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.His commitment always remained to thespirit rather than the form of any institution.As he had explained when run-ning as a Free Soil candidate, the party organization will never bind us oneinstant after it seems to us to be plainly false to its principles. Similarly, afterdetermining that the Unitarians were aimless, hopeless, powerless, and dead, he moved toward more radical forms of religion that might be imbued oncemore with principle.22Higginson s move toward force in resisting the Fugitive Slave Law worked intandem with his focus on physical strength and courage.The fight over slaverymade his newfound commitment patently clear, as politics, legislation, andmoral suasion seemed to make no headway against the steadily escalating de-mands of southern slaveholders.It was time for force. All the intellect, all thegenius, all the learning ever expended upon the point of Constitutional inter-pretation, Higginson wrote in 1857, are not worth, in the practical solutionof the slavery question, a millionth part so much as the poorest shot that evera fugitive slave fired at his master. One had a duty to commit not just mind 26 VICTORIAN DUTYand soul but body, a duty to develop one s physical as well as moral and intel-lectual courage.23Tensions between self-development and self-absorption remained as Higgin-son moved toward radical opposition to slavery.He took the occasion of an 1858article to chastise reformers for failing to back up their convictions with physi-cal courage, explaining that both the presence of moral courage and the ab-sence of physical courage often emerged from the same source: an overregardfor the self at the expense of a true understanding of duty.Reformers often weremotivated by an intense egotism, an obsession with individual purity, and afear that even the slightest indications of popular approbation signaled animpure compromise. But while the abstract martyrdom of unpopularity appealed to many reformers, when it comes to the rack and the thrumbscrew,the revolver and the bowie-knife, the same habitual egotism makes them cow-ards. Reformers had to check their egos, Higginson cautioned, and be certainthat neither their concern with moral purity nor their fear of physical dangerled them to neglect their larger duties.He strove in his reform work to unitephysical and moral bravery, doing so in the same way that he balanced his self-development with larger social duties.24Having manlike turned and faced the danger, Higginson s fascinationwith violence found a legal outlet in the 1860s when he enlisted in the UnionArmy and led the first regiment of former slaves in a war against their one-time masters.Before that new occasion, Higginson created opportunities tounite the physical with the mental by venturing to Kansas.There he met JohnBrown, whose combination of word and deed set the stage for the next act inAmerican history by offering up a martyrdom that was as far from abstract asone could imagine.25The World s Eye.the World s HeartSome American reformers who came of age in the 1840s devoted themselves tobreathing new life into old forms such as the university and the clergy.Othersset themselves the task of creating new networks and structures.Nowhere wassuch basic building of institutions more important than in the realm of Ameri-can letters.As the middle of the nineteenth century approached, the greaterBoston area had already produced a constellation of cultural institutionsmost notably Harvard College and the North American Review.But any sortof establishment, especially one with greater than regional influence, was still VICTORIAN DUTY 27in the process of becoming.Such pursuits attracted the powers of dozens ofyoung literary men and women who participated in what would later be rec-ognized as an American Renaissance.Much remained to be done in bringingculture and reform into a common field, in establishing the role of the secularand quasi-professional man of letters, in fostering critical rigor, and in vindi-cating American culture from its transatlantic critics.26James Russell Lowell was one of the most determined of his generation tocommit himself to literature and to fostering the institutions of humane cul-ture in the United States.His talent for mixing rhymes with convivialityemerged during his undergraduate days at Harvard, when he was elected tothe Hasty Pudding Club and to the office of class poet before being suspended(or, as Harvard then put it, rusticated ) for his rambunctious neglect of col-lege duties. Lowell proved a more devoted student outside of class than in,devouring all the British literature he could buy or get through the Harvard li-brary.When Lowell graduated in 1838 and returned to his family s Cambridgehome, Elmwood, he experienced his own period of miserable.indecision as he cast about for a vocation with little more sense of direction than Higgin-son would a few years later.The son of a gentle and gracious Unitarian minister,Lowell briefly considered and rejected the ministry before similarly consider-ing and rejecting business.Through drawn to the luster of a literary career, heambivalently entered Harvard s Dane Law School in the fall of 1839.In timehe would reject a legal career as well
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