A political, not a military, appointee, Higginson also knew he lacked experience. This was an issue—or was made into one, since many appointments remained political. When Shaw petitioned Governor Andrew to remove the Fifty-fourth from Montgomery’s command, he replied to the obvious question—why not advance Higginson to that position—by reminding the governor that Higginson had not been tested in battle. Andrew took Shaw’s request, almost verbatim, to Secretary of War Stanton, noting that “Higginson, the senior colonel of the brigade, although a brave and chivalrous gentleman of high culture, has never seen much service, and never any in their field until he went to South Carolina.”
That is, Higginson had proved only that black men were good enough for skirmishes; Shaw was eager to try the mettle of his black soldiers in active combat. But he would hedge his bets. “It would always be possible to put another line of [white] soldiers behind a black regiment,” Shaw allegedly said, “so as to present equal danger in either direction.” Higginson was stunned.
Though no abolitionist, Shaw was no friend to slavery, and fully grasping the symbolic importance of the Fifty-fourth, he took his position as its commander quite seriously. He also understood the hurdles the black soldier faced; every commander of a black regiment did: to each was entrusted a chance for undoing the racial prejudices that permitted slavery in the first place. But Shaw cared little about the black man, at least initially, whom he punished in order to teach. Norwood Hallowell remembered him as disciplining the unruly members of the Fifty-fourth by standing them on barrels, “bucked, gagged and, if need be, shot.” By contrast, Higginson’s training methods were based on sympathy. “In a slave regiment the harsher forms of punishment were, or ought to have been, unknown, so that every suggestion of slavery might be avoided,” Hallowell noted. “This was Colonel T.W. Higginson’s enlightened method.”
The men met in person only once, when Higginson rode over to Beaufort to visit the newly arrived troops. Afterward Shaw told his mother that “I never saw any one who put his whole soul into his work as he does. I was very much impressed with his open-heartedness & purity of character.” But as the weeks passed, Shaw himself was hardening. He even cast a more respectful eye on Montgomery.
Montgomery, Strong, Hunter, Gillmore: these were the tough, uncompromising men that war demanded, that soldiering demanded, that Shaw respected. And Higginson? He was kind. War is not kind.
Doubtless Higginson knew he was different from the rest and, like Saxton, considered too sensitive for an important command. He immovably believed that despite huge obstacles, the service of black soldiers was a stepping-stone to liberty, dignity, and full enfranchisement. While this was no doubt true, this was not soldiering.
REASSIGNED TO GENERAL STRONG’S BRIGADE, on July 16 Shaw and his men stubbornly repelled a Confederate attack on James Island, where they were encamped, and saved a white regiment’s skin, proving beyond the shadow of a doubt that a black man was a good soldier. After the battle the Fifty-fourth was sent to Cole Island, marching all night through mud and sticky swamp, and then slowly transported in groups of thirty in a small leaky boat to Folly Island.
“Folly Island gives a fair chance at Morris Island; to have Morris Island is to have Fort Sumter, & that is to have Charleston,” Higginson remarked, repeating Gillmore’s plan. On Morris Island stood the formidable Fort Wagner, a heavily armed earthwork situated near the island’s north end and just across the water from Sumter itself. (A previous attempt on Fort Wagner had ended in a rout.) Drenched from thunderstorms, thirsty, and hungry—unlike the officers, they had not eaten in two days—on the morning of July 18, Shaw’s exhausted men finally set foot on Morris Island and then marched two more bone-tiring hours.
“Well I guess we will let Strong put those d——d negroes from Massachusetts in the advance, we may as well get rid of them, one time as another,” Brigadier General Truman Seymour, who commanded Strong’s division, allegedly told Gillmore. According to Higginson, Seymour, a misanthropic man with a careless tongue, had opposed the enlistment of black troops, and Strong was a Democrat indifferent to emancipation.
On the evening of July 18 on Morris Island, Shaw reported to General Strong. Presumably Strong told Shaw that though the men of the Fifty-fourth were worn out, they could lead the column against Fort Wagner, should Shaw choose. He did.
Robert Gould Shaw, leader of the famed Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, a regiment mistakenly considered the first company of African American troops, 1863. Higginson’s First South Carolina Volunteers was formed the year before.
Shaw and his men talked about the decision, and the men held hands, trying to comfort one another. They exchanged letters and pictures. Shaw gave some of his papers to his friend Edward Pierce, a journalist, and rallied the troops, telling them if the color-bearer fell, he would take the flag. Noisily the men shouted approval. Shaw’s face twitched, and he tossed aside his cigar. Thirty minutes later he cried, “Forward.”
Prepared for hand-to-hand combat, the men stole on foot across a narrow bar of sand until they were within range of the daunting earthwork fort, about one hundred yards. The hour was late, about seven forty-five, and the skies were streaked with purple rays from a fading sun. Just as the Fifty-fourth was about to rush across the ditch surrounding the fort, a sheet of fire from small arms lit the darkening night. Men lurched across the ditch, staggered, and fell. Wilky James, serving as Shaw’s adjutant, was hit in the side. Reeling, he was hit again. The column ran past him. Shaw scaled the ramparts, urging his men forward, and was shot through the heart. Undeterred, his men followed. Hand grenades flung from the parapet burst over them as they scaled the face of the fort, and for a fleeting moment one of them, Sergeant R. J. Simmons, planted their flag at its top.
Other officers tumbled to the ground, dead or mortally wounded. Higginson’s young nephew Frank guided the retreat of the battered regiment, but the path was so packed with the dead, so crammed with wounded men screaming in pain, that the soldiers could hardly move. A second regiment rushed futilely forward. There were more than fifteen hundred Union casualties.
Shaw’s body, which had fallen inside the fort, was subsequently stripped naked and placed on display before being thrown into the bottom of a large pit, the corpses of his vanquished troops tossed on top of his. “Buried with his niggers,” a victorious General Hagood presumably said, but another Confederate officer, Lieutenant Iredell Jones, said the Negroes had fought valiantly and were led by as brave an officer as ever lived. Shaw’s father instructed General Gillmore not to remove his son’s body; it should remain with his men.
Shaw and the entire Fifty-fourth Massachusetts became unassailable martyrs and heroes.
Yet it had been a slaughter. And for what? For a plan, according to Higginson, that was futile, poorly executed, ill conceived, perhaps even racist and cruel?
Thin, weak, and downcast, Higginson decided to return to Worcester on furlough. That might hasten his recuperation, for he wasn’t entirely sure what ailed him.
HIGGINSON WENT BACK to Beaufort at the end of August, when the temperature bubbled to ninety-seven degrees. But the tropical heat wasn’t the only reason his step had lost its spring. Nothing much had changed. He presided over interminable court-martials. Evenings he still liked to hear the songs of those he again, and unfortunately, called “the dear blundering dusky darlings.” But he had no taste for food, he could not sit or stand for long periods, he could not read, and at night he soaked his bedclothes in perspiration. Was this a delayed reaction to the deaths, gory, inexplicably heartless, on every side? Or was it a gnawing suspicion that those waging war in Washington were “vacillating and half proslavery”? Did he wonder whether emancipation meant the kind of enfranchisement he envisioned? Or had Montgomery’s audacity and Shaw’s martyrdom eclipsed the painstaking, committed, and compassionate abolitionism that he strenuously practiced?
He lay in the officers’ hospital early in October. Dr. Rogers guessed malaria. Mary had planned to come south, but he put
her off. He suspected that he might leave the army and return north—he wanted to leave—but ambivalence kept him where he was, drilling his regiment, inhaling perfumed air, supervising pickets in the tangled cypress swamps. Charlotte Forten thought he looked thin and drawn. His eyes were hooded.
He remained in limbo, neither sick nor well. It was not that his duties had become perfunctory but rather that his faith in the military as a great equalizer was waning. “This makes me hate all arbitrary power more than ever, this military life, because I see at what a price of possible injustice its efficiency is bought.” General Gillmore devalued Saxton. Montgomery and others continued to jockey for promotions not slated for him. Dr. Rogers, himself ill, returned home, and Higginson’s regiment, plagued by smallpox, was not sent back to Jacksonville, where the Union suffered another disastrous defeat at the Battle of Olustee, again under General Seymour’s dubious command. Nor had his troops been adequately compensated, despite facile assurances from the War Department. “At a time when it required large bounties to fill the Northern regiments with their nine months men,” Higginson complained to Charles Sumner, “these men enlisted for three years without bounty, without even State aid to families relying solely on the monthly pay. For five months they received it…and then Government suddenly repudiated it and cut them down to $10.” Now they were paid seven dollars, not even the ten dollars promised. Two-thirds of the men refused to accept the pittance.
And his men seemed to need him less. “They are growing more like white men; less naïve & less grotesque,” he observed, meaning that as proven soldiers they were more independent, disciplined, sure of themselves. Perhaps his time, too, had come. He had turned forty years old.
“I feel that I hv. done my duty entirely,” he wrote Mary, but “as to these people, I feel much more clinging yet, & it will be hard to leave them & the work I feel I am doing for them—hard to leave South Carolina & [not] feel that I desert them.”
Eighteen months after taking command of the first authorized regiment of black troops in the United States, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson resigned from the army and on the fourteenth of May headed north to he knew not what.
EIGHT
Agony Is Frugal
I found you were gone, by accident,” Dickinson wrote to Wentworth Higginson in the winter of 1863, “as I find Systems are, or Seasons of the year, and obtain no cause—but suppose it is a treason of Progress—that dissolves as it goes.” Even though they had been corresponding just over a year, she missed him and had hoped to meet him in person. “I should have liked to see you, before you became improbable,” she lamented. “War feels to me an oblique place—Should there be other Summers, would you perhaps come?”
If there were other summers, yes; for now she must content herself with his description of the South Carolina Sea Islands—cold comfort. “I too, have an ‘Island’—,” she retorted, “whose ‘Rose and Magnolia’ are in the Egg, and it’s ‘Black Berry’ but a spicy prospective, yet as you say, ‘fascination’ is absolute of Clime.”
She was referring to his essay “Procession of the Flowers,” which she had condensed in her own inimitable way. “The fascination of summer lies not in any details,” he had written, “however perfect, but in the sense of total wealth which summer gives.” Fascination is absolute of clime.
She then signed her letter “Your Gnome.”
The signature may refer to a comment of his, now lost, about the gnomic quality of her verse. For she liked to quote him back to himself, lobbing phrases at him in her slightly coquettish way. The technique had become part of their conversation, much as their talk of flowers was, for a tender bond had sprung up between them, these two seemingly different individuals, divided by place, temperament, and talent and linked by her first unabashed letter to him, a stranger. But he may have taken her remark about war amiss: war could not be an oblique place for a soldier, never mind the man who considered this war a first step toward the restoration, for all, of human and civil rights. She apologized straightaway. He had been so generous to her, she said, that she wanted only his forgiveness. Besides, “to doubt my High Behavior, is a new pain,” she unhappily remarked.
Though death was too close, too real, too coldly indiscriminate for her to mock, at times she did or seemed to scorn the war: “Color—Caste—Denomination—/ These—are Time’s Affair—/ Death’s diviner Classifying / Does not know they are—.” And she told truths about death few of us admit: “’Tis so appalling—it exhilirates—.” She could transform death, too, into a gentleman caller, a supple suitor, an insect, a fly. Imagination runs free; language is taut. “Agony is frugal—,” as she would write, in poems direct, spare, pitiless. Yet this might sound callous to the unpracticed ear. “I shall have no winter this year—on account of the soldiers—,” she remarked to Mary Bowles. “Since I cannot weave Blankets, or Boots—I thought it best to omit the season.”
Directing her irony against socialites concerned only with the “season” during, of all times, war and also against the sanctimonious organizers of charity fairs, church drives, and sewing circles, she spurned both. (“What Soft—Cherubic Creatures—/ These Gentlewomen are—/…Such Dimity Convictions—.”) Instead she measured every grief she met “With narrow, probing, eyes—/ I wonder if It weighs like Mine—/ Or has an Easier size—.” Grief is private; there are no easy sizes. Sometimes soldiers bore her wrath too. “A Soldier called, a Morning ago, and asked for a Nosegay, to take to Battle,” she tartly noted. “I suppose he thought we kept an Aquarium.” Nosegays for battle? How could one prettify battle?
“Perhaps Death, gave me Awe for friends, striking sharp and early,” as she explained to Higginson, “for I held them since, in a brittle love, of more alarm, than peace.”
“It feels a shame to be Alive—,” as she elaborated in a poem dating from this period:
It feels a shame to be Alive—
When Men so brave—are dead—
One envies the Distinguished Dust—
Permitted—such a Head—
The Stone—that tells defending Whom
This Spartan put away
What little of Him we—possessed
In Pawn for Liberty—
The price is great—Sublimely paid—
Do we deserve—a Thing—
That lives—like Dollars—must be piled
Before we may obtain?
Are we that wait—sufficient worth—
That such Enormous Pearl
As life—dissolved be—for Us—
In Battle’s—horrid Bowl?
It may be—a Renown to live—
I think the Men who die—
Those unsustained—Saviors—
Present Divinity—
Juxtaposing life and death—“dead,” “lives,” “life,” “live,” “die”—Dickinson here salutes the soldier (“Those unsustained—Saviors—/ Present Divinity—”), who is but a “Pawn,” his life exchanged for abstractions like “Liberty,” his existence pulverized “In Battle’s—horrid Bowl”: dust to dust, for a botched civilization.
Though to Higginson the soldiers fought for the very concrete goal of ending slavery, in Amherst, even among antislavery enthusiasts, the war was also a political drama. Edward Dickinson, for one, had been a congressman opposing the extension of slavery, not its elimination, and when he declined the Republican nomination for lieutenant governor in 1861, he denounced “as subversive of all constitutional guarantees, if we expect to reconstruct or restore the Union, the heretical dogma that immediate and universal emancipation of slaves should be proclaimed by the government, as the means of putting an end to the war”—though he did say he hoped “that, in the good providence of God, emancipation may be one of the blessed results of the war.” (The Springfield Republican, printing Dickinson’s statement, subsequently ran a rejoinder that declared him a bigot, a partisan, and a mouse.) As the war dragged on, he updated his position on slavery, or so he said. “He is against slavery as the cause
of the war & to be destroyed,” an acquaintance waggishly commented in 1864, “yet, he has always been in action a conservative or a pro slavery man as I think, but he has now forgotten it.”
The war affected every family, and Emily Dickinson’s was no exception: quite the reverse, given Edward Dickinson’s penchant for public office. But Dickinson’s feelings are unclear. “I like Truth—it is a free Democracy,” she said. Likely she approved Austin’s paying a substitute to fight in his place—he had been drafted—for five hundred dollars; life, his life, any life, particularly Austin’s life, should be spared. Yet she had chosen to befriend Higginson—an activist, a women’s rights champion, an ultra-abolitionist—who, even if he could have afforded it, would never have dreamed of buying a substitute to fight for him. But Edward and Austin Dickinson, wealthy men, guiltily insisted that the town of Amherst pay an additional award of one hundred dollars to local enlistees in addition to what was paid by the state and federal government: they weighed life in economic terms. “Do we deserve—a Thing—/ That lives—like Dollars—must be piled / Before we may obtain?”
That Dickinson seldom mentioned the war directly inspired literary critics for many years to assume she inhabited only a supernal realm of poetry, far removed from the miserable squabbles of petty men. That can hardly be the case. And she knew that while Higginson claimed that he preferred to live in nature, unscathed by the alarms of war, the man who composed lyrical essays about April days and snowflakes had also depicted slave insurrections with equanimity, if not outright advocacy. And though skeptical about the intentions, hesitations, and prevarications of his government, once Higginson signed on, he unwaveringly committed himself. Dickinson tacitly approved. “Though not reared to prayer—,” she wrote him tenderly, “when service is had in Church, for Our Arms, I include yourself.”
Of course, then, the war touched her. And she may have tried in her own way to assist the cause. For despite her avowed refusal to publish her poems, several of them appeared during the war: three in Drum Beat, for instance, the official paper of the Brooklyn and Long Island Sanitary Fair, which had been organized to raise money for medical supplies for Union soldiers. Edited by Richard Salter Storrs, an Amherst College graduate and friend of Austin and Sue’s, the short-lived Drum Beat enjoyed a wide circulation, and its roster of contributors included literary luminaries like Oliver Wendell Holmes and William Cullen Bryant. It also spread Dickinson’s work, albeit without her name attached. (Poets frequently published anonymously.) After the poem “Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple” (later mailed to Higginson) ran in its February 29, 1864, issue, under the title “Sunset,” it was reprinted in the Springfield Daily Republican and the Springfield Weekly Republican; after the March 2 issue carried “Flowers—well, if anybody” (titled “Flowers”), that poem cropped up in the Springfield Republican and The Boston Post.
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