Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts on December 22, 1823. He graduated from Harvard University in 1841, taught school briefly, before returning to Harvard’s Divinity School and a career as a Unitarian minister. Higginson ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 1850. He supported John Brown’s radical effort to arm former slaves to equip them to incite a slave rebellion in the South. He was also indicted for attempting to free a fugitive slave from a Boston jail in 1854. In 1862, he volunteered to serve as captain in the 51st Massachusetts Volunteers. In November 1862, Higginson accepted an invitation from General Rufus Saxton to become the colonel of the 2nd regiment of South Carolina Loyal Volunteers, later the 33rd regiment, United States Colored Infantry, more commonly called US Colored Troops. In his private correspondence, Higginson noted that Colonel Montgomery arrived at Beaufort on the evening of February 23, 1863 “with 125 men as the nucleus of the 2nd regiment. He reports a poor state of things at Key West.” He also reported that all the men Montgomery recruited prior to their temporary merger with the 1st South Carolina regiment were natives of Key West.  See Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The Complete Civil War Journal of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, edited by Christopher Looby, (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 104 &116.