Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823–1911) was a Unitarian minister, writer, and reformer from Cambridge, Massachusetts, active in the abolitionist and women's suffrage movements for most of his life. During the Civil War he commanded the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first Union regiment of formerly enslaved soldiers, an experience he recounted in Army Life in a Black Regiment (1870); he also wrote the novel Malbone: An Oldport Romance (1869). He corresponded for years with the poet Emily Dickinson, whom he never met until shortly before her death, and after it he co-edited the first published collections of her poems. He died in Cambridge at eighty-seven.