In 1881, Thomas Wentworth Higginson wrote in his diary that in the unlikely event someone would write his biography, “the key to my life is easily to be found in this, that what I longed for from childhood was not to be eminent in this or that way, but to lead a whole life, develop all my powers, and do well in whatever came in my way to do.” As Douglas R. Egerton shows in his magnificent, exhaustively researched and beautifully written A Man on Fire: The Worlds of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the colonel, abolitionist, minister, legislator and writer did just that.
Egerton writes that “Higginson’s lifelong refusal to tether himself to a single issue has today kept him from fame by association with one. Scholars, whether of antislavery or literary or gender studies, tend to tell only part of Higginson’s story.” A noted Civil War historian, Egerton guides us expertly through the issues and personalities in Higginson’s various causes. He raised funds for evangelist-abolitionist John Brown’s fateful raid on the U.S. Armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. As a Civil War army colonel, he led the first Black Union regiment and wrote about that experience in his classic Army Life in a Black Regiment. A prominent man of letters, Higginson corresponded with Emily Dickinson about her poetry, and his own essays and poems appeared frequently in magazines and newspapers. A noted public speaker, Higginson supported women’s suffrage and advocated for women’s participation in governance.
Egerton also sensitively captures the private life of this very public man, highlighting Higginson’s relationships with his mother; his first wife, Mary, who died in 1877; and his second wife, Minnie, and their daughters. Higginson had a basic optimism that drove his extraordinary activism. Despite the struggles for the reforms he fought for, he said in 1871 “that this is a remarkably good world, and there are remarkably good people in it.” This bright outlook rings through A Man on Fire, especially in Higginson’s writings, which Egerton cites throughout. In his memoirs, Higginson wrote, “It has been my privilege to live in the best society all my life—namely that of abolitionists and fugitives.”
When Higginson’s 1898 memoir, Cheerful Yesterdays, was published, his friend Samuel Clemens observed, “He was always doing the fine and beautiful and brave disagreeable things that others shrank from and were afraid of—and his was a happy life.”
