Songs of Innocence and Experience

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s 1898 autobiography, Cheerful Yesterdays, and his 1899 collection of biographical essays, Contemporaries. Despite the advent of new regimes of racial discrimination and segregation throughout the ex-Confederacy, the veteran fugitive-slave rescuer and John Brown backer prioritized art and aesthetics. On the one hand, the autobiographer often treated his personal antislavery history in a storybook fashion. Consequently, abolitionism constituted not a preeminently moral and religious crusade, but a colorful backdrop for romantic tales of derring-do. On the other, the biographical essayist handled the lives and deeds of abolitionist agitators in the same manner as those of Transcendentalist literati. Regardless of their different fields of activity, Higginson scrutinized both from the perspective of a literary critic. As a belletrist and public intellectual, he neither attempted to rekindle the spirit of radical abolitionism nor repurpose its values for another phase of militant activism. Songs of antebellum innocence, then, did not conceal the retrogression that postbellum experience had produced. This chapter therefore assays how mature reflection undermined youthful idealism, so much so, that a former Union Army officer of freed-slave soldiers evolved into a devout sectional reconciliationist.