An early feminist and devout champion of equality, Higginson was a man who lived his convictions. At thirty, he broke down a courthouse door in an effort to free a fugitive slave. At forty, he served in the Civil War as colonel in the first federally authorized black battalion, after turning his home into a well-trodden stop on the Underground Railroad. At fifty, he was editor of the official journal of the American Woman Suffrage Association, which he had cofounded—a position he would hold for fourteen years. In his sixties, he became Margaret Fuller’s biographer, after having raised her
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