Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 147Of Thomas Wentworth Higginson little is remembered today, apart from the facts
that he trained and commanded a troop of African-Americans during the Civil War
and acted as a literary mentor to Emily Dickinson. The first supplied the subject for
his book, Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870); the second led him to co-edit the
first published volume of Dickinson’s poetry, in 1890. During his life, however,
Higginson was one of the most celebrated essayists and speakers in the United
States. He was also an active campaigner. He played a vital role in the temperance
movement; he fought for labor reforms; he was a founder of the Women’s Suffrage
Association; he engaged in numerous missions to help fugitive slaves and he
gave support and financial aid to John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. The
involvement in the abolitionist movement, in particular, led him to produce some of
his best work: not only, eventually, his account of life in a black regiment but also a
series of essays on black rebellions. The essays were written in the 1850s but
not published, in the Atlantic, until the Civil War began. They are remarkable, not
least because Higginson – like Phillips – makes the point that he is revealing a secret
history. “The biographies of slaves can hardly be individualised,” Higginson suggests,
in his essay on Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 slave insurrection in Virginia, “they
belong to a class.” That seems questionable, if not downright wrong, given the
particularized nature of the slave narratives of, say, Douglass and Jacobs. Higginson
is on surer ground, however, when he points out how little is known for a fact about
Nat Turner himself. He illustrates this by saying that not much is known about
Turner’s wife, apart from the fact that she was a slave who belonged to another
master. “But this is much,” Higginson adds, “for this is equivalent to saying that ... her
husband had no more power to protect her than the man who lies bound upon a
plundered vessel’s deck has power to protect his wife on board the pirate schooner
disappearing into the horizon.” Proceeding with this combination of careful detective
work and colorful language, Higginson then goes on to a detailed account of the
Turner revolt. Cooler in tone than Phillips, he is also less drawn than Phillips is to
the violence of revolution, calling it “awful work.” He is reluctant, too, to plunge very
deep into origins and motivation. Having cited various theories as to the specific
origins of the 1831 revolt, he ends simply by saying that “whether the theories ... were
wise or foolish, the insurrection made its mark.” But while he is by no means
attracted to the violence of the revolt, Higginson sees its necessity. And while he
allows Nat Turner and his rebellion a degree of mystery, he leaves the reader in no
doubt as to the “extraordinary” character of the man and the exemplary nature of
the movement he instigated.
If Garrison was the journalist of the white abolitionist movement, Phillips the
orator and Higginson its essayist, then John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) was its
poet. As his “Proem” (1849) indicates, Whittier had no vast ambitions. “O Freedom!
If to me belong / Nor mighty Milton’s gift divine, / Nor Marvell’s wit and graceful
song, /” he declares in that piece, “Still with a love as deep and strong / As theirs, I lay,
like them, my best gifts on thy shrine!” All he wanted to do, in fact, was to denounce
those whose preoccupations with their own selfish needs made them oblivious to
the needs of others. That meant, above all, the slave owners: he once said that heGGray_c02.indd 147ray_c 02 .indd 147 8 8/1/2011 7:54:40 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 40 AM