Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857–1925

4. The Battle of the Hundred Pines: Thomas Wentworth Higginson

The Battle of the Hundred Pines thomas wentworth higginson if the civil war, as Holmes Sr. noted, asked sacrifices of everyone, few were willing to sacrifice as much as Thomas Wentworth Higginson , a Unitarian minister, militant abolitionist, and commander of the first regiment of black soldiers. Higginson had come to national attention for his opposition to the Fugitive Slave Act (1850), which made it a crime for federal officials not to return escaped slaves to their owners. Anyone helping an escaped slave was subject to six months’ imprisonment and a fine of one thousand dollars. Four years after the act became the law of the land, Higginson had stood with two thousand other protestors outside Boston’s federal courthouse protesting the arrest of an escaped slave, Anthony Burns. Higginson , who came prepared to break down the courthouse door rather than let Burns be returned to slavery, led an impromptu squad of black men armed with a battering ram. Marshalls beat them back, and in the chaos, a deputy died. Undeterred, Higginson went back to his pulpit in Worcester, where he exhorted his parishioners to plant themselves “on the simple truth that God never made a Slave, and that man shall neither make nor take one here! . . . No longer conceal Fugitives and help them 4 The whole drama of the war seemed to reverse itself in an instant. thomas w. higginson, “Up the St. Mary’s,” Atlantic, April 1865 r e p u b l i c o f w o r d s [ 26 ] on, but show them and defend them. Let the Underground Railroad stop here!”1 Higginson’s preaching could not save Burns. On 2 June 1854, a guard of 120 armed men escorted him past houses draped with black flags. Hissing demonstrators lined the way to the Boston pier, and people in nearby apartments tossed homemade cayenne pepper bombs from upper-story windows. At State Street the crowd confronted two cannons prepared to fire. By the time the Custom House came in sight, many of the troops and protesters were drunk. Someone smashed a bottle of sulfuric acid, and mob and military, including both lancers on horseback and footmen with fixed bayonets, charged. The ensuing melee failed to halt the march toward the wharf, where, at 3:20, Burns boarded the steamer that took him back to slavery.2 Indicted for his part in Burns’s aborted rescue, but not for the murder of a federal marshal, Higginson never stood trial. The prosecutor dropped the case for lack of evidence. Higginson’s enemies liked to say that this fighting parson could never be accused of underestimating his own importance; his friends, that he simply stated the obvious. Whatever people thought of Higginson himself , he paid with his person for what he believed, and he believed that the first man to command a successful regiment of black troops would “perform the most important service in the history of the war.”3 Resigning from the white regiment of the Fifty-First Massachusetts Volunteers in 1862, he agreed to command the First South Carolina Volunteers of escaped slaves from South Carolina and Florida. Soon after, Robert Shaw organized the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, composed of Northern blacks and commemorated in the movie Glory. Higginson was convinced that the destiny of American blacks rested on the shoulders of his troops. Should they desert or fail in comprehension or courage there would be no more efforts to arm freed slaves, whose service to the Union argued their right to liberty and full citizenship. Higginson trusted that their performance under fire would demoralize the South and shame “the nation into recognizing them as men.”4 Who else, he reasoned, had more incentive to fight than those fighting for [their] dignity, “homes and families”?5 Before Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant met at Appomattox, nearly two hundred thousand black Americans joined the Union army, over half of them in Confederate territory.6 Higginson’s own recruiting ben- Thomas Wentworth Higginson [ 27 ] efited from news of the Emancipation Proclamation, despite orders from Southern generals like Kirby Smith that black soldiers should receive no mercy and that their commanders were to be hanged on the spot. Eager to test his men, Higginson proposed a week-long expedition to gather supplies after white troops brought news of stockpiled lumber—badly needed for tent flooring—along the banks of St. Marys River. Rising...