About the Author
While as a minister at the Free Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, Thomas Wentworth Higginson shocked America by leading an attack on the Boston Court House to free Anthony Burns, a fugitive slave being held there. He also supported John Brown as one of the Secret Six, the group of conspirators who supported Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry. The high point of his career as a freedom fighter came in late 1862, when he entered military service as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers of African Descent. Higginson is probably best remembered today as the individual who “discovered” the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson.
