DR. DOUGLAS EGERTON
presents
"Thomas Wentworth Higginson:
Abolitionist, Soldier, and Poet-Minister
or visit
Few Americans covered as much ground as Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Born in 1823 to a family descended from Boston's Puritan founders, he attended Harvard, like all the men in his family, and prepared for the settled life of a minister. Instead, he rejected both privilege and convention, and embraced radical causes, attaching himself to nearly every major reform movement of the day, from women's rights to abolitionism.
More than merely a fellow traveler, Higginson became a proponent of direct action. Wounded during an altercation with the police over an enslaved man who--in defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act--was fighting extradition to the South, Higginson wore the scar with pride. He became a member of Boston's Secret Six, supporting John Brown's raid and going to Bleeding Kansas with his rifle, prepared to put his life on the line. During the Civil War Higginson went to South Carolina and led one of the first Black regiments, the 1st Carolina Volunteers, into battle.
Man of action though he was, "Colonel" Higginson was also a writer and journalist, friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and one of the founding editors of the Atlantic Magazine. Emily Dickinson sought out his advice and their correspondence attests both to Dickinson's genius and Higginson's attempt to help it reach a larger audience.
Until his death in 1911, Higginson played a role (often a leading and vocal part) in nearly every progressive movement of the 19th century, earning a place in studies of abolitionism, feminism, education, temperance, Victorian fiction, as well as films, novels, and books featuring Dickinson and Harriet Tubman (whom he met in South Carolina during the Civil War). These reveal only aspects of Higginson's storied life.
Douglas Egerton will discuss his latest biography, to be released the day before his presentation -- Man on Fire; The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson -- which embraces all the facets of this American whirlwind, illuminating the ways in which Higginson's lifelong crusade for a more just world resonates today.
Source: Amazon.com
About the Speaker:
Douglas R. Egerton became interested in history through his family and its troubled past. His paternal grandmother was born in Tennessee in 1885, the daughter of an elderly Confederate officer and slaveholder (and his second, much younger, wife). When in high school, the series “Roots” was shown on television, and his normally softspoken grandmother became furious about the way in which the Old South was depicted. She assured her grandson the planter class “was always kind to our people,” an inadvertent admission that African American enslaved persons were indeed human property.
Dr. Egerton says that’s when he decided to write and teach about race relations in the early American South. He moved east from Arizona and received his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Georgetown University. He never lost his interest in the South, which he reports was far more complex and complicated than he ever imagined. His work now deals with the intersections between race and politics in early America.
Dr. Egerton's books include Thunder At the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America (2016), The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (2014), Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln, and the Election That Brought on the Civil War (2010) and Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (2009).
His first book, Charles Fenton Mercer and the Trial of National Conservatism (1989), examined the career of the founder of the American Colonization Society, a group of conservative white antislavery politicians who wished to send freed slaves to Liberia. His other books, Gabriel’s Rebellion (1993), He Shall Go Out Free: The Lives of Denmark Vesey (1999), and Rebels, Reformers and Revolutionaries (2002) explore slave rebelliousness.
Dr. Egerton has also written numerous essays and reviews regarding race in early America; some of the latter have appeared in the Sunday Boston Globe and The Nation. He has appeared on the PBS series “The African Americans: Many Rivers to Cross” (2013), “Africans in America” (1998) and “This Far by Faith” (2002).
During the 2011-12 academic year, Dr. Egerton held the Mary Ball Washington Chair (Fulbright) at the University College Dublin. In spring 2015, he was the Merrill Family Visiting Professor of History at Cornell University. In 2017, Dr. Egerton won the Gilder-Lehrman Lincoln Prize for Thunder at the Gates.
