"Literature is attar of roses, one distilled drop from a million blossoms," Higginson wrote in his "Letter to a Young Contributor," words that d.i.c.kinson heeded well.

"This was a Poet-," she wrote as if in reply, It is ThatDistills amazing senseFrom Ordinary Meanings-And Attar so immenseFrom the familiar speciesThat perished by the Door-We wonder it was not OurselvesArrested it-before- WHEN d.i.c.kINSON SHOWED SUE "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers-," Sue criticized the second stanza. The two friends went back and forth. "Your praise is good-to me-," Emily replied, because I "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers-," Sue criticized the second stanza. The two friends went back and forth. "Your praise is good-to me-," Emily replied, because I know know it it knows- knows-and suppose- suppose-it means-. means-."

If writing demanded commitment, it also required a recipient. There were Newton and other friends, like Joseph Lyman, George Gould, Perez Cowan, and Henry Vaughan Emmons, to whom she seems to have shown some of her early work; there was Sue, there was Higginson himself, who loved language and the outdoors, as she did, and whom, despite his "surgery," she trusted. One need not understand everything.

Her most perplexing connection was to the unknown person she addressed as Master in three letters probably composed in the late 1850s. Undiscovered until her death-and they were found in draft form only-these letters contain no clues to the recipient's ident.i.ty. No one even knows if d.i.c.kinson actually mailed final copies of the letters, and as in most things d.i.c.kinson, much about their origin is guesswork. The reigning hypothesis is that the Master was the Reverend Charles Wadsworth, moody minister of Philadelphia's Arch Street Presbyterian Church, whom d.i.c.kinson apparently met while visiting that city en route from Washington in March of 1855.

The Reverend Wadsworth, an oddball of the first order, thrilled parishioners with his overheated theatrics: he had a trapdoor cut into the pulpit floor so he might appear and disappear without having to mingle with the congregation, and a poet in his younger days, or so he had hoped, he was an ace performer, the religious thespian with br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes, quivering cheeks, heaving chest, a "man of G.o.d of the old school,...a tower of strength to the wavering and distressed." He reveled in the theology of John Calvin, calling it the single philosophical defense against blank atheism, and his sermons were said to rival Henry Beecher's. "And the Church below, Christ's witness unto the world, in all her ordinances and utterances, cries, 'Come, come!' And the Church above, with the resulting of white robes, and the sweeping of golden harps, cries, 'Come, come!'" Though one reviewer found his published sermons florid, he admitted not having seen the eminent Wadsworth preach, which Mark Twain had. "But every now and then, with an admirable a.s.sumption of not being aware of it," Twain reported, "he will get off a first-rate joke and then frown severely at any one who is surprised into smiling at it."

Likely d.i.c.kinson's visit to her Philadelphia cousins included a Sunday sermon by the preacher she later called a Man of Sorrow. Was this Man of Sorrow the Master to whom d.i.c.kinson addressed her love letters? Jay Leyda, d.i.c.kinson sleuth supreme, doubted it though he conjectured that d.i.c.kinson initiated a correspondence with Wadsworth shortly after the move to the Homestead and about the time her mother fell ill. d.i.c.kinson did contact Wadsworth about something troubling her, for he answered kindly, referring to "the affliction which has befallen, or is now befalling you." And in 1860 he called at the d.i.c.kinson home, "Black with his Hat," as the poet later recalled, telling her "My Life is full of dark Secrets." We don't know much more than this, but it does seem that d.i.c.kinson turned to Wadsworth, seeking relief for an affliction that likely had nothing to do with him. And if the affliction refers to a romance with the Master, then the Master is someone else.

Other candidates for the Master include the family friend Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican, Springfield Republican, or someone whose ident.i.ty has not yet surfaced. After her death, Austin concluded that Emily had been "several times in love, in her own way," and years later d.i.c.kinson's niece insisted that "my Aunt had lovers, like Browning's roses, 'all the way' to the end-men of varied profession and attainment who wrote to her and came to see her, and whose letters she burnt with a chivalry not all of them requited in kind." (The last remark is a posthumous jab at Higginson, who allowed the publication of his stash of d.i.c.kinson letters.) or someone whose ident.i.ty has not yet surfaced. After her death, Austin concluded that Emily had been "several times in love, in her own way," and years later d.i.c.kinson's niece insisted that "my Aunt had lovers, like Browning's roses, 'all the way' to the end-men of varied profession and attainment who wrote to her and came to see her, and whose letters she burnt with a chivalry not all of them requited in kind." (The last remark is a posthumous jab at Higginson, who allowed the publication of his stash of d.i.c.kinson letters.) The specific ident.i.ty of the Master matters less than the letters she intended for him. There we overhear the "afflicted" d.i.c.kinson, alternately pa.s.sive and brash, pleading and adamant, violent, poetic, secretive, and exposed. "I've got a cough as big as a thimble-but I don't care for that-I've got a Tomahawk in my side but that don't humor me much, Her Master stabs her more-Wont he come to her-," she asks in the second letter, possibly written as many as two years later. Raging, scathing, self-destructive, she was very much aware of what she was writing.

Evidently the relationship had progressed, at least in her mind. "Open your life wide, and take me in forever, I will never be tired-I will never be noisy when you want to be still-I will be your best little girl-n.o.body else will see me, but you-but that is enough-I shall not want any more-."

And there is the third letter, written near the date of the second (or so it seems.) Its masochism is harrowing, its initial image of violence almost vindictive: Master.If you saw a bullethit a Bird-and he told youhe was'nt shot-you might weepat his courtesy, but you wouldcertainly doubt his word-One drop more from the gashthat stains your Daisy'sbosom-then would you believe? believe?........I am older-tonight, Master-but the love is the same-so are the moon and thecrescent-........-but if I had the Beard on my cheek-like you-and you-hadDaisy's petals-and you cared so for me-what would become of you?Could you forget me in fight, or flight-or the foreign land?Couldn't Carlo [her dog], and you and Iwalk in the meadows an hour-and n.o.body care but the Bobolink-and his- his-a silver silver scruple? scruple?........I waited a long time-Master-but I can wait more-waittill my hazel hair is dappled-and you carry the cane-then I can look at mywatch-and if the Day istoo far declined-we can takethe chances for Heaven-What would you do with meif I came "in white"?I want to see you more-Sir-than all I wish for inthis world-and the wish-altered a little-will be myonly one-for the skies-Could you come to New England-Would you cometo Amherst-Would you liketo come-Master?

If the master letters are aggressive, s.e.xy, and an amalgam of fury, doubt, pride, and supplication, they also reveal a d.i.c.kinson in complete command of herself, despite protestations to the contrary.

This is how she loved.

Perhaps you think me stooping! stooping!I'm not ashamed-of that! that!Christ-stooped-until he touched the Grave! touched the Grave!Do those at Sacrament- Sacrament-Commemorate dishonor- dishonor-Or love-annealed of love-Until it bend-as low as Death DeathRe-royalized-above?

BY 1858, d.i.c.kINSON WAS FASTENING GROUPS of her poems together into small hand-sewn packets, each of which contained as many as twenty poems. She sent a number of these poems to friends; others she kept and reworked. And even after she entered them into booklets, she continued to alter them, dividing long stanzas, for instance, into quatrains, or shifting some of the punctuation, or subst.i.tuting words. Later called fascicles by one of her first editors, these packets survive, all forty of them, and though they cannot be dated with precision, they reveal a self-conscious poet, never satisfied with the work at hand. "'It is finished,'" she would say, "can never be said of us." of her poems together into small hand-sewn packets, each of which contained as many as twenty poems. She sent a number of these poems to friends; others she kept and reworked. And even after she entered them into booklets, she continued to alter them, dividing long stanzas, for instance, into quatrains, or shifting some of the punctuation, or subst.i.tuting words. Later called fascicles by one of her first editors, these packets survive, all forty of them, and though they cannot be dated with precision, they reveal a self-conscious poet, never satisfied with the work at hand. "'It is finished,'" she would say, "can never be said of us."

Though publication was "foreign to my thought, as Firmament to Fin-," as she had told Higginson, she obviously considered her verse, as she famously wrote, her letter to the World. Naturally she sought recognition, though that was not her primary aim. "It's a great thing to be 'great,' Loo," she told her cousin Louise Norcross, "and you and I might tug for a life, and never accomplish it, but no one can stop our looking on, and you know some cannot sing, but the orchard is full of birds, and we all can listen What if we learn, ourselves, some day!"

Yet if she could learn to be a singer, to whom would she sing? Audience is one of the great mysteries vexing d.i.c.kinson scholars, who variously infer that she devised an alternative form of publication by addressing herself mainly to family and select friends. But readers then and now also feel that she speaks to them alone; her verse is intimate, private. Higginson would cla.s.sify it with what Emerson called the poetry of the portfolio, something produced without thought of publication, solely to express the writer's own mind. But this is only partly true and reflects more of Higginson's prejudice than d.i.c.kinson's intention. For she spoke of her writing with increasing if comically humble confidence, hesitancy growing to a.s.sertion: My Splendors, are Menagerie-But their Competeless ShowWill entertain the CenturiesWhen I, am long ago,An Island in dishonored Gra.s.s-Whom none but Daisies, know- Deliberately she defied the conventional, the sentimental, the predictable: birds gossip, roads wrinkle, suns stoop, skies pout, and daffodils untie their bonnets. Emotionally raw and intellectually dense, her poems divide nouns from verbs, past from present ("When I, am long ago, / An Island in dishonored Gra.s.s-"), only to reunite them. Ditto p.r.o.nouns: they lose case or reference and yet stay what they are. Fantastically, she transforms life and death, speaking after death ("Because I could not stop for Death-") or at the moment of its onset ("I heard a Fly buzz-when I died-"), and in many poems, with color and delight she embraces sensually the things of this world ("We like March-his Shoes are Purple-"), the change of seasons and their recurrence, as in this early example: An altered look about the hills-A Tyrian light the village fills-A wider sunrise in the morn-A deeper twilight on the lawn-A print of a vermillion foot-A purple finger on the slope-A flippant fly opon the pane-A spider at his trade again-An added strut in Chanticleer-A flower expected everywhere-An axe shrill singing in the woods-Fern odors on untravelled roads-All this and more I cannot tell-A furtive look you know as well-And Nicodemus' MysteryReceives it's annual reply!

She can tilt her rhyme; she'll use an off rhyme or an eye rhyme: "Power is only Pain-/ Stranded-thro' Discipline." She shuns full stops: "First-Chill-then Stupor-then the letting go-." The open-ended dash, breathless, was her pause of choice, dashes in all sizes and shapes: short, long, slant, each prying the door ajar. Nouns stand at attention, capitalized and substantive. "Narcotics cannot still the Tooth / ," she writes, "That nibbles at the soul-."

Invoking the Bible, blaspheming, misquoting, and subverting the expected, she tests the idea of G.o.d, rails at his distance. She suffers, she sees; she suffers because she sees: I had some things that I called mine-And G.o.d, that he called his-Till recently a rival claimDisturbed these amities.The property, my garden,Which having sown with care-He claims the pretty acre-And sends a Bailiff there.

"On subjects of which we know nothing," she once said, "we both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour, which keeps Believing nimble."

Some things that fly there be-Birds-Hours-the b.u.mblebee-Of these no Elegy.Some things that stay there be-Grief-Hills-Eternity-Nor this behooveth me.There are that resting, rise.Can I expound the skies?How still the Riddle lies!

"Can I expound the skies?" If not, why not? Though church doctrine might annoy her, she never tires of its human side: "When Jesus tells us about his Father, we distrust him. When he shows us his Home, we turn away, but when he confides to us that he is 'acquainted with Grief,' we listen," she says, "for that also is an Acquaintance of our own." Sorrow touches sorrow, offering the comfort of the unknown: "This World is not conclusion." Like her poetry, the wounded deer leaps highest. ("I sing," as she had told Higginson, "as the Boy does by the Burying Ground-because I am afraid.") A poet of incalculable loss, infinite compa.s.sion, she speaks urgently, intimately, frugally, of the unspeakable. The s.p.a.ce between us and her melts away.

She employs the common folk measure of Protestant hymns, writing in six-and eight-syllable lines, in order to unbalance it-no full stops at the end of a stanza, for instance. A miniaturist, she composes poems in brief, most of which fit on a single page. She loves shortcuts. She manages-invents-an economic phrase to express the inexpressible, raiding the unspeakable, cutting to the quick of emotion, all emotion, and dissecting it with such speed we wonder how she can possibly know what she knows: She dealt her pretty words like Blades-How glittering they shone-And every One unbared a NerveOr wantoned with a Bone-She never deemed-she hurt-That-is not Steel's Affair-A vulgar grimace in the Flesh-How ill the Creatures bear-To Ache is human-not polite-The Film opon the eyeMortality's old Custom-Just locking up-to Die- The succinct description of Hawthorne she would later send Higginson-he "appalls, entices"-refers equally to herself. Her pretty words, too, are dealt like blades: t.i.tle divine-is mine!The Wife-without the Sign!Acute Degree-conferred on me-Empress of Calvary!Royal-all but the Crown!Betrothed-without the swoonG.o.d sends us Women- Incomparably modern, the poetry is as ephemeral as experience itself. Sensual, its decided s.e.xuality-whether directed toward the Master or Susan or Higginson or her own vocation as poet-is expressed in a language compounded of colloquialism and religious reference, aphorism and plaint, statement and plea. Direct, dense, often excruciating, her poetry lies close to the reader and one step beyond, fervently waiting: Because I could not stop.

d.i.c.kINSON DISPATCHED POEMS TO FRIENDS, her verse often accompanied by a pressed flower or a leaf. A large number went to Samuel Bowles, the close friend of Susan and Austin's (later it was rumored that Bowles and Susan were uncommonly fond of each other), who visited Amherst often, sometimes with his wife, sometimes not. Owner and editor of the influential her verse often accompanied by a pressed flower or a leaf. A large number went to Samuel Bowles, the close friend of Susan and Austin's (later it was rumored that Bowles and Susan were uncommonly fond of each other), who visited Amherst often, sometimes with his wife, sometimes not. Owner and editor of the influential Springfield Republican, Springfield Republican, a conservative weekly newspaper founded by his father in 1824, Bowles converted it into a daily, working until he collapsed and then diving back into his work as soon as he recovered. But he managed to produce a newspaper respected nationally for its clarity, its pith, its independence, and its editorials. The d.i.c.kinsons were enthusiastic readers. a conservative weekly newspaper founded by his father in 1824, Bowles converted it into a daily, working until he collapsed and then diving back into his work as soon as he recovered. But he managed to produce a newspaper respected nationally for its clarity, its pith, its independence, and its editorials. The d.i.c.kinsons were enthusiastic readers.

Liberal, generous, unhappily married, and reputed to be something of a roue as well as a supporter of women writers-his paper often printed their poetry-Bowles was also a dabbler in national as well as local politics, a diplomat, and a dynamo with real sensitivity and beautiful, seductive eyes, a modern man impatient, canny, and worldly. "His growth was by absorption," said his biographer. "Other people were to him sponges out of which he deftly squeezed whatever knowledge they could yield." His journalistic ear sleeplessly c.o.c.ked, his politics fresh, his sentiments broad, his pen ready, he was an antislavery man who considered abolitionists to be dangerous extremists. (Most did.) He applauded Edward d.i.c.kinson's stand against the Kansas-Nebraska bill and supported the congressman's unsuccessful bid for reelection in 1854 (though it seems he eventually withdrew his support). In 1856 he supported the antislavery Republican John C. Fremont for the presidency, then in 1860 endorsed the rail-splitter Abraham Lincoln, whom he didn't much like, and reluctantly supported the war, which he liked even less.

Samuel Bowles, editor of the Springfield Republican. Springfield Republican. "His nature was Future." "His nature was Future."

Radicals like Higginson found the Republican Republican too pessimistic for their taste, and Boston salonistas like Annie Adams Fields airily dismissed its publisher: "Mr. Bowles is quite handsome and would be altogether if he had elegance of manner to correspond with what nature has done for him in giving him fine eyes," the Brahmin hostess recorded, "but he is an ambitious man, ambitious to be known as a literary man, but apparently mistaking popularity for fame he has learned to know almost everybody of literary celebrity, to get on the top word continually, to keep open house, to be a general good fellow, which combined with real ability has made him widely liked & given him a brilliant restless way, which makes so many Americans." James Fields, her husband, took Bowles's measure more crisply: heaven forbid the man should start a magazine; it would bury too pessimistic for their taste, and Boston salonistas like Annie Adams Fields airily dismissed its publisher: "Mr. Bowles is quite handsome and would be altogether if he had elegance of manner to correspond with what nature has done for him in giving him fine eyes," the Brahmin hostess recorded, "but he is an ambitious man, ambitious to be known as a literary man, but apparently mistaking popularity for fame he has learned to know almost everybody of literary celebrity, to get on the top word continually, to keep open house, to be a general good fellow, which combined with real ability has made him widely liked & given him a brilliant restless way, which makes so many Americans." James Fields, her husband, took Bowles's measure more crisply: heaven forbid the man should start a magazine; it would bury The Atlantic. The Atlantic.

"His nature was Future": Emily d.i.c.kinson grasped him best. But the future was something he never quite reached. A series of ailments, including sciatica and shingles, along with his chronic insomnia and his headaches, all wore him down, and in 1862 he sailed for Europe to rest. When he returned, he picked up exactly where he had left off. The work and the illnesses continued, and he died sixteen years later, at the age of fifty-one.

As early as 1860, Bowles and his wife, Mary, were d.i.c.kinson staples. It was Mary who gave Emily an antislavery Christmas parable by Theodore Parker, but it was Samuel, with his "vivid Face and the besetting Accents," with whom the poet shared a special conversation, he ribbing her as "the Queen Recluse" who "has 'overcome the world.'" Bowles appreciated and respected d.i.c.kinson's need for solitude. "I have been in a savage, turbulent state for some time-," he confided to Austin, "indulging in a sort of chronic disgust at everything & everybody-I guess a good deal as Emily feels."

Emily trafficked with no movement, no group, no cabal of dogooders outside the select circle that now included Bowles, with whom she could disagree, particularly about politics. "I am much ashamed Mr. Bowles," she jauntily apologized after one of his visits. "I misbehaved tonight. I would like to sit in the dust. I fear I am your little friend no more, but Mrs Jim Crow." The issue seems to have been women's rights. "I am sorry I smiled at women," she continued. "Indeed, I revere holy ones, like Mrs Fry and Miss Nightingale." She and Bowles treated each other as equals, and when he left for Europe, she deeply missed him. "When the Best is gone-I know that other things are not of consequence-," she explained to his wife. "The Heart wants what it wants-or else it does not care-."

Vinnie once observed that her sister was "always watching for the rewarding person to come." Bowles was one such person.

"I AM SO FAR FROM LAND," d.i.c.kinson once told Bowles. One wonders if, this time, he understood her meaning, and it seems he did. She asked him to mail some letters she did not want to post from the gossipy village of Amherst; he could be trusted to be discreet. And if he did not thoroughly understand her poems-his taste in verse hugged the sh.o.r.e-he published several in the d.i.c.kinson once told Bowles. One wonders if, this time, he understood her meaning, and it seems he did. She asked him to mail some letters she did not want to post from the gossipy village of Amherst; he could be trusted to be discreet. And if he did not thoroughly understand her poems-his taste in verse hugged the sh.o.r.e-he published several in the Republican Republican when his wife or Sue gave them to him: "n.o.body knows this little Rose" in 1858, "I taste a liquor never brewed" in the spring of 1861; and on March 1, 1862, "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers." when his wife or Sue gave them to him: "n.o.body knows this little Rose" in 1858, "I taste a liquor never brewed" in the spring of 1861; and on March 1, 1862, "Safe in their Alabaster Chambers."

That last poem was one of the four that d.i.c.kinson chose to mail Higginson just six weeks after it had appeared the Republican. Republican. There it stood, anonymous but hers, in one of the best papers of the day. Pride of publication had nudged the door a bit more ajar, and behind it lay her query to Higginson, another special person: Is my Verse alive? There it stood, anonymous but hers, in one of the best papers of the day. Pride of publication had nudged the door a bit more ajar, and behind it lay her query to Higginson, another special person: Is my Verse alive?

Of course she knew the answer. That was not the point.

FIVE

Thomas Wentworth Higginson: Liberty Is Aggressive

Come strong." In the drizzly spring of 1854, three years after the aborted Sims rescue, Higginson received the call from the abolitionist Samuel May Jr., Louisa May Alcott's cousin. Come to Boston right away.

Anthony Burns, a twenty-year-old fugitive slave from Virginia, had been arrested-kidnapped, roared the Boston Vigilance Committee-and imprisoned in the same Court House that had confined the luckless Sims.

Burns had already declined the legal counsel of such patrician notables as Richard Henry Dana, for even if the abolitionists of Boston dreamed otherwise, Burns, no fool, knew where all the commotion was headed. "It is of no use," he told Dana. "They will swear to me & get me back; and if they do, I shall fare worse if I resist." Also aware that a legal wrangle would just delay but not prevent Burns's reenslavement, the Vigilance Committee called for a public meeting at Faneuil Hall on Friday evening, May 26, and asked Higginson, if he could, to bring a posse of Worcester men.

"Give all the notice you can," May had said. What he actually intended-beyond rallying public support-is unclear.

Himself prepared for battle, Higginson stepped off the train in Boston that Friday to find his fellow committee members squabbling over how best to proceed, their debate droning on until one of them, learning the slave catchers were to pa.s.s by, suggested they march outdoors and "point the finger of scorn." The finger of scorn? Higginson's mouth fell open. "As if Southern slave-catchers were to be combated by such weapons," he wailed in frustration.

While the committee dithered into the late afternoon, Higginson broke away and bought a dozen hand axes. Martin Stowell, a friend from Worcester, had told him that Burns might be sprung from the Court House that same night if the abolitionist leaders could channel the anger sure to be unleashed at the rally. Someone could yell that a mob of black men was at the Court House trying to free Burns, Stowell continued, and the Faneuil Hall crowd would then surge into Court Square, where Higginson would be waiting, ready to pilot the freedom lovers toward the jail and Burns's liberation.

It was a grand plan, bold and dangerous and so enticing that Higginson never stopped to consider its practicality: that it might be impossible, for instance, to alert the leaders of the rally to the details of the plot in the din of a roaring crowd, nearly five hundred strong (mostly men), that crushed into Faneuil Hall that night. And so the silky-tongued orator Wendell Phillips, key member of the Vigilance Committee, never heard of the scheme, and it's not clear whether the other speakers, Samuel Gridley Howe and Theodore Parker, really understood it even if they had.

Higginson had no choice but to saunter back over to Court Square, where Stowell had stashed the axes, and affect nonchalance.

"I am a clergyman and a man of peace," Theodore Parker's voice meantime rang out in the packed and steamy hall. "I love peace. But there is a means, and there is an end; Liberty is the end, and sometimes peace is not the means towards it." Still, the crowd should reconvene the next morning, he continued, for a nonviolent protest against the kidnapping. Wendell Phillips was ready to a.s.sent when someone screamed out that a group of black men were at the Court House rescuing Burns that very moment. Pandemonium. From Court Square, Higginson spied in horror a group of men hurrying up State Street: the "froth and sc.u.m of the meeting, the fringe of idlers on its edge," he later described them, and not the men or at least not the hundreds he had expected.

Posted near the Court House, Stowell began to hammer its heavy oak door with one of the axes. Several men threw bricks. Several other men-Higginson at the front-hoisted a fourteen-foot wooden beam. Someone inside began ringing the Court House bell. The men with the battering ram shoved forward; one of the door's hinges tore; the door tipped to the side. Higginson, at the head of the beam, elbowed his way into the room, but Lewis Hayden pressed ahead of him. Unarmed, Higginson fought bare-handed. The police were swinging swords and billy clubs, and Higginson received a cut, nothing severe, on his chin. Hayden fired his revolver. Stowell fired his. Perhaps the guards did too. For many years afterward Higginson supposed, or wanted to believe, the sheriff's deputies would carelessly or drunkenly murder their own.

One man was killed. Special officer James Batchelder, a twenty-four-year-old teamster stationed behind the teetering door, fell backward, moaning "I am stabbed."

Higginson didn't hear Batchelder's cry. Beaten back by the guards, he ran down the pa.s.sageway and onto the Court House steps, where he saw that the sullen mob was dispersing. "You cowards, will you desert us now?" he shouted. For a moment the crowd didn't move. But it was over. "That meeting at Faneuil Hall was tremendous, I never saw such enthusiasm," Higginson later told a friend, "& (though warned that it would be so) I could not possibly believe that it wd exhale so idly as it did in Court Square."

Just then Bronson Alcott strode up the Court House steps, cane in hand, and paused to ask Higginson why he and his men were not inside. "Because these people will not stand by us," Higginson growled. Alcott continued up the steps, a model of transcendental courage. Another pistol shot rang out. Alcott walked back down the stairs.

With the approval of President Franklin Pierce, Nathaniel Hawthorne's benefactor, the United States marshall in Boston called out federal troops. "The law must be executed," he declared.

Later that night Batchelder died. No one was ever quite sure what had happened, whether Hayden or Stowell had fired the deadly shot, if in fact it was a shot that had killed Batchelder and not a wound from a saber. Unaware of this, Higginson spent the night at a friend's and, lest he be recognized by the police the next day, tied a kerchief around his face when he ventured out. He again met with the Vigilance Committee, but since legal proceedings were now inevitable, there was nothing left for him to do but go back to Worcester on Monday, consoling himself that the rescue's failure would provoke outrage among waffling antislavery people. And it did. "We went to bed one night old fashioned, conservative, Compromise Union Whig," said the textile manufacturer Amos Adams Lawrence, "& waked up stark mad Abolitionists."

The struggle against slavery was now an armed insurrection. "Ma.s.sachusetts antislavery differs much from New York or Pennsylvania antislavery," one citizen would note in dismay; "it is fanaticism & radicalism." But Higginson was pleased. "That attack was a great thing for freedom, & will echo all over the country," he told his mother.

As for Batchelder, Higginson informed Samuel May that the Committee should offer to a.s.sist his family, "supposing it to be so arranged as to show no contrition on our part, for a thing in which he had no responsibility, but simply to show that we have no war with women and children." Willingly, in other words, Higginson adopted the rationalization of a radical: that the death and suffering of combatants or bystanders are the inevitable if regrettable byproduct of the greater struggle. It was a position that in later years he would disavow. For now, though, the customarily compa.s.sionate Higginson preferred to see Boston in flames rather than tolerate one person's reenslavement, but he also chafed at the idea, then bruited about, of Burns's being repurchased by New Englanders and set free, which would undermine his effectiveness as a symbol. As it happened, the United States district attorney, a Democratic party operative, delayed the proposed sale and then outlawed it, citing Batchelder's death as his reason.

Not blind to the inherent cruelty of his position, Higginson brooked no qualms about the morality of force. "A revolution is begun!" he shouted in Worcester. "If you take part in politics henceforward, let it be only to bring nearer the crisis which will either save or sunder this nation-or perhaps save in sundering."

A warrant was issued for Higginson's arrest, indicting him for treason or what he scorned as "the crime of a gentleman." An uncle, the businessman George J. Higginson, sent money. "It is the only way you know that we traders dare to show any sympathy," he told Wentworth. Urged to leave the country, Wentworth refused. "My penalty cannot be very severe; & I shall consider it the highest honor ever attained by a Higginson," he explained to his mother. Backing him fully, Mary said that the jail should open an annex for antislavery wives, and jesting only by half, Lucy Stone noted that "it would be best for the 'cause' if they should hang you." Higginson granted "that months & years in jail would be well spent as a protest against slavery. The men now arrested are obscure men," he continued; "their sufferings will be of comparatively little service; but I have a name, a profession, & the personal position which make my bonds a lesson & a stimulus to the whole country. What better things could I do for liberty?"

Anthony Burns: broadside depicting the former slave's escape, capture, imprisonment, and, finally, deportation from Boston, 1855.

No doubt wishing to avoid that very showdown, the government reduced the charge to disturbing the peace, and the indictment was quashed.

Yet nothing could rub out the memory of Bad Friday, June 2,1854. Thousands of faceless troops on horseback patrolled the gray streets, shops closed their doors, women draped dark shawls from upper-story windows, and a small coffin, the word Liberty Liberty painted on it, hung on State Street. As many as fifty thousand citizens lined the streets to watch Burns, six feet tall, well dressed, and escorted by a martial entourage-the soldiers' bayonets fixed, their swords drawn-make his way down to the docks, where the United States cutter painted on it, hung on State Street. As many as fifty thousand citizens lined the streets to watch Burns, six feet tall, well dressed, and escorted by a martial entourage-the soldiers' bayonets fixed, their swords drawn-make his way down to the docks, where the United States cutter Morris Morris placidly waited to ferry him to Virginia. placidly waited to ferry him to Virginia.

Burns aboard, the glum crowd grew quieter, its stiff Yankee back broken.

The following Sunday in church, Higginson denounced the whole sorry affair with the resolution of one ready to amputate a gangrenous limb. Invoking the names of the revolutionary heroes of Europe, Giuseppe Mazzini and Lajos Kossuth, in a sermon he called "Ma.s.sachusetts in Mourning," he exhorted his congregation not to "conceal Fugitives and help them on, but show them and defend them. Let the Underground Railroad stop here! Say to the South that Worcester, though part of a Republic, shall be as free as if ruled by a Queen! Hear, O Richmond! and give ear, O Carolina! henceforth Worcester is Canada to the Slave!"

No longer did he believe the Fugitive Slave Act-or any of the laws supporting slavery-would be repealed. "I am glad of the discovery (no hasty thing, but gradually dawning upon me for ten years) that I live under a despotism," he said. "I am glad to be deceived no longer."

A revolution had begun.

"LIBERTY IS AGGRESSIVE," Emerson wrote in his journals. "It is only they who save others, that can themselves be saved," he added, referring to Higginson, transcendentalist in arms. Emerson wrote in his journals. "It is only they who save others, that can themselves be saved," he added, referring to Higginson, transcendentalist in arms.

"I knew his ardor & courage," Richard Henry Dana remarked, "but I hardly expected a married man, a clergyman, and a man of education to lead the mob."

Th.o.r.eau also praised him as "the only Harvard Phi Beta Kappa, Unitarian minister, and master of seven languages who has led a storming party against a federal bastion with a battering ram in his hands."

Whether or not the failure to save Burns was a national watershed, it was one for Higginson. For as a Higginson scholar commented, his action was the deliberate and strategic culmination of his years of preaching, lecturing, and working for a cause-and of his progressive disillusionment with antislavery politics. Now, as stalwart hero or fanatic or both, Higginson was a staple of New England newspapers, his sermons reprinted or quoted, especially his enraged requiem of the Burns affair. Had Emily d.i.c.kinson read those accounts-or the sermon? Doubtless both had been discussed at the d.i.c.kinson dining table. Did she know of him, too, from Amherst gossip? After all, it had been a local Baptist clergyman, the Reverend G. S. Stockwell, who, learning the whereabouts of Anthony Burns, had contacted Burns's owner, asking to purchase him with the intention of then letting him go.

And now there was Kansas, the next battleground, where Higginson would be known as the Reverend General and preach at what he called the makeshift Church Militant, a hodgepodge of packing crates covered in buffalo robes. "Ever since the rendition of Anthony Burns, in Boston, I have been looking for men," he said. "I have found them in Kanzas."

After the pa.s.sage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, proslavery men and what were termed border ruffians-violent proslavery mobs mainly from the slave state of Missouri-had armed themselves to fight the antislavery homesteaders sent to the territory by New England emigrant aid societies, a Bible in one hand, a rifle in the other, according to Stephen Douglas, the author of the bill. Douglas wasn't entirely wrong. In Worcester, for instance, Higginson's friend Eli Thayer (a man of more brag than action, Higginson later noted) might have established the New England Emigrant Aid Company to supply Kansas-bound homesteaders with food and clothes, advertising the territory as a good place to live, but Theodore Parker shipped them rifles and six-shooters in boxes labeled "Bibles."

With hundreds of nonregistered voters pouring into Kansas, the proslavery majority swiftly elected a proslavery legislature and pa.s.sed the so-called bogus laws forbidding antislavery talk of any kind. (David Rice Atchison, proslavery senator from Missouri, encouraged Missourians in Kansas "to kill every G.o.d-d.a.m.ned abolitionist in the district.") Free staters countered by setting up their own legislature in Topeka. Violence between the two groups escalated, and in the spring of 1856, a gang of fuming proslavery men mobbed the Free-Soil town of Lawrence, burned the hotel, sacked the governor's house, and demolished two antislavery newspaper offices. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis dispatched federal troops to the territory, and the fifty-six-year-old abolitionist crusader John Brown rounded up four of his sons-he had sired twenty children-along with his son-in-law and two other men and rode out to Pottawatomie County, where they dragged five proslavery settlers from their cabins and hacked them to death with cavalry broadswords.

Appointed unofficial agent of the Ma.s.sachusetts Kansas Aid Committee in the spring of 1856, Higginson had traveled west briefly to a.s.sist a band of what he called bona fide homesteaders (not like those ruffians from Missouri) and equip them with pistols, cartridges, and the cash raised in Boston. "These are times," said Henry Ward Beecher, "when self-defense is a religious duty." The National Kansas Committee then authorized Higginson to buy what he figured the homesteaders needed most: rifles, muskets, pistols (ninety-two of them), knives, and plenty of ammunition-fifty-nine hundred caps for the revolvers alone.

In September he returned to the Plains, hoping to help emigrants cross from Nebraska into Kansas. He found them cold, hungry, beleaguered; for breakfast they ate squash and green corn; for lunch and dinner they ate squash and green corn. In Nebraska City, Higginson purchased them cowhide boots, plaid flannel shirts, and warm blankets before setting off for Topeka, which he reached on September 24, riding with twenty-eight wagons and about 150 people. "Never before in my life," Higginson later remembered with decided pleasure, "had I been outside the world of human law." But he was often discouraged. Settlers herded their wagons in the opposite direction, back toward Iowa-some to avoid arrest, some to avoid starving, some with stolen horses-and in any event away from what many of them, in ignorance, had hoped would be the Promised Land.

Yet to Higginson the mission was clear, as he wrote-ghoulishly-of his Kansas trip in a series of letters to the New York Tribune. New York Tribune. "I almost hoped to hear that some...lives had been sacrificed," he said, "for it seems as if nothing but that would arouse the Eastern states to act. This seems a terrible thing to say, but these are terrible times." "I almost hoped to hear that some...lives had been sacrificed," he said, "for it seems as if nothing but that would arouse the Eastern states to act. This seems a terrible thing to say, but these are terrible times."

But late in October, back at home, Higginson slumped into a depression. Although the situation in Kansas was improving, to his mind the clear-headed John Geary, appointed by Pierce as governor of the territory, managed to bring peace only by co-opting the settlers and ignoring the larger struggle against slavery. In addition, that fall, James Buchanan, sympathetic to slaveholders, was elected president of the United States. Then came the Dred Scott decision: the Supreme Court ruled in a stunning 72 vote that blacks had no rights of citizenship, that slaves were property, and that all congressional acts excluding slavery from the territories were unconst.i.tutional. Racism was pervasive, north and south. In exasperation, Higginson cried, "Colored men are thrust illegally out of cars in New York, and to take their part is Fanaticism."

Though he continued to vote in national and local elections, he preferred to see the North secede from the South than to submit to the likes of a President Buchanan, and early in 1857 he spearheaded the Worcester Disunion Convention. "We the Undersigned invite the citizens of Ma.s.sachusetts to meet in Convention at Worcester on Thursday January 15 to consider the practicality, probability and expediency of a separation between the free and slave states," the convention circular proclaimed. "It is written in the laws of nature the two antagonistic nations cannot remain together," Higginson exclaimed to his fretting mother. "Every year is dividing us more & more, & the sooner we see it, the better we can prepare for a perfect & dignified policy."

But in 1857, grain prices were falling, inventories of merchandise languished in warehouses, stocks were plummeting, railroads defaulting, and the land boom collapsing. This was the first and last Disunion Convention.

And that fact made Higginson all the more susceptible to John Brown-"Weird John Brown," as Melville would call him: a folk hero, eloquent and shrewd and already lionized far in excess of his accomplishments. Like many others, Higginson chose to ignore Brown's role in the Pottawatomie ma.s.sacre, although he later admitted that he had heard of no one who disapproved it. It had the salubrious effect, Higginson coldly added, of restraining the b.l.o.o.d.y Missourians. For, as he remarked, John Brown "swallows a Missourian whole, and says grace after the meal."

HE DIDN'T REMEMBER SEEING BROWN in Kansas but was interested when Franklin Sanborn, a young schoolmaster in Concord whose students would include two of Henry James's brothers, the Alcott sisters, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's son, suggested they meet. Brown is the "best Disunion champion you can find," Sanborn declared, "and with his hundred men, when he is put where he can use them...will do more to split the Union than a list of 5000 names for your convention-good as that is," Sanborn hastily added. in Kansas but was interested when Franklin Sanborn, a young schoolmaster in Concord whose students would include two of Henry James's brothers, the Alcott sisters, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's son, suggested they meet. Brown is the "best Disunion champion you can find," Sanborn declared, "and with his hundred men, when he is put where he can use them...will do more to split the Union than a list of 5000 names for your convention-good as that is," Sanborn hastily added.

Higginson consented to see Old Brown when the freedom fighter came to Ma.s.sachusetts to solicit funds from the parlor radicals of Boston. Possessed like Melville's Ahab with one besetting idea, the elimination of slavery, grim Brown glowed with "that religious elevation," Higginson recalled, "which is itself a kind of refinement,-the quality one may see expressed in many a venerable Quaker face at yearly meeting." With Kansas no longer the battle's frontier-its newly appointed governor, Robert Walker, had allowed elections that fall, resulting in a victory for free staters-Brown would take his war elsewhere, with a plan: attack the federal a.r.s.enal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, which in turn would lead to a rebellion of huge proportions, fugitive slaves and free blacks rushing to his side.

Frederick Dougla.s.s considered the scheme stupidly suicidal, but Higginson joined the clandestine group soon widely known as the Secret Six. It included Sanborn himself; a self-made financier, George Luther Stearns, who had struck a fortune in lead pipes; the antislavery philanthropist Gerrit Smith of upstate New York, on whose land the Brown family lived; the intransigent Theodore Parker, unfortunately ailing from congenital tuberculosis; and the Byronic Samuel Gridley Howe, founder of the Perkins Inst.i.tute for the Blind, who in his younger days had fought the Turks in Greece. These men were to finance Brown's plan and ignite, so they initially hoped, an insurrection that would eradicate slavery once and for all.

Higginson resigned from the Free Church. Action mattered. Only action mattered.

Of the Secret Six, Higginson alone would remain loyal to Brown's plan, for good or ill, and was the one who never let fear for his own safety interfere with what he believed to be right. And though he had little cash to give Brown-he himself barely managed to make ends meet-he protested loudly any delay of the plan, correctly sensing ambivalence in two of the six. "I long to see you with adequate funds in your hands, set free from timid advisers, & able to act in your own way," he told Brown. "Did I follow only my own inclinations, without thinking of other ties, I should join you in person if I could not in purse." The tie to Mary-and to his mother-was too strong, particularly since Mary did not approve.

Still, he placed his faith in deeds, however violent or brazen. "The world has always more respect for those who are unwisely zealous," he noted, "than for those who are fastidiously inactive." As it began in blood, he said of slavery, "so to end." He was right, although premature.

For Brown the beginning of the end came on October 16, 1859, in Harpers Ferry when he and twenty-one others, including several of his sons, stormed the federal a.r.s.enal, seized a local rifle works, and then took about sixty local citizens as hostages. But rather than strike quickly and escape to the nearby hills, Brown and his men positioned themselves near the a.r.s.enal for thirty-six hours, a tremendous strategic blunder. A local militia quickly cut off any escape route, forcing Brown and his gang to retreat into a small firehouse in the armory yard. Brown sent men to negotiate; one was arrested, the others shot. Another of Brown's raiders, having run out of the armory, was killed, his dead body used for target practice by snipers circling the area. Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee and a squadron of twelve marines offered Brown a chance to surrender unconditionally; the next day they bashed the door down. Seventeen people died, including two of Brown's sons, two slaves, a slave owner, a marine, and three residents of Harpers Ferry. Brown, who'd been stabbed with a decorative dress sword, was taken prisoner.

Summarily tried, found guilty, and sentenced to hang, Brown was unrepentant-and he refused to reveal the names of the Six. But the United States Senate issued warrants for the arrest of several of them. Frank Sanborn hid for a night in Concord before taking off for Canada. Gerrit Smith committed himself to an insane asylum in Utica, New York, after he methodically destroyed all incriminating doc.u.ments. Higginson stood his ground. Along with Howe, the attorney Samuel E. Sewall, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, he signed a circular soliciting funds for Brown's defense and then traveled to the Adirondacks to escort Brown's wife to Boston. He planned to accompany her all the way to Virginia, where he hoped she would urge her jailed husband to escape. This was part of Higginson's plot to rescue Brown and his raiders, but Brown himself was unwilling, having judged himself more effective as martyr than fugitive.

The antiabolition press clamored for more than just Brown's head. Papers had been found in Brown's possession that pointed in the direction of the Secret Six, and with their attorney not sanguine about what they might face in court, Stearns and Howe also fled to Canada, and Sanborn, who had returned, went back. "Sanborn," Higginson asked in disgust, "is there no such thing as honor honor among confederates?" Then Howe published a letter distancing himself from Brown. Higginson was appalled. "Gerrit Smith's insanity-& your letter-," he told Howe, "are to me the all too sad results of the whole affair." among confederates?" Then Howe published a letter distancing himself from Brown. Higginson was appalled. "Gerrit Smith's insanity-& your letter-," he told Howe, "are to me the all too sad results of the whole affair."

On December 2, 1859, the day of Brown's execution, bells tolled in Boston. "I believe John Brown to be the representative man of this century, as Washington was of the last," said George Stearns, who would soon testify before Congress. Emerson went further. Brown's death, he supposedly said, "will make the gallows as glorious as the cross." Not everyone agreed. "n.o.body was ever more justly hanged," said Emerson's neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne, "...if it were only in requital of his preposterous miscalculation of possibilities."

As for Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a Vigilance Committee in Worcester rallied round him, should he be seized by the government. But civil disobedience implied an acceptance of consequences, and he was ready for them. Even eager. "Under a government which imprisons any unjustly," Th.o.r.eau had written, "the true place for a just man is also in a prison."

Higginson did not run. He did not burn incriminating evidence. Instead he organized an attempt (unsuccessful) to spring Aaron Stevens and Albert Hazlett, two members of Brown's party, from the Charles Town, Virginia, jail. Aided by the former Kansas guerrilla James Montgomery, Higginson was to lead the attack, but he called it off when Montgomery learned that soldiers were swarming over Charles Town. Stevens and Hazlett were hung. Higginson stood fast. "John Brown is now beyond our reach," he declared, "but the oppressed for whom he died still live."

When the Senate investigated Harpers Ferry, summoning Howe and the others, Higginson was ready, proud to tell all he knew. But the government likely second-guessed his motives once again and decided that of all people, Higginson, capable of making his testimony a cause celebre, was worth avoiding. He was never called.

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1857. "He prided himself not a little on his good looks," said Angelina Grimke Weld.