Every year is dividing us more & more, & the sooner we see it, the better we can prepare for a perfect & dignified policy.”
But in 1857, grain prices were falling, inventories of merchandise languished in warehouses, stocks were plummeting, railroads defaulting, and the land boom collapsing. This was the first and last Disunion Convention.
And that fact made Higginson all the more susceptible to John Brown—“Weird John Brown,” as Melville would call him: a folk hero, eloquent and shrewd and already lionized far in excess of his accomplishments. Like many others, Higginson chose to ignore Brown’s role in the Pottawatomie massacre, although he later admitted that he had heard of no one who disapproved it. It had the salubrious effect, Higginson coldly added, of restraining the bloody Missourians. For, as he remarked, John Brown “swallows a Missourian whole, and says grace after the meal.”
HE DIDN’T REMEMBER SEEING BROWN in Kansas but was interested when Franklin Sanborn, a young schoolmaster in Concord whose students would include two of Henry James’s brothers, the Alcott sisters, and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son, suggested they meet. Brown is the “best Disunion champion you can find,” Sanborn declared, “and with his hundred men, when he is put where he can use them…will do more to split the Union than a list of 5000 names for your convention—good as that is,” Sanborn hastily added.
Higginson consented to see Old Brown when the freedom fighter came to Massachusetts to solicit funds from the parlor radicals of Boston. Possessed like Melville’s Ahab with one besetting idea, the elimination of slavery, grim Brown glowed with “that religious elevation,” Higginson recalled, “which is itself a kind of refinement,—the quality one may see expressed in many a venerable Quaker face at yearly meeting.” With Kansas no longer the battle’s frontier—its newly appointed governor, Robert Walker, had allowed elections that fall, resulting in a victory for free staters—Brown would take his war elsewhere, with a plan: attack the federal arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, which in turn would lead to a rebellion of huge proportions, fugitive slaves and free blacks rushing to his side.
Frederick Douglass considered the scheme stupidly suicidal, but Higginson joined the clandestine group soon widely known as the Secret Six. It included Sanborn himself; a self-made financier, George Luther Stearns, who had struck a fortune in lead pipes; the antislavery philanthropist Gerrit Smith of upstate New York, on whose land the Brown family lived; the intransigent Theodore Parker, unfortunately ailing from congenital tuberculosis; and the Byronic Samuel Gridley Howe, founder of the Perkins Institute for the Blind, who in his younger days had fought the Turks in Greece. These men were to finance Brown’s plan and ignite, so they initially hoped, an insurrection that would eradicate slavery once and for all.
Higginson resigned from the Free Church. Action mattered. Only action mattered.
Of the Secret Six, Higginson alone would remain loyal to Brown’s plan, for good or ill, and was the one who never let fear for his own safety interfere with what he believed to be right. And though he had little cash to give Brown—he himself barely managed to make ends meet—he protested loudly any delay of the plan, correctly sensing ambivalence in two of the six. “I long to see you with adequate funds in your hands, set free from timid advisers, & able to act in your own way,” he told Brown. “Did I follow only my own inclinations, without thinking of other ties, I should join you in person if I could not in purse.” The tie to Mary—and to his mother—was too strong, particularly since Mary did not approve.
Still, he placed his faith in deeds, however violent or brazen. “The world has always more respect for those who are unwisely zealous,” he noted, “than for those who are fastidiously inactive.” As it began in blood, he said of slavery, “so to end.” He was right, although premature.
For Brown the beginning of the end came on October 16, 1859, in Harpers Ferry when he and twenty-one others, including several of his sons, stormed the federal arsenal, seized a local rifle works, and then took about sixty local citizens as hostages. But rather than strike quickly and escape to the nearby hills, Brown and his men positioned themselves near the arsenal for thirty-six hours, a tremendous strategic blunder. A local militia quickly cut off any escape route, forcing Brown and his gang to retreat into a small firehouse in the armory yard. Brown sent men to negotiate; one was arrested, the others shot. Another of Brown’s raiders, having run out of the armory, was killed, his dead body used for target practice by snipers circling the area. Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee and a squadron of twelve marines offered Brown a chance to surrender unconditionally; the next day they bashed the door down. Seventeen people died, including two of Brown’s sons, two slaves, a slave owner, a marine, and three residents of Harpers Ferry. Brown, who’d been stabbed with a decorative dress sword, was taken prisoner.
Summarily tried, found guilty, and sentenced to hang, Brown was unrepentant—and he refused to reveal the names of the Six. But the United States Senate issued warrants for the arrest of several of them. Frank Sanborn hid for a night in Concord before taking off for Canada. Gerrit Smith committed himself to an insane asylum in Utica, New York, after he methodically destroyed all incriminating documents. Higginson stood his ground. Along with Howe, the attorney Samuel E. Sewall, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, he signed a circular soliciting
funds for Brown’s defense and then traveled to the Adirondacks to escort Brown’s wife to Boston. He planned to accompany her all the way to Virginia, where he hoped she would urge her jailed husband to escape. This was part of Higginson’s plot to rescue Brown and his raiders, but Brown himself was unwilling, having judged himself more effective as martyr than fugitive.
The antiabolition press clamored for more than just Brown’s head. Papers had been found in Brown’s possession that pointed in the direction of the Secret Six, and with their attorney not sanguine about what they might face in court, Stearns and Howe also fled to Canada, and Sanborn, who had returned, went back. “Sanborn,” Higginson asked in disgust, “is there no such thing as honor among confederates?” Then Howe published a letter distancing himself from Brown. Higginson was appalled. “Gerrit Smith’s insanity—& your letter—,” he told Howe, “are to me the all too sad results of the whole affair.”
On December 2, 1859, the day of Brown’s execution, bells tolled in Boston. “I believe John Brown to be the representative man of this century, as Washington was of the last,” said George Stearns, who would soon testify before Congress. Emerson went further. Brown’s death, he supposedly said, “will make the gallows as glorious as the cross.” Not everyone agreed. “Nobody was ever more justly hanged,” said Emerson’s neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, “…if it were only in requital of his preposterous miscalculation of possibilities.”
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