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Army Life in a Black Regiment, 1870
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a militant abolitionist who, in 1859, funded John Brown's efforts to start a slave insurrection in Virginia. When the Civil War began, Higginson joined the Union army and eventually served as colonel of the 1st South Carolina Infantry -- the first federally authorized African American regiment. In Army Life in a Black Regiment, he preserved Negro spirituals by copying the words and music he heard sung around the regiment's campfires. Among these was Many Thousands Gone, which one hundred years later inspired singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. |