“You told me in one letter”: ED to TWH, [August 1862], Letters, 2:415.
“A Letter always feels to me like immortality”: ED to TWH, [June 1869], Letters, 2:460.
“Of our greatest acts we are ignorant—”: ED to TWH, [June 1869], Letters, 2:460.
“There’s a certain Slant of light”: Fr 320.
“Sweet hours have perished here”: Fr 1785.
“an article upon wildflowers”: Springfield Republican, November 1862.
“If, in the simple process of writing”: TWH, “Procession of the Flowers,” p. 657.
“Nature is a Haunted House—”: ED to TWH, n.d., Letters, 2:554.
“I trust the ‘Procession of Flowers’ was not a premonition”: ED to TWH, February 1863, Letters, 2:424.
CHAPTER SEVEN: INTENSELY HUMAN
“must put the slavery question in a wholly new aspect” “I have never written any political article there before”: TWH to LSH, May 30, 1861, Houghton.
“Slavery is the root of the rebellion”: TWH, “The Ordeal by Battle,” p. 94.
“the far greater horrors of its suppression”: TWH, “Nat Turner’s Insurrection,” p. 179.
“she was a woman, she was a slave”: TWH, “Nat Turner’s Insurrection,” p. 181.
“My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—”: Fr 764; see Howe, My Emily Dickinson, p. 129.
“but for this reverse we never should have the law of Congress”: L&J, p. 156.
“No prominent anti-slavery man”: TWH to LSH, November 1, 1861, Houghton.
“Each Life converges to some Centre—”: Fr 724.
“What I could write I have written”: CY, pp. 248–249. TWH, Field Book, August 31, 1862, Houghton.
“as if one had learned to swim in air”: CY, pp. 248–249.
“In each set…there are mingled”: TWH to LSH, October 13, 1862, Houghton.
a “man of somewhat fluid gender identifications”: Nelson and Price, “Debating Manliness,” p. 504.
“slender & graceful, dark with raven eyes & hair”: TWH to LSH, September 20, 1845, Houghton.
“All that my natural fastidiousness and cautious reserve”: TWH, p. 126.
“There was a young curate of Worcester”: See CY, p. 251.
“The government sent agents down here”: Charles Francis Adams Jr., April 6, 1862, quoted in Ford, A Cycle of Adams Letters, p. 128.
“overlook means in his zeal for ends”: November 27, 1862, Civil War Journal, p. 52. All quotations, unless noted, have been checked against Higginson’s Civil War journal at Houghton Library and published in TWH, The Complete Civil War Journal and Selected Letters of Thomas Wentworth Higginson. The journal often contains the same phrasing as Higginson’s letters to his wife and mother.
Though Saxton was to report to Hunter: For a fuller discussion of the history of the black soldier in the Union army, see Cornish, The Sable Arm, chapters 2 and 5; see also TWH, “The First Black Regiment,” p. 521.
“from the dull and tedious drudgery”: Cabell and Hanna, The St. Johns, p. 208.
“a mere plantation-guard or a day-school in uniform”: TWH, “Scattered Notes re Colored Troops,” Houghton.
“Intensely human”: TWH to LSH, May 6, 1863, Houghton.
“I had been an abolitionist too long”: Army Life, p. 3.
“like vexed ghosts of departed slave-lords”: December 10, 1862, Civil War Journal, p. 251.
“The first man who organizes & commands”: TWH, journal, November 23, 1862, Houghton.
a small book of Shakespeare’s sonnets: I am indebted to Kent Bicknell for showing me TWH’s copy of Shakespeare, with its notes by TWH.
No black soldier in Higginson’s regiment: See Grimké, November 27, 1862, The Journals, p. 405.
“It needs but a few days”: November 27, 1862, Civil War Journal, pp. 47–48.
Emerson, he recalled had squirmed: See TWH to Charles Eliot Norton, March 30, 1892, Houghton.
“He will be a marked man”: John Greenleaf Whittier to Mary Curzon, December 24, 1862, Houghton.
“How absurd is the impression about these Southern blacks”: December 1, 1862, Civil War Journal, p. 53.
“At first glance, in a black regiment”: Part, p. 131.
“His comprehension of the whole problem of slavery”: Army Life, p. 48.
“It is the fashion with philanthropists”: November 21, 1863, Civil War Journal, p. 175.
“to impress on them”: January 7, 1863, Civil War Journal, p. 79.
“And he evidently feels towards them all”: Grimké, “Life on the Sea Islands,” p. 669.
“it always seemed to me” “What was the use of insurrection”: Army Life, pp. 192–193.
And when he wrote publicly of them: See, for instance, TWH, “Leaves from an Officer’s Journal,” p. 521; the journal was printed in Army Life with some changes.
“This spontaneous outburst of love and loyalty”: Rogers, “Letters of Dr. Seth Rogers,” p. 340.
“My Country ’Tis of Thee”: See letter from Harriet Ware, January 1, 1863, in Pearson, Letters from Port Royal, p. 130; see also “Higginson’s Black Brigade,” Springfield Republican, January 1, 1863, p. 1.
Higginson stood silent: see Grimké, January 1, 1863, The Journals, p. 430.
“It made all other words cheap”: January 1, 1863, Civil War Journal, p. 77.
Not as good as at home: See Taylor, “Memoir of Susie King Taylor” in Reminiscences of My Life in Camp, p. 18, and Grimké, January 1, 1863, The Journals, p. 430.
“A man fell at my elbow”: Army Life, p. 56.
“Nobody knows anything about these men”: TWH, “The War in Florida,” New York Times, February 10, 1863, p. 2.
“Ah…. We called him Bob”: Army Life, p. 66.
“You may make a soldier out of a slave”: TWH, “Safety Matches,” p. 4.
“good illustrations”: Report of Col. T. W. Higginson, First South Carolina Infantry (Union), February 1, 1863, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, series 1 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1885): 14:197.
“our abstract surmises”: Report of Col. T. W. Higginson, in The War of the Rebellion, 14:198.
“who are bent on making him incapable”: “Col. Higginson’s Estimation of Black Soldiers,” Springfield Republican, February 6, 1863, p. 2.
“and in rather exalted language”: “The Blacks in Battle,” New York Times, February 10, 1863, p. 4.
With Jacksonville secure: See Rufus Saxton to Edwin M. Stanton, March 14, 1863, in Moore, The Rebellion Record, document 132.
“Higginson, the romantic, had raised money”: Cornish, The Sable Arm, p. 150.
“It was the first time in the war”: Army Life, p. 89.
“A more fatal order for the place”: See Moore, The Rebellion Record, document 148, p. 638.
“Jacksonville is in ruins”: New York Tribune, March 28, 1863.
“In a struggle for freedom”: Garth Wilkinson James, “Memoir,” p. 11.
“lean as / a compass-needle”: Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead,” in Life Studies and For the Union Dead, p. 71.
“Our negro troops are splendid”: Quoted in Generals’ Reports of Service, in The War of the Rebellion, 14:133.
“Any disaster or failure on our part”: TWH to LSH, May 18, 1863, Houghton.
Asked to make a speech: See Grimké, July 4, 1863, The Journals, p. 492.
“that this was a real war”: quoted in Letter from Robert Gould Shaw, June 9, 1863, in Soldiers’ Letters, from Camp, Battlefield and Prison, ed. Lydia Minturn Post (New York: Bunce & Huntington, 1865), p. 249.
“the colored troops as such are not responsible”: TWH to Charles Sumner, June 20, 1863, Houghton.
After Shaw formally protested Montgomery’s tactics: See the Hunter-Lincoln correspondence in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion, series 1, 14:469–470.
“Then you die at half past nine”: George Crockett S
trong to Benjamin Franklin Butler, June 29, 1863, in Benjamin F. Butler, Private and Official Correspondence of Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, during the Period of the Civil War (Norwood, Mass.: Plimpton Press, 1917), 3:94.
“Montgomery had two soldiers shot”: TWH to Richard Watson Gilder, April 16, 1897, NYPL.
“Do not think this rapid organization”: TWH to Charles Eliot Norton, June 28, 1863, Houghton.
“as fanatics sometimes did”: TWH to Richard Hinton, Higginson Papers, Kansas.
“without mercy”: TWH to Charles Eliot Norton, June 28, 1863, Houghton.
“The worst acts of tyranny”: TWH to Edna Dow Cheney, September 13, 1865, Smith.
Merriam wasn’t finished: See Halpine Report, June 2, 1863, Military Order of the Loyal Legion Collection, box 14, Houghton. See also Poole, “Memory and the Abolitionist Heritage,” pp. 210–213.
“he is not a man of the sentiments”: TWH to Colonel W. W. H. Davis, February 19, 1865, UVA.
Dr. Rogers and Higginson were left: Rogers, “Letters of Dr. Seth Rogers,” p. 346. See also, for instance, TWH, “The First Black Regiment,” p. 521.
“We presume too much on the supposed ignorance of those men”: TWH, letter to the New York Times, February 21, 1864, p. 5; see also Army Life, appendix D, p. 222.
“free colored regiments”: see TWH to Charles Sumner, June 20, 1864, Houghton.
The Fifty-fourth received much more publicity: See, for example, TWH, Massachusetts in the Army and Navy, p. 83, and TWH, “The Shaw Memorial,” p. 194.
“Higginson, the senior colonel of the brigade”: John Andrew to Edwin Stanton, June 29, 1863, in U.S. War Department, The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, series 3 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1899), 3:424; see also Keith Wilson, “In the Shadow of John Brown: The Military Service of Colonels Thomas Higginson, James Montgomery, and Robert Shaw in the Department of the South,” in Smith, Black Soldiers in Blue, p. 324.
“It would always be possible”: CY, p. 257.
“bucked, gagged and, if need be, shot”: Hallowell, The Negro as a Soldier in the War of the Rebellion, p. 9.
“I never saw any one”: Shaw, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune, p. 339.
“Folly Island gives a fair chance”: Civil War Journal, pp. 157–158.
“Well I guess we will let Strong”: Truman Seymour, quoted in Shaw, Blue-Eyed Child of Fortune, p. 51.
Seymour, a misanthropic man: see TWH to Sydney Howard Gay, May 23, 1864, Butler.
Shaw and his men talked: See testimony of Nathaniel Paige, in Berlin, Reidy, and Rowland, The Black Military Experience, p. 534.
“the dear blundering dusky darlings”: September 12, 1863, Civil War Journal, p. 167.
“vacillating and half proslavery”: Army Life, p. 95. See also Civil War Journal, p. 81.
“This makes me hate all arbitrary power”: January 29, 1864, Civil War Journal, p. 187.
“At a time when it required large bounties”: TWH to Charles Sumner, November 24, 1863, Houghton.
“They are growing more like white men”: February 11, 1864, Civil War Journal, p. 183.
“I feel that I hv. done my duty entirely”: TWH to MCH, January 28, 1864, Houghton.
CHAPTER EIGHT: AGONY IS FRUGAL
“I found you were gone, by accident” “I too, have an ‘Island’—”: ED to TWH, [February 1863?], Letters, 2:423.
“The fascination of summer”: TWH, “Procession of the Flowers,” p. 656.
“to doubt my High Behavior”: ED to TWH, [1863], Letters, 2:425.
“Color—Caste—Denomination—”: Fr 836.
“’Tis so appalling—it exhilirates—”: Fr 341.
“Agony is frugal—”: In Fr 1196.
“I shall have no winter this year—”: ED to Mary Bowles, [c. August 1861], Letters, 2:377.
“What Soft—Cherubic Creatures—”: Fr 675.
“With narrow, probing, eyes—”: In Fr 550.
“A Soldier called, a Morning ago”: ED to Samuel Bowles, [August 1862], Letters, 2:416.
“Perhaps Death, gave me Awe”: ED to TWH, [February 1863?], Letters, 2:423.
“It feels a shame to be Alive—”: Fr 524.
he denounced “as subversive”: See the Springfield Daily Republican, October 17, 1861.
“He is against slavery as the cause of the war”: See YH, 2:92.
“I like Truth—it is a free Democracy”: LL, p. 71.
Austin’s paying a substitute: The going rate was three hundred dollars, about six thousand dollars in today’s money.
That Dickinson seldom mentioned the war: In recent times there have been a number of scholars attending to Dickinson and the Civil War, beginning with Wolosky’s Dickinson; see also Berkove, “‘A Slash of Blue!’” Lee, “Writing through the War” Marcellin, “‘Singing off the Charnel Steps’” and Wardrop, “The Poetics of Political Involvement and Non-Involvement.” I am indebted to this work.
“Though not reared to prayer—”: ED to TWH, [February 1863?], Letters, 2:423.
After the poem “Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple”: See Dandurand’s pioneering “New Dickinson Civil War Publications” “Blazing in Gold and quenching in Purple”: Fr 321; “Flowers—well, if anybody”: Fr 95A.
“These are the days when Birds come back—”: Fr 122B. See also TWH, “The Life of Birds,” p. 376:
In autumn, they come timidly from the North, and, pausing on their anxious retreat, lurk within the fading copses and twitter snatches of song as fading. Others fly as openly as ever, but gather in flocks, as the Robins, most piteous of all birds at this season,—thin, faded, ragged, their bold note sunk to a feeble quaver, and their manner a mere caricature of that inexpressible military smartness with which they held up their heads in May.
Yet I cannot really find anything sad even in November. When I think of the thrilling beauty of the season past, the birds that came and went, the insects that took up the choral song as the birds grew silent, the procession of the flowers, the glory of autumn,—and when I think, that, this also ended, a new gallery of wonder is opening, almost more beautiful, in the magnificence of frost and snow, there comes an impression of affluence and liberality in the universe, which seasons of changeless and uneventful verdure would never give. The catkins already formed on the alder, quite prepared to droop into April’s beauty,—the white edges of the May-flower’s petals, already visible through the bud, show in advance that winter is but a slight and temporary retardation of the life of Nature, and that the barrier which separates November from March is not really more solid than that which parts the sunset from the sunrise.
“if she did not, the longest day would pass me”: ED to TWH, June 7, 1862, Letters, 2:408.
“Fame is a fickle food”: Fr 1702; “Fame is a bee”: Fr 1788; “Fame’s Boys and Girls, who never die”: Fr 892.
“Some—Work for Immortality—”: Fr 536.
“When I was small, a Woman died—”: Fr 518.
“Bereavement in their death to feel”: Fr 756.
“The Battle fought between the Soul”: Fr 629.
“It sets the Fright at liberty—”: In Fr 341.
“No Rack can torture me—”: Fr 649.
“Can the Lark resume the Shell—”: In Fr 754.
“you may make a soldier out of a slave”: TWH, “Safety Matches,” p. 4. There is, of course, no telling which came first, the poem or the essay, although it’s likely that the poem preceded Higginson’s essay; perhaps it is one she sent him that has escaped our notice and he borrowed from. Or Higginson may have used the phrase earlier. (He used it later, in “Some War Scenes Revisited,” p. 9.) And, finally, if the phrase was in the public domain, as it may also have been, that both authors linked the bird’s resuming its egg to issues of freedom and bondage is mighty suggestive.
“A Slash of Blue! A sweep of Gray!”: Fr 233.
“Publication—is the Auction”: Fr 788.
“I
do not let go it”: ED to TWH, [August 1862], Letters, 2:415.
“He fought like those Who’ve nought to lose—”: Fr 480.
“My Portion is Defeat—today—”: Fr 704.
“Could you, with honor, avoid Death”: ED to TWH, February 1863, Letters, 2:424.
“Best Gains—must have the Losses’ test—”: Fr 499.
“The Soul unto itself”: Fr 579A.
In June 1863: The collection Out-Door Papers includes such nature pieces as “April Days,” “My Out-Door Study,” “Water-Lilies,” “The Life of Birds,” “Procession of the Flowers,” and “Snow,” as well as essays on physical culture, such as “Saints, and Their Bodies,” “A Letter to a Dyspeptic,” and “The Health of Our Girls.”
The Springfield Republican went so far: Springfield Republican, June 6, 1863; June 20, 1863; quoted in YH, 2:79.
“It is still as distinct as Paradise—”: ED to TWH, [spring 1876], Letters, 2:552.
“Precisely at half past three”: TWH, “Water-Lilies,” p. 466.
“The Birds begun at Four o’clock—”: Fr 504B.
“At Half past Three”: Fr 1099.
“that which is remembered”: TWH, “Water-Lilies,” p. 473.
“Absence is the very air of passion”: TWH, “Water-Lilies,” p. 473.
“No man can measure what a single hour with Nature” “The influence is self-renewing”: TWH, “Procession of the Flowers,” pp. 656, 657.
“I was thinking, today—”: ED to TWH, [February 1863], Letters, 2:424.
“Perception of an Object costs”: Fr 1103.
“The Myrrhs, and Mochas, of the Mind”: In Fr 1608.
“Heaven over it—”: In Fr 508.
“The Zeros taught Us—Phosphorus”: Fr 284.
“So instead of getting to Heaven, at last—”: In Fr 236.
“The snow-light offends them”: ED to Louise Norcross, [1865], Letters, 2:439.
“What I see not, I better see—”: Fr 869.
“yet I work in my Prison”: ED to TWH, June 1864, Letters, 2:431.
“I wish to see you more than before I failed—”: ED to TWH, [June 1864], Letters, 2:431; “I heard a Fly buzz”: Fr 591.
word of it would “excel” her own: ED to TWH, June 1864, Letters, 2:431.
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