Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) was serving in the Union Army when he wrote this letter from Camp Saxton at Beaufort, South Carolina, to his brother Stephen Higginson at Deerfield, Massachusetts. A Unitarian minister, Thomas Higginson had been an outspoken antislavery activist in the years leading up to the war. He staunchly supported the radical abolitionist John Brown, including raising money to fund Brown’s failed attempt to ignite a revolt of enslaved people by seizing weapons at the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in 1859. Thomas served in the Union Army throughout the Civil War (1861-1865), first as a Captain in the 51st Massachusetts Regiment and then as Colonel of the First South Carolina Volunteers, the first Union army regiment recruited from formerly enslaved African American men from the South. The army required that White officers command all African American regiments, including the 1st. On New Year’s Day, 1863, the Regiment received their national and regimental colors (flags) at a ceremony that included a reading of the Emancipation Proclamation.
In this letter, dated March 1, 1863, Colonel Higginson shared that his commander, General Rufus Saxton (also of Deerfield) responded to questions about the men of the regiment with “the phrase ‘intensely human’ which is the whole story.” Higginson proudly wrote that the men under his command “fight for their liberty very much like other oppressed races…if you could see them charge bayonets, on drill; it is hard to stop them.” The First South Carolina Volunteers marched for Florida five days later. Like other soldiers, Higginson was eager for news from home and thanked his brother for mailing him a copy of the Evening Gazette, a Boston newspaper.
