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RESUMEN

Henry Lee Higginson (Nov. 18, 1834- Nov. 14, 1919), U.S. Army officer, investment banker, and philanthropist, was born in New York City, the second of George Higginson and Mary Cabot Lee’s five children. Many accounts describe Henry Lee Higginson as a “Boston Brahmin,” highlighting his descendance from early 17th century settlers in Massachusetts and his prominence in the city’s intellectual and business affairs. But his early years were relatively modest. The Panic of 1837 forced his father to close his dry goods business in New York to return with his family to his native Boston.

Higginson’s autobiography notes that his father "never owned a house or a horse of his own until within a few years of his own death," and “passed much of his time and any spare pennies possible in charitable work” (Ledbetter, 54). Nevertheless, the financial success of Lee, Higginson, and Company, the Higginson family name, and Henry Lee’s strong record at Boston Latin School, enabled him to enter Harvard College in 1851. He suffered from chronic eyesight problems, however, and left Harvard in 1852 for Europe, predominantly Dresden, Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, where he developed a passion for Germanic orchestral music. After a short period back in Boston, where he trained as a bookkeeper for an old line East Indian merchant company and opposed the arrest by federal troops of Anthony Burns, a fugitive from slavery. He then returned to Europe in 1856 to pursue his dream of a career in music. Continued ill-health plagued his efforts and forced him back to Boston in late 1860 on the eve of the U.S. Civil War.

He served as a Union Army officer for four years, fighting at Bull Run in 1862 and at the Battle of Aldie in the Shenandoah Valley in June 1863, where the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry suffered heavy losses and he was severely wounded in hand to hand fighting. A bullet lodged at the base of his spine and a sabre gash across his right cheek would remain a permanent scar. His injuries prevented him joining his regiment at the Battle of Gettysburg a few days later, and it was in Boston that July he learned of the death of his friend, Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, killed along with many African American volunteers in the 54th Massachusetts Regiment in the Union assault on Fort Wagner, South Carolina. It was also while recuperating in Boston in December 1863 that Higginson married Ida Agassiz, a daughter of the Harvard professor and naturalist Louis Agassiz and a cousin of Robert Gould Shaw. The couple had two children, Cecile Pauline Higginson, who died aged five years, and Alexander Henry Higginson. At the end of his military service in 1864 Higginson was promoted to the rank of Colonel, but after the war was generally referred to as “Major Higginson,” to distinguish him from his older cousin, Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who commanded the Thirty-third Regiment, United States Colored Troops and wrote the classic Army Life in a Black Regiment (1867).

After the war he pursued two different business opportunities, first as an agent for a Boston company exploring opportunities in Ohio’s oil industry, and then as joint owner of “Cottonham,” a Georgia plantation, in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War. A staunch abolitionist, Higginson had fewer qualms about employing “free laborers” under conditions that continued to favor planters. Writing to his wife about the formerly enslaved he stated: “labor we can get as much as we want.…these people are beginning to see that work or starvation is before them.” (Beckert, 22) The failure of both of these ventures finally persuaded Higginson (now aged 34) to join his father’s company.

It was at Lee, Higginson, and Company, that Higginson amassed the fortune that underlay his prodigious philanthropic efforts in the late 19th and early 20th century. He did so by investing heavily in industrial ventures in the Midwest and West that proved more profitable than his sojourn in the Cotton South. In 1866 Higginson purchased the Calumet Copper Mine in Michigan and, along with his two brothers in law—Quincy A. Shaw, who was married to Ida’s sister, Pauline Agassiz Shaw, and Ida and Pauline’s brother, Alexander Agassiz, a civil engineer—transformed the copper mining industry. Calumet’s valuation rose from under $5million in 1870 to $23 million in 1880 and $57 million in 1900. Profits were maximized by long hours and dangerous working conditions in the mines and unsparing opposition to labor unions, including the use of US troops to defeat strikes by the Knights of Labor in the 1870s. Lee. Higginson, and Company’s investment in mines, railroads, and other industries made them one of the leading investment companies in the nation.

Henry Lee Higginson would channel his own personal fortune from financing Calumet and other ventures into a wide range of philanthropic enterprises, beginning with the establishment of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881. It was the culmination of a goal he had set a quarter century earlier while seeking a musical career in Europe. Believing that the finest music should be available to as many as wanted to hear it, Higginson ensured that a portion of tickets would be available at below market cost. His growing wealth also facilitated significant support of his alma mater; though he never completed his degree he remained close to others in the Class of 1855 and with his wife Ida Agassiz enjoyed a close relationship with Harvard’s president Charles E. Eliot, who praised Higginson as a man who knew Harvard through and through and who foresaw needs and knew how to meet them.

The College awarded him an honorary Master of Arts degree in 1882. In June 1890 Higginson donated 31 acres of land in Cambridge to the college for recreational use and named it Soldiers Field, in honor of six of his friends who died in the Civil War: James Savage, Jr., Charles Russell Lowell, Edward Barry Dalton, Stephen George Perkins, James Jackson Lowell, and Robert Gould Shaw. Higginson was made a member of the Harvard Corporation in 1893; other philanthropic donations to Harvard included $150,000 in 1899 to fund the Harvard Union (now the Barker Center), which opened in 1902 and which Higginson conceived as a common space for students who could not afford the final clubs. Membership was open to all and dues kept deliberately kept low – from $10 for current students, to $50 for lifetime privileges for alumni. It was a state of the art undertaking – a “finals club for the masses”--with a Great Hall; a full restaurant (open to ladies on weekends); a lunch counter; an athlete’s training table; a barber shop; cigar and news stands; billiard rooms; a library with 6,000 volumes; guest rooms and office space for the Crimson and other Harvard publications.
(https://fdrfoundation.org/fdr-and-harvards-first-great-social-experiment-the-union/)

Higginson’s donation of $20,000 to help fund the unique summer school that brought over 1200 Cuban teachers to Harvard in 1900, reflected his very distinctive form of philanthropy, which sought to bring the very best of high culture to—at least—the aspiring middle classes and to newly liberated Cubans aspiring to nationhood. The generosity of that gift—two-sevenths of the total budgeted—was warmly welcomed by President Eliot and by the Cuban teachers who hailed him with “vivas!” and calls for “Cuba Libre” when he visited the Summer School on Harvard’s campus and when they were invited to his summer home at Beverly Farms. (Boston Globe, July 20, 1900).

His funding of the Summer School at Harvard and of a school in Santiago, Cuba, also reflected Higginson’s broader interest in America’s evolving role in world politics and their consequences for the fortunes of the investors in Lee, Higginson, and Company and other banking and business interests located on Boston’s State Street. Throughout the 1890s Higginson vigorously opposed those like his friend, fellow Brahmin and son of Harvard, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA), one of the nation’s most vocal proponents of an expansionist and nationalistic foreign policy. As a veteran of the US Civil War, who had lost many dear friends, Higginson had a deep understanding of the consequences of military conflict. But he also feared that American expansionism, especially in Latin America, would provoke Britain, on whose capital State Street depended, and threaten the investments of Lee, Higginson, and Co. He also worried that American belligerence in Chile, Venezuela, and in the emerging Cuban agitation for independence from Spain might cause another financial “Panic” like the one in 1837 that had ruined his father’s business in New York, the one in 1873 that nearly ruined his own early investments and had caused severe losses most recently in 1893.

Higginson rallied State Street bankers and used his own powers of persuasion to lobby U.S. Presidents Cleveland and McKinley against policies (like abandoning the Gold Standard) that challenged the London stock markets. When the battleship Maine was sunk in Havana harbor in February 1898, Higginson informed Lodge that “the Cubans are more likely to have done it” to force America into the conflict with Spain, which Lodge, Teddy Roosevelt and others blamed for the explosion. Higginson led State Street’s efforts to keep the US out of war over Cuba—working closely with Edwin Atkins, a leading American sugar planter in Cuba—proposing that the U.S. could lease or purchase the island. When Congress declared war on Spain on April 20, 1898, however, Higginson finally abandoned his anti-war stance out of a sense of patriotism. He devoted his energies to buying military equipment for the 400 Harvard students who would fight in the war—ten of whom were killed—and to equipping and sending the Bay State hospital ship to Cuba. Higginson rejected overtures from Harvard scholar William James and others in the Anti-Imperialist League who opposed annexing Cuba and the Philippines. Despite his fears, the Spanish-American war did not provoke a market collapse and Higginson made his peace with American intervention in Cuba.

In his final decades Henry Lee Higginson figure opposed efforts by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Robert Taft, and Woodrow Wilson to curb the power of corporations. The Major also led the campaign against Wilson’s nomination to the Supreme Court of fellow Bostonian and Harvard man (and one-time friend) Louis D. Brandeis, the champion of anti-trust legislation. He also resigned from his leading role in the Boston Symphony in 1918, after its conductor, the German Karl Muck, was interned during World War I, even though Muck denied that he had refused to play the “Star Spangled Banner.” He died in Boston a few days short of his 85th birthday.


Further Reading

Papers and correspondence related to Higginson’s life and career can be found in Harvard’s Houghton Library and the Harvard Business School Library, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston.

1. Beckert, Sven and Katherine Stevens. Slavery, Harvard, and Seeking a Forgotten History (2011).

2. Ledbetter, Steven. “Higginson and Chadwick: Non-Brahmins in Boston American Music, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring, 2001): 51-63.

3. “Loud were the Vivas; for Mr. Higginson, America, and the Cuba Libre,” Boston Globe, July 20, 1900.

4. Maggor, Noam. Brahmin Capitalism: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age (2017)

5. Meyerhuber, Carl I. “Henry Lee Higginson and the New Imperialism, 1890-1900.” Mid-America, 1974. Vol.56 (3): 182- 199

6. Morse, Jr. John T. “Memoir of Henry Lee Higginson,” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society, Third Series, Vol. 53 (Oct., 1919 - Jun., 1920): 92-127.

7. Perry, Bliss. The Life and Letters of Henry Lee Higginson (1921).

8. Obituary: New York Times, Nov. 16th, 1919.