I'm Nobody. Who was He?

WOW – check below for some interesting facts about one man’s life from the 1880s.  Can you guess who I’m talking about?  I’ll divulge the name at the end of the post.

His grandfather was a member of the Continental Congress, and he was a distant cousin to the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

He entered Harvard College at age 13 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa at 16.

He was a Unitarian minister, author,  abolitionist, politician, and soldier.

From 1818 to 1834, he was the bursar of Harvard University.

He was one of the leading male advocates of women's rights during the decade before the Civil War. 
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He was a member of the Secret Six who supported John Brown.

During the Civil War he served as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the first federally authorized black regiment, and he contributed to the preservation of Negro spirituals by copying verses and music he heard sung around the regiment's campfires.

Following the war, he wrote Army Life in a Black Regiment and devoted much of the rest of his life to fighting for the rights of freed people, women, and other disfranchised people.

After the Civil War, he was an organizer of the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868, and of the American Woman Suffrage Association the following year. 

From 1880 – 1882 he served in the Massachusetts legislature.

In 1905, he joined with Jack London, Clarence Darrow, and Upton Sinclair to form the Intercollegiate Socialist Society.

He was a writer for “The Atlantic.”
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He was also a friend and mentor to Emily Dickinson – and in 1890, he assisted Mabel Loomis Todd with the first publication of poetry by Dickinson following the poet’s death in 1886.

Do you know who accomplished all of this?

**drum roll**

This was all accomplished by Thomas Wentworth Higginson.