American reformer and editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1823-1911) led the first black regiment to serve in the Civil War. He also supported women's suffrage and encouraged many female writers.

Thomas W. Higginson was born on Dec. 23, 1823, in Cambridge, Mass. He graduated from Harvard in 1841. In 1847 he graduated from the Harvard Divinity School and married a distant cousin, Mary Channing. The couple moved to Newburyport, M.A., where Higginson served the Unitarian congregation, preaching social reform in general and abolition in particular. He was asked to resign after 2 years.

Free of the pulpit, Higginson worked for women's rights, the Free Soil party, and abolitionist causes, which brought him into contact with such men as Henry David Thoreau and Orestes Brownson. In the 1850s, while pastor of the Free Church of Worcester, Mass., Higginson lectured and wrote poetry and essays for the Atlantic Monthly. As an abolitionist, he was one...