"ON THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON"
By
Howard N. Meyer
In 1961, The Year OF centennials, the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Thomas
Wentworth Higginson went quietly unobserved. No American writer who published so
much has been so completely forgotten. A bibliography of his writings made a few years
before his death by the Cambridge Public Library covers thirty-four printed pages. Yet
few will remember more about him than some vague association with Emily Dickinson.
Higginson may have been correctly pigeonholed as a "minor" writer, but he deserves
nonetheless to be remembered as a major American.
There is much about Colonel Higginson's life and works that is of contemporary interest
in this present phase of our history when, as Walter Lippmann has said:
"The critical weakness of our society is that for the time being our people do not have
any great purposes which they want to achieve."
Higginson's outstanding role was that of the colonel in command of the first American
regular army regiment of freed slaves. His life, spanning three fourths of the nineteenth
century and a decade of our own, was marked by a consistent observance of the dictates
of conscience not often found in the present day. He survived after having been a
contemporary of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau to be a contemporary of Dreiser,
Jack London, and young Upton Sinclair, who interviewed him in preparation for his early
novel, Manassas. In the first decade of this century Higginson published two biographies
as well as several volumes of essays, continuing to write until his eighty-seventy year, the
year of his death. Pre-eminently and primarily a man of letters, he was a man of action as
well, a reformer and a radical, a "free lance" in the original sense of the word.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson was born in 1823, the youngest in a family of ten
children. The flavor of the domestic background and setting is suggested by the person of
the children's nurse:
she was Rowena Platt, who was later to become the wife of
Longfellow's Village Blacksmith. His parents were both of established old New England
families; it was a family joke that one of his mother's ancestors referred to Elizabeth I of
England as "Cousin Betsy Tudor." The father's family alternated between the ministry
and the lucrative East Indian trade.
After early prosperity in the latter role, his father was forced out of the shipping business
by the strangling embargo that wrecked New England ports and fortunes before and
during the War of 1812, and found employment and a home as Bursar of Harvard
College. Young Thomas was reared as a "child of the College" which he later attended.
Half a century later, in his memoirs he recalled and described the ante-bellum Southern
boys who attended Harvard. These products of a slave-owning, plantation aristocracy
were quite distinctive. They had "charming manners, social aptitude, imperious ways,
abundant leisure and plenty of money; they were graceful dancers, often musical." One of
these charming aristocrats, it was discovered, was receiving clandestine private tutoring
from Higginson's classmate, Charlie (much later, Major General) Devens. It was quite a
mystery for a while until they got the story from Charlie; the charming Southerner was
making up for a point that had been overlooked when he was picking up his social graces:
he was being taught how to read and write.
Harvard's class of 1841 found himself in an America-or at least a New England—which
was in a state of ferment; as Higginson later wrote, there was passing "through the
community a wave of that desire for a freer and more ideal life …every man had a draft
of a new community in his waistcoat pocket." Carried away by the spell of transcendental
idealism, young Higginson rejected his family's plan to have him become a lawyer:
he
made a quick survey of Blackstone and found that he "could not consent to surrender my
life to what it represented."
For some years after he left college he worked as a private tutor, and then he returned to
Harvard to attend the Divinity School and prepare himself to serve as a Unitarian
minister. During this period he speculated in his diary that a preacher's life might not
provide a sufficient outlet for his restless spirit:
"An esthetic life-how beautiful—but the
life of a Reformer, a People's Guide 'battling for the right'-glorious, but how hard."
Even before becoming a divinity student Higginson had been touched with a fever for the
two outstanding causes of the day, abolitionism and women's rights. Both of these
interests found an outlet in, and stimulated his urge to write—which was to become the
principal activity of his later life. While attending abolitionist and feminist meetings,
writing antislavery sonnets and essays defending woman's rights, he also found time to
continue the athletic pursuits for which he was splendidly fitted by a strong frame.
Football, baseball, and swimming were all major activities in his Divinity School days.
He began his life of action as an ordained Unitarian minister in Newburyport. He laid
down the theme and text for his own life in his Divinity School sermon at Harvard in
1847 when he said:
"There are social evils against which we know that Christ, if alive, would have protested
with the whole strength of His soul—evils which require the Christ-like spirit of love and
moral indignation to put them down; and yet those who fall to the office of Minister of
Christ (I speak not of particular denominations) have not only left hem untouched and
even unmentioned, but actually have lent their influence by threatening, by slander, and
even by satire, against those who would touch them."
The newly ordained minister did not shrink from speaking and acting against two great
social evils of that period. An ardent and active feminist—then and for sixty years to
come –he was among the signers of the Call for the first National Woman's Rights
Convention. He officiated at the wedding of Lucy Stone, and formally joined the newly
married couple in endorsing on the marriage certificate a protest against the ineligibility
of married women even to own property under existing laws. Later on, his essay, "Ought
Women to Learn the Alphabet"—which Lowell, at first thought too radical for the new
Atlantic – inspired the founder of Smith College to devote her fortune to equal higher
educational opportunities for women.
Higginson was not to hold the Newburyport pulpit for long. The other great social evil of
the day caused him to act, in and out of the pulpit, as an ardent abolitionist. He was
persuaded by John Greenleaf Whitter to run for Congress in 1848 on the Free Soil ticket.
Unfortunately, the wealthy and more influential members of his seaport congregation had
come by their fortunes in ways and by means which made the preaching of an active
antislavery man intolerable. He was forced to resign his ministry. His parting ship:
"An
empty pulpit has often preached louder that a living Minister."
As is not uncommon, the dismissal made a more militant and active abolitionist of the
man whose voice was sought to be stilled. The dismissal, too, helped pave the way for a
literary career which produced much that was esteemed by his contemporaries. He had to
write and lectured to support himself, and although he subsequently returned to the pulpit
for a few years, he established himself as a first-rate essayist. It was due to his article,
"Letter to a Young Contributor," that Emily Dickinson was emboldened to write to him
and ask, "Mr. Higginson, are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse is alive?"-the
beginning of a correspondence which may well have saved that verse for all of us. It
meant so much to her that a few years later she wrote him:
"Of our greatest acts we are ignorant. You were not aware that you saved my life. To
thank you in person has been since then one of my few requests."
They did meet, twice, and after her death he became the first editor of her poetry.
Once in chronicling his adventures as a traveling lectured for hire, he told a story that
deserves repeating as illustrating the difference between the scope of intellectual interest
in the 1850's and that of a century later:
In one of my trips, while on a small branch railway in New England, I found everybody
talking about the prospective entertainment of that evening—conductor, brakeman and
passengers all kept recurring to the subject:
everybody was going. As we drew near to
the end, the conductor singled me out as the only stranger and the probable lecturer, and
burst into eager explanation. "The president of the Lyceum" he said, "is absent from the
village, and the vice-president, who will present you to the audience, is the engineer of
this very train." So it turned out; the engineer introduced me with dignity and propriety;
he proved to be a reader of Emerson and Carlyle, and he gave me a ride homeward on
his locomotive the next morning.
Higginson's days as a minister were not yet over, however. After several years of free-
lance writing and lecturing, he received a call to the "Free Church" in Worcester, a
congregation which had been stimulated into being by the example of the militant
independent of Boston, Dr. Theodore Parker. Higginson's wife later described the
Worcester congregation as having been "composed of radicals of all descriptions and as a
whole imbued with strong antislavery sentiments."
The new Worcester congregation not only put no barriers in the way of its new preacher's
efforts to put his ideas into action, but cheered him on. He became a member of the
Boston Anti-Slavery Vigilance Committee, a group whose function it was to protect the
abolitionist agitators at their meetings, and to break the Federal law by rescuing fugitive
slaves:
peacefully, if possible; by force, if necessary. Thus during the decade when the
irrepressible conflict drew nearer, the militant pastor continued to speak, write, and often
act as his conscience directed.
His physical appearance fitted well with his romantic idealism. His face and head were
long and well proportioned; his features were sensitive and his eyes were dark and tender.
He wore his hair rather long and in a Byronesque manner. He continued, as he was to all
his life, to keep his tall strong body in excellent condition. While leading his flock in
Worcester, and commuting to Boston as an abolitionist and freelance writer, he found
time to organize and coach a boating club, and he was president at various times of
skating and cricket clubs. His physical appearance was summed up be Wendell Phillips,
who once remarked, while listening to a speech by Higginson, "Is it not glorious to be
handsome?"
During the entire decade immediately preceding the Civil War, Higginson was in the
forefront of New England activity directed against the institution of slavery, and of all
efforts to rescue, through the Underground Railroad, fugitive slaves and their families. As
he wrote to an indifferent friend during this period:
"To us, antislavery is a matter of
deadly earnest, which costs us our reputations today, and may cost us our lives
tomorrow."
So it was that he was to be found at the head of the group that literally broke down the
Boston courthouse door in an unsuccessful effort to rescue Anthony Burns, one of the
most celebrated captives of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. Higginson bore a scar on his
chin for the rest of his life from a saber cut received in this affray.
In the dark days of 1856 when the Federal authorities were seeking to appease the slave
states, when a slave-holding Southern Congressman assaulted and crippled Charles
Sumner on the floor of the U.S. Senate, there began a reign of terror along the Kansas
border, the object of which was to drive out the settlers who had come there in the hope
of winning the new territory for Free Soil. Higginson once more found his way into the
thick of the action. He made unofficial trips to the West to aid in organizing and
transporting groups of settlers. Later, as an avowed agent of the Kansas National
Committee, he engaged in gunrunning, food smuggling, and morale-building agitation.
The clergyman wrote home from Topeka, "Imagine me patrolling as one of the guard for
an hour every night, in high boots amid the dewy grass, rifle in hand and revolver in
belt."
Later on, in another Kansas town, he overheard, on the steps of a saloon, what might have
proved to be the plans for his own lynching—or, at least, a coat of tar and feathers:
"Said
on man, 'Tell you what, we've found out one thing, there's a Preacher going about here
preaching politics.' 'Fact' and 'is that so?' was echoed with virtuous indignation on all
sides. 'That's so' continued he, 'and he fixes it this way:
first he has his text and he
preaches religion; then he drops that and pitches into politics; thee he drops that too and
begins about the suffering' niggers' (this with ineffable contempt)—'It's well we've got
him here to take care of him,' said one. 'Won't our boys enjoy running him out of town?'
added another, affectionately…."
Higginson survived to record this experience and others like it in an article called "A Ride
Through Kansas;" on his way home from one of his trips to Kansas he paused in St.
Louis and visited a slave-trading establishment. This experience was converted into an
item of literary output called "Assorted Lots of Young Negroes," an essay that created
something of a stir when it was published.
One who lived and worked as Higginson did could not have escaped the attention of John
Brown, and the two met in Boston in 1858, Since they believed the plan and project that
Brown had asked them to help finance to be a sort of expanded underground railroad
operation, Higginson and five other noted abolitionists lent support to the activities that
ended in the raid on Harpers Ferry. Of all the so-called "Secret Six" who had backed
John Brown, Higginson was the only one who continued to live as he had before, when
the raid failed, resolved to face the consequences rather that to flinch or flee. He not only
admitted and proclaimed his past assistance to the would-be liberator, but he went to visit
the survivors of Brown's family at North Elba, New York, to give such aid and comfort
as he could to them. Later he even plotted, unsuccessfully, to arrange the rescue of two of
the followers of Brown who had been convicted of complicity in the raid.
The year 1860 arrived and the threatening clouds grew darker. Higginson had retired as a
minister to become a full time writer. However conscious of the imminence of war, he
started to "read military books, took notes on fortifications, strategy, and the principles of
attack and defense." He taught military preparation enabled him to become ready for
what was to be, to one who had been such an ardent abolitionist, the supreme opportunity
of his life.
Lying between the two great port cities of Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South
Carolina, was the sleepy island town of Beaufort, an aristocratic watering place of the
slavery days. Situated on Port Royal, one of South Carolina's "Sea Islands" which cluster
around Port Royal Sound, Beaufort dominated a body of water which was the greatest
natural harbor on our southeast coast. In order for the Union forces to maintain the
blockade of the Confederacy that had been mounted at the beginning of the war, they
required a base and anchorage somewhere along the Confederate coast. Beaufort and Port
Royal were the chosen objective. In a great gamble, in late 1861 a joint Army and Navy
force, under Admiral Samuel DuPoint and General Thomas Sherman, seized Port Royal
and the nearby islands and gained a foothold and beachhead between the chief Atlantic
ports of the Confederacy. It was destined to be held for the balance of the war. The
victory was received with great enthusiasm, and went far to restore the Union morale that
had been shaken by Bull Run.
There were significant and inevitable local consequences to the victory of Port Royal and
the liberation of the Sea Islands. The islands had a number of plantations, and the many
slaves who remained were freed. In addition, fugitive slaves by the thousands made their
way to the new magnetic center of freedom on the coast. The newly freed Negroes were
furnished with rations, and given employment and the rudiments of education under the
direction of missionaries, teachers, and volunteer civilians brought from the North on the
recommendation of Edward L Pierce, special agent of the Treasury Department, who was
charged with the duty of organizing civilian activities with a view to securing a cotton
crop in 1862. This friend (and later biographer) of Charles Sumner acted on the premise
that the slaves were human beings who, if treated as such, might aid the nation whose
military necessities had liberated them. As Elizabeth Ware Pearson wrote in her
introduction to Letters from Port Royal "The question whether or not the freedmen would
work without the incentive of the lash was settled once and for all by the 'Port Royal
Experiment.'"
In August, 1962, the President's approach to the war involved a sedulous avoidance of
offence to the wavering border states, even though many Northerners were thereby
exasperated and angered. One aspect of this seeming appeasement policy was the
consistent rejection of the offers of Northern, free Negroes to fight in defense of the
Union. But in the special circumstances in which the Sea Islands and Port Royal harbor
were situated, the arming and employment of Negro troops became a military necessity.
Under the command of General Rufus Saxton, military governor of the optimistically
styled "Department of the South," the first American regiment of freed slaves came into
being.
The First South Carolina Volunteers were to carry heavy responsibilities, by no means
limited to the military missions that were their lot. Under constant microscope scrutiny of
Northern groups of every shade of opinion, the regiment was to help determine the
extend to which Negro Americans would be permitted to fight for their own freedom.
That, in turn, was to determine the duration—and, who cannot say, the outcome—of the
war.
Before the Civil War the regular army had been closed to the Negro. The splendid
performance of Negro troops in 1815 at the Battle of New Orleans had been forgotten;
most state laws did not even permit them to be part of the militia in any capacity. The
right to fight even in a segregated outfit officered by whites was not yet recognized, and
until it was there could not develop the understanding and recognition which was to lead
to the integrated armed forces of our day.
The former Reverend Higginson had been giving increased attention during 1861 to his
do-it-yourself military education, while not neglecting his literary output. Thirty-seven
years old, clear-minded and vigorous, he advanced from student to teacher of military
affairs, and taught the elements of drill to successive groups of volunteers who were
entering the State Militia of Massachusetts. His own enlistment and appointment to the
rank of captain in the 51st Massachusetts followed in 1862. When the group was about to
receive its marching orders, the commander of the Military Department of the South at
Port Royal had a historic inspiration and Higginson received a letter from him offering
the command, with the rank of colonel, of the First South Carolina Volunteers.
The choice was a brilliant one. No one could have been chose who was better suited to
lead and understand, to teach and learn from, to educate and inspire, a group of 800 men
who had either been slaves from birth, or come to this country, unlike every other
immigrant group, not to escape oppression but to find it. One of his junior officers later
wrote, "He was a born commander…he met a slave and made him a Man." The new
colonel was strong on drill and military appearance, qualities of great importance to a
group whose status as free men was of only recent origin, and who had been forbidden,
under penalty of the lash, even to read and write before their liberation. The recruits he
led lacked neither courage nor native ability, and justified his faith in them.
From our point of view, it was fortunate that the man who proved to be so superbly
qualified as a military leader who also well prepared to record for all time the progress of
his mission. Woven with warmth and literary skill, Army Life in a Black Regiment is the
chronicle of the First South Carolina Volunteers by their first commanding officer. In
reading the perceptive observations and reflections, the anecdotes, and the stirring
descriptions of skirmishes and raids up Southern rivers, the reader must always remember
the primitive condition of life in which the 800 enlisted men had been found before the
regiment came into being.
The major premise and conclusion is equality. Though this theme is still one of the two
great issues of our day, Colonel Higginson, with a genuine sense of history, has no doubt
about the outcome, as he says in dedication the volume to General Saxton:
The equality in war is the guarantee of that ultimate
Civil equality which you and I may not live to see,
But for which we who knew these men in military
Service can never doubt their fitness.
The book, however, is no tract nor propaganda document. It is rich in episodes of
dramatic interest—such as the three raids upriver into hostile country. As the three
makeshift transports—one a converted Boston ferryboat, another a Confederate frigate
"liberated" in a single-handed act of heroism by a fugitive slave, Robert Smalls—
proceeded up the St. Mary's, our former minister describes, in rhapsodic prose, the
fascination and excitement of the nocturnal ascent of an unknown river. We glide with
him "in the dim moonlight between dark hills and meadows" while the threat-or promise-
of dangers unknown and unseen strains every nerve.
Not only dramatic interest but also a wry sort of comedy is to be found, as in any good
war story. One particularly likes the incident of the grousing Confederate prisoner who
complained that a Negro corporal had kicked him after he had surrendered, and the
reflective musing of the Divinity School graduate in colonel's dress, after weighing the
wrongs which the black race had sustained, that "the most scrupulous Recording Angel
might tolerate one final kick to square the account."
As an expert witness of questions having to do with the right of the Negro, in all things,
to full social equality, Higginson, the Boston blueblood, was an abolitionist capable of a
lack of objectivity, yet his testimony is impressive. The simplicity and essential honesty
of his nine-word statement dispels and discredits all claims that the Negro people are less
moral than any other:
their "graces come by nature and their vices by training." This is
corroborated by the testimony he presents of white female witnesses-the school teaches
and missionaries who moved freely about the camp "without the slightest fear of
annoyance" and who "would not have moved about with anything like the same freedom
in any white camp they had ever entered."
The witnesses on this particular point could be drawn from both sides of the battle lines.
When Higginson's Negro regiment, in one of its greatest single exploits, dashed deep into
Florida and captured and held the city of Jacksonville until the Union High Command
directed a withdrawal, their commander describes the confidence placed in his men by a
Confederate captain's wife, who preferred this occupation to that of strangers.
The crowning drama—as it is today in the wars of our time—was the drama of liberation.
The colonel's gift for graceful and evocative narration is put to use to describe the scene
enacted when the river raiders penetrated to enemy held plantation country. One cannot
forget the scene he describes, as the firing ceased and the smoke cleared away, and the
moist meadows became alive with human heads. We are with him as he watches the file
of men and women on a run for the riverside, including the old women, who, during their
last few steps to freedom, would kneel to utter a little prayer, still balancing the bundle,
and as he welcomes the eight-eight year-old man "neber too ole for leave de lan o
bondage."
An estimate and appreciation of the significance of the success of the First South
Carolina is most authoritatively given in a letter to their commanding general, after the
capture of Jacksonville, by President Lincoln, whose words were no doubt especially
valued after his ling resistance to the use of Negro soldiers in the war:
I am glad to see the account of your colored force at
Jacksonville. I see that the enemy are driving at them
Fiercely, as is to be expected. It is important to the enemy
That such a force shall not take shape and grow and
Thrive in the South, and in precisely the same proportion
It is important to us that it shall.
One day Higginson recorded in his diary the words of a sermon delivered by one of his
privates, Thomas Long, a former slave, acting as lay chaplain for the day at religious
services conducted for the regiment. They were published sixty years later in the
biography of the former colonel, but deserve to be reproduced in connection with his
story of the regiment"
We can remember, when we fust enlisted, it was hardly safe for we to pass by de camps to
Beaufort and back, lest we went in a mob and carried sidearms. But we whipped down all
dat—not by going into de white camps for whip um; we didn't tote our bayonets for whip
um; bet we lived in down by our naturally manhood; and now de white sojers take us by
de hand and say Broder Sojer. Dats what dis regiment did for de Eponipian race.
If we hand't become sojers, all might have gone back as it was before; our freedom might
have slipped through de two houses of Congress and President Linkum's four years
might have passed by and notin' been done for us. But now tings can neber go back,
because we have showed our energy and our courage and our naturally manhood.
Anoder ting is, suppose you had kept your freedom without enlisting in dis army; your
chilen might have grown up free and been well cultivated so as to be equal to any
business, but it would have been always flung in dere faces-"Your fader never fought for
he own freedom"--and what coud dey answer? Neber can sat that to dis African Race
any more.
After the war Higginson returned to the life of a man of letters, but never ceased to be, in
some measure, a man of action in support of causes he espoused. When Susan B.
Anthony was arrested in 1872 for attempting to test the theory that the right of women to
vote was encompassed by the fourteenth Amendment, he led a committee to raise funds
for her defense.
He repeatedly volunteered for public service, and was twice ejected from local school
boards—once for defending the right of a Catholic parent to demand that his child be
required to read only the Douay Bible; once again for demanding an end to the
segregation of Negro children in the schools of Newport, Rhode Island.
In his writing he assaulted, among other things, the concept of the academic ivory tower:
It hardly embarrassed a professor's position if he defended slavery as a divine
institution; but he risked his place if he denounced the wrong. In those days, if by and
chance a man of bold opinions drifted into a reputable professorship, we listened sadly to
hear his voice grow faint. He usually began to lose his faith, his courage, his toleration –
in short, his Americanism –when he left the ranks of the uninstructed.
In 1896 this authentic specimen of Boston's aristocracy of birth – the first Higginson
landed in 1630 – pressed his own definition of Americanism in meeting head-on the
agitation then arising for restrictive immigration laws. The Pilgrims were poor when they
landed [he wrote]:
They were sometimes ignorant; some of their women could only make their mark instead
of signing their names. No doubt the prisons show a larger proportion of foreigners than
of natives, because the foreigners represented the poorer class and the less befriended
class. But the eminent scoundrels, who are rich and shrewd enough to keep out of prison,
are rarely foreigners; they are more often the native product, and use the others as their
tools; one such successful swindler doing more real harm in the community that twenty
men convicted of drunkenness or petty larceny.
Our school and college textbooks do not often tell of the anti-imperialist activities and
utterances of Higginson, Howells, William James, Mark Twain, and others during the
period of the Philippine Insurrection. What Higginson wrote in 1899 deserves repetition,
so apt does it seem in reference to certain lamentable events beginning April 17, 1961:
The whole history of free states consists in rebellion against the interference of other
states which think themselves wiser and stronger...The men who are remembered in
history the longest are sometimes those who raise their voices against such aggressions,
even when their own government commits them.
In June, 1904, when the old colonel was eight-one, when Jim Crow was king, and
lynchings occurred at the rate of literally one hundred per year, while the North, that had
graduated from the Gilded Age to Manifest Destiny, acquiesced in the Southern solution
of the 'peculiar" problem, he wrote:
There is no charge more unfounded than that frequently made to the effect that the Negro
was best understood by his former masters. It would be more reasonable to say that the
Negro as a human being was really least comprehended by those to whom he represented
merely a check for a thousand dollars, or less, from a slave auctioneer. This principle
may be justly borne in mind in forming an opinion the very severest charges still brought
against him. Thus a Southern Negro has only to be suspected of any attempt at assault on
a white woman, and the chances are that he will be put to death without a trial, and
perhaps with fiendish torture. Yet, during my two years' service with colored troops, only
one charge of such assault was brought against any soldier, and that was withdrawn in
the end and admitted to be false by the very man who made the assertion, and this in a
captured town…does anyone suppose for a moment that the mob which burns him on
suspicion of such a crime is doing it in defense of chastity? Not at all; it is in defense of
caste.
In writing about Colonel Higginson in the London Spectator that year ("The Man of
Letters as a Reformer"), J.W. Strachey said that he was "representative of a group
practically indigenous to the United States – the man of letters playing a part in public
affairs."
Today, save for a passing reference in works about Emily Dickinson, he is almost
forgotten.
His eclipse, both as a writer and as a figure in Civil War history, might not have been a
surprise to Colonel Higginson. At one time he wrote, "When any great historical event is
past, fame soon begins to concentrate itself on one or two leading figures; dropping
inexorable all minor ones." In another passage he observed, with regard to literary
recognition and survival, words describing a process that affected him:
To a literary fame, death comes like the leaves in Alice in Wonderland, by eating which
one suddenly grew tall or short. How instantaneously Bayard Taylor's shrank when he
died… On the other hand, Hawthorne, Thoreau and even Poe suddenly rose in
dimensions.
The reader may judge whether this writer, soldier, minister and reformer deserves the
oblivion that has been his. Army Life in a Black Regiment, for example, as a first-person
story of a phase of Civil War history of which, perhaps, some of the self-styled "buffs"
are unaware, has more than one claim to contemporary interest.
When the old colonel was buried in May, 1911, the honor guard was composed of a
squad of young Negro soldiers. The tribute was well deserved.
This long-forgotten book, which stands as his finest work, should be in the first rank of
Civil War books for its unique and dramatic presentation of the fight for freedom and
human equality that was, after all, the sole redeeming feature of tragic fraternal conflict.