Thomas Wentworth Higginson and the freedom jubilee

“Colonel Higginson was a man on fire,” read one obituary. “He had convictions and lived up to them in the fullest degree.” The obituary added that he had “led the first negro regiment, contributed to the literature of America, and left an imprint upon history too deep to be obliterated.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson would have been pleased to have been referred to as “colonel.” He was proud of his military service and happily used the title for many decades after the end of the Civil War and up to his death in May 1911 at the age of eighty-seven.

Nonetheless, his time in the army was just one of many things for which he hoped to be remembered. “I never shall have a biographer, I suppose,” he mused to his diary in 1881. Just in case somebody took up the challenge, however, he wished to provide a hint about his career. “If I do” find a chronicler, he wrote, “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, & do well in whatever came in my way to do.”

Yet while it was a life marked by numerous struggles for social justice and progressive causes, from abolitionism to women’s rights, from religious tolerance to socialism, and from physical fitness for both genders to temperance, there was one moment from the days he served as colonel to the 1^st South Carolina Infantry that meant so much to him that he wrote about it with great clarity in later years.

Higginson’s regiment was comprised solely of contraband troops, enslaved Americans who had fled toward Beaufort, South Carolina, which had been captured by the United States in November 1861, from northern Florida and coastal Carolina. When Higginson first arrived in Beaufort in December 1862 to take charge of the troubled regiment, the recruits and their families remained under military protection, but news of the Union disaster at Fredericksburg led him to fret about their fate should the Confederacy ultimately prevail.

The first of January 1863 arrived, and with it the promise of President Abraham Lincoln’s final Emancipation Proclamation. To properly commemorate the day of jubilee, General Rufus Saxton, the military governor of the Department of the South, issued an order entitled “A Happy New Year’s Greeting to the Colored People” of South Carolina, together with an invitation to a celebration at the regiment’s camp. The steamers Flora and Boston ferried freedpeople from the liberated Sea Islands to Beaufort’s docks, and from there the band from the 8^th Maine led the procession to the 1^st’s drilling grounds in an oak grove behind an abandoned mansion. A low stage had been hastily erected. Saxton sat toward the rear with Dr. William Henry Brisbane, a federal tax commissioner, and Reverend Mansfield French, who had arrived on the coast as a teacher. Higginson stood on the edge of the stage, flanked by his two favorite Black officers, Sergeant Prince Rivers and Corporal Robert Sutton. Laura Towne, a Philadelphia teacher and abolitionist, found a seat amidst the “dense crowd.” Higginson, she thought, though “tall and large man as he is,” appeared “small” when standing between his two color bearers.

The ceremony began promptly at 11:30 with a prayer from Chaplain James Fowler. Brisbane next stepped forward to read the president’s proclamation. Higginson considered that especially appropriate, as the South Carolina-born Brisbane had converted to abolitionism and carried his slaves to freedom in the North. French then presented Higginson with a new regimental flag he had obtained in Manhattan, a fact he had “very conspicuously engraved on the standard.” Thinking the day should be for Black Carolinians, that act and French’s praise of white New Yorkers left “a bad taste” in Higginson’s mouth.

But then “followed an incident so simple, so touching, so utterly unexpected & startling” that he could scarcely believe it. Just as Higginson received the flag and began to speak, an “elderly male voice” from the front row began to sing, “into which two women’s voices immediately blended.” The first words of what Higginson thought almost hymnlike floated above the crowd: “My county ‘tis of thee, Sweet land of Liberty.” Those on the platform began to join in. Higginson turned, shushing: “Leave it to them.” The freedpeople in the audience finished the song, with Higginson gazing down at them. Dr. Seth Rogers remembered that Higginson was “so much inspired” that he “made one of his most effective speeches.” Higginson thought otherwise. The day marked the first moment “they had ever had a country, the first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people,” he marveled, and “here while others stood in silence, waiting for my stupid words, these simple souls burst out.” The “choked voice of a race [was] at last unloosed,” and nothing he might say could match that eloquence. But he thought both Rivers and Sutton spoke “very effectively,” and the entire regiment sang “Marching Along.” The day ended with a barbecue of twelve roasted oxen and, as the temperance-minded colonel approvingly noted, “numerous barrels of molasses and water.”

Higginson was mustered out in November 1864 after being badly wounded during an upriver raid designed to liberate Confederate lumber and enslaved Carolinians. “Emerson says no man can do anything well who did not feel that what he was doing was for the time the centre of the universe,” Higginson reflected as his days on the Carolina coast drew to a close. He devoutly believed that no “brigade or division in the army was so important a trust as [his] one regiment—at least until the problem of negro soldiers was conclusively solved before all men’s eyes.” And although he ever depreciated his courage in contrast with that of the Black men who risked everything to serve, Higginson did think himself forever united with his men, as he put it in “A Song From Camp”:

            “And the hands were black that held the gun,

                        And white that held the sword,

            But the difference was none and the color but one,

                        When the red, red blood was poured.”

_{Featured image by Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly, Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.}