Higginson, Thomas Wentworth

1823–1911

Health Reformer and Minister

The Unitarian minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson was among a growing number of nineteenth-century reformers concerned with the health and physical fitness of middle-class American men. As one of the earliest proponents of “muscular Christianity,” Higginson formulated what became a highly influential ideal of middle-class manhood.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Higginson graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1847 and became involved in several antebellum-era reforms, especially abolitionism and women's rights. Like many Unitarian ministers of the period, he emphasized the close relation between nature and human spirituality—an idea closely associated with Romanticism— and like many reformers he promoted the cultivation of moral perfection in both individuals and American society.

By the late 1850s, Higginson was increasingly focused on health reform. He drew inspiration from the English novelists Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, who were harbingers of the muscular Christianity movement and whose works emphasized the importance of physical exercise and competitive sport in building Christian character among young men. He became convinced that urbanization, industrialization, and poor dietary habits were undermining the health and vigor of middle-class men. He also criticized the nation's Protestant churches for teaching “that physical vigor and sanctity were incompatible” and filling the ministry with clergy who lacked a “manly life” (Putney, 21). Convinced that both personal and national spiritual strength required a healthy diet, outdoor activity, and physical education, he published his views in a series of Atlantic Monthly essays during the late 1850s and early 1860s, including “Saints, and their Bodies,”“A Letter to a Dyspeptic,” “Physical Courage,” “Gymnastics,” and “My Outdoor Study.”

Although Higginson addressed women's health as well— one of his essays focused on “The Health of Our Girls”—his primary concern was the necessity of physical fitness in preparing middle-class boys and men for the roles, responsibilities, and imperatives of Victorian middle-class manhood. He considered good health “a necessary condition of all permanent success” (Borish, 146) and believed that the moral discipline fostered by exercise and sport would make men more effective in business, politics, the ministry, and the conquest and settlement of the western frontier. He therefore [Page 210]actively promoted organized camping (so that men might learn from nature's “magnificent strength” [Lucas, 32]), boating (“without a boat, one is so much less a man”), and football (“to those whose animal life is sufficiently vigorous to enjoy it”) (Borish, 148, 149).

Higginson's ideal of middle-class manhood was decidedly white, genteel, and heterosexual. Although he led a regiment of freed slaves in South Carolina during the Civil War and was fascinated by what he considered the “splendid muscular development” (Nelson and Price, 504) of black men's bodies, he thought that “neither their physical nor moral temperament gave them that toughness, that obstinate purpose of living, which sustains the … Anglo-Saxon” (Borish, 148). He harshly distinguished his own model of American manliness from what he called the “unmanly manhood” of poet Walt Whitman, who celebrated rough working-class masculinity, open sexual expression, and homosexual love, and who chose nursing over field duty during the Civil War.

Higginson's ideas at first remained confined largely to eastern elites and theologically liberal ministers, but by the closing decades of the nineteenth century they achieved much wider popularity. Higginson remained actively involved with muscular Christianity in his later life, becoming a patriarch to the movement he had helped to establish.

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