872 THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. 



call of a body of active reformers, all abolitionists, baving no strong 

 element of cohesion ; a mere aggregation of extremely independ- 

 ent individuals ; leaders in public movements, wbose popular in- 

 fluence was restrained by the fact that they were combating local 

 prejudices and attacking opinions sustained by conservatism and social 

 power. Higginson says of Wendell Phillips that to abolitionism he 

 "sacrificed his social position, his early friendships, his professional 

 career," and of himself he says that he found himself in fashion in 

 Worcester, "at least with the unfashionable." The portals of society 

 could not have remained closed in that place to a Higginson married 

 to a Channing if he had cared to cause them to open, but the illness of 

 his wife and the gratification that he derived from social intercourse 

 with those who sympathized with his views prevented him from pene- 

 trating abodes where an abolitionist, a woman's rights man, and a 

 Parkerite would not have been altogether persona grata. He says in 

 one place, " I cannot dispense with the society which we call unculti- 

 vated." If he found any such in Worcester he did not rely upon it 

 altogether, for he discovered cultivated, genial friends, unknown to so- 

 ciety, with whom he had delightful intercourse. The home of a tailor, 

 for instance — of whom Higginson wrote that he had the freshest and 

 most original mind in Worcester — who stood at his cutting board all 

 day, and who at night read Browning with his charming wife, and this 

 too at a time when to be able to read Browning meant even more than 

 it does to-day, furnished one place of resort. In such families as this, 

 where the free interchange of opinions on all topics was permissible, he 

 found the sort of social intercourse that he wanted. His time was taken 

 up with outdoor exercise, writing for the papers, and at times in giving 

 a helping hand to some escaped slave. Naturally, fugitives from servi- 

 tude claimed assistance from such a body as his church, and it follows 

 of course that actual aid was freely given to help them on their way to 

 freedom. 



He quotes in his " Cheerful Yesterdays " from a contemporary 

 journal, apparently his own, in illustration of that curious period, a 

 paragraph describing the impression of the writer on thus participating 

 in revolutionary work, in which the journalist states that it is strange 

 " to see law and order, police and military, on the wrong side and find 

 good citizenship a sin, and bad citizenship a duty. . . ." 



On the 25th of May, 1854, there came to him a summons to 

 Boston to attend a public meeting to be held in Faneuil Hall in con- 

 sequence of the arrest of Anthony Burns, another fugitive. Higginson 

 found the Vigilance Committee inadequate for the situation through 

 the non-resistance element and through division of opinion. Those 



