Author Description

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) was an American minister, author, abolitionist, and soldier. He graduated from Harvard in 1841, and was a schoolmaster for two years. He then studied theology at the Harvard Divinity School. Higginson was active in the American Abolitionism movement during the 1840s and 1850s, identifying himself with disunion and militant abolitionism. During the Civil War, he served as colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized African-American regiment, from 1862 to 1864. Following the war, Higginson devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for the rights of freed slaves, women and other disenfranchised peoples. He described his Civil War experiences in Army Life in a Black Regiment (1869). He also contributed to the preservation of Negro Spirituals by copying dialect verses and music he heard sung around the regiment's campfires. Amongst his other works are Malbone: An Oldport Romance (1869), Travellers and Outlaws: Episodes in American History (1889), Oldport Days (1888) and Old Cambridge (1899).