Higginson, THOMAS WENTWORTH

Higginson, THOMAS WENTWORTH, an American author, was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, 22d December 1823, graduated at Harvard in 1841 and at the divinity school in 1847, and was ordained in the same year. He retired from the ministry in 1858. Meanwhile he had been active in the anti-slavery agitation, and, with Theodore Parker, Wendell Phillips, and others, had been indicted for the murder of a man killed during an attempt to rescue a fugitive slave, but escaped through a flaw in the indictment. In the struggle to make Kansas a free state he took a conspicuous part. In the civil war he rose to the command of the first regiment that was raised from among the former slaves. He afterwards returned to literature, and in 1880-81 was a member of the Massachusetts legislature. His books include, besides histories of the United States, a volume of Harvard Memorial Biographies, and a translation of Epictetus, Out-door Papers (1863); Malbone, an Old-port Romance (1869), and Oldport Days (1873); Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870); Atlantic Essays (1871); Common-Sense about Women (1881); a Life of Margaret Fuller (1884); The Monarch of Dreams (1886); and Hints on Writing and Speech-making (1887).