Thomas Wentworth Higginson (December 22, 1823 – May 9, 1911) was an American minister, author, abolitionist, and soldier. He was active in the American Abolitionism movement during the 1840s and 1850s, identifying himself with disunion and militant abolitionism. During the Civil War, he served as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized African-American regiment, from 1862-1864.

Following the war, Higginson devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for the rights of freed slaves, women and other disenfranchised peoples. Higginson was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts on December 22, 1823. He was a descendant of Francis Higginson, a Puritan minister and emigrant to the colony of Massachusetts Bay.

He was a grandson of Stephen Higginson, a member of the Continental Congress, and a distant cousin of Henry Lee Higginson, founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Higginson attended Harvard College at age thirteen and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at sixteen. He graduated in 1841, and was a schoolmaster for two years and, in 1842, became engaged to Mary Elizabeth Channing.

He then studied theology at the Harvard Divinity School. At the end of his first year of divinity training, he withdrew from the school to turn his attention to the abolitionist cause. He spent the subsequent year studying and, following the lead of Transcendentalist minister Theodore Parker, fighting against the expected war with Mexico.

Believing that war was only an excuse to expand slavery and the slave power, Higginson wrote anti-war poems and went door-to-door to get signatures for anti-war petitions. With the split of the anti-slavery movement in the 1840s, Higginson prescribed to the Disunion Abolitionists, who believed that as long as slave states remained a part of the union, Constitutional support for slavery could never be amended. A year after leaving school, a growing passion for abolitionism led Higginson to recommence his divinity studies and graduated in 1847.

He married Channing the same year. Higginson became pastor at the First Religious Society of Newburyport, Massachusetts, a church known for its liberal Christianity. He supported the Essex County Antislavery Society and criticized the poor treatment of workers at Newburyport cotton factories.

Additionally, the young minister invited Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson and fugitive slave William Wells Brown to speak at the church; in sermons he condemned northern apathy towards slavery. Higginson proved too radical for the congregation and was forced to resign in 1848.

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