HIGGINSON, HENRY LEE (Nov. 18, 1834--Nov. 14, 1919), banker, Union soldier, founder and patron of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, inherited from a Puritan ancestry his vigorous physique and a simple, somewhat naive personality. His father, George Perkins, was a grandson of Stephen Higginson and a descendant of Rev. Francis Higginson, a colonist whom Cotton Mather called "the first in a catalogue of heroes:" his mother, Mary Cabot Lee, was similarly well born. Henry was born, as it chanced, in New York City, where George Higginson was for a time a commission merchant; but the family returned to Boston after the panic of 1837. There the father, his resources impaired, took a small office in India Wharf and a very small house in Chauncy Place. "We lived in the narrowest way," the son wrote afterward, "and got on very well; went into a house a little bit larger in Bedford Place; went to a good school, then to the Latin school and had a pleasant boyhood."
Like both parents, Henry Higginson showed sturdiness and steadiness of character rather than extraordinary mentality. He was industrious, but his scholarship was only fairly good. Summers he earned spending money by picking fruit and doing other chores on farms near Boston. He was thoughtful, an avid reader, and by 1848, he was a convinced abolitionist. In 1851 he entered Harvard College, in the same class with Phillips Brooks, Alexander Agassiz, and George Dexter. His eyes, meantime, had begun to give trouble, and midway in his freshman year he was withdrawn and sent to Europe in charge of a clergyman. The boy kept a diary of their extensive walking tours which shows that his life-long interest in music began when he first went to the opera in London. He attended concerts in Munich and Milan, and at Dresden, where he paused to study German, he heard Tannhauser with delight. He wrote home that he might make music his profession. Upon his return in September 1853, however, after an eighteen-month period of study under Samuel Eliot, he assumed a clerkship which his father had secured for him in the office of Samuel & Edward Austin, India merchants. This position he held some twenty months. He was not a born business man. His youthful interest was in reform movements and music. His anti-slavery enthusiasm led him to equip "a good-looking Irishman with his family to go to Kansas to settle," but the fellow deserted his family and disappeared.
In November, 1856, he inherited $13,000 from an uncle, gave up his clerkship, and went to Europe purposing to make music his life work. He took lodgings at Vienna, but unexpected obstacles then, as throughout his life, kept him from doing what he really wanted to do. An injury to his left arm prevented him from becoming a pianoforte virtuoso; studies in harmony and composition, faithfully pursued, disclosed, according to his instructors, no great creativeness or originality. In 1860 he returned to Boston, still undecided as to his future. He had made a little money through sale of German wines, and he planned to become a wine merchant. The outbreak of the Civil War interfered with that design. Higginson was among the first to enlist and had an honorable military service, but one full of frustrations to which he was liable. Commissioned second lieutenant in Col. George H. Gordon's regiment, the 2nd Massachusetts Infanty, in May 1861, he was promoted to first lieutenant in July. He found conditions at Hagerstown, Md., unfavorable, however, and rejoiced at securing transfer to the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry of which he was commissioned captain in October 1861, and major in March 1862. Typhoid kept him from his command several months. At Beaufort Island, S.C., he showed marked ability in handling men and horses, yet, when the others attacked Charleston, in June 1862, his company stayed on guard at Beaufort--"cussed luck," he wrote. Ordered later to the northern front, he was severly wounded in the indecisive skirmish at Aldie, Va. During a long convalescence he married, in December 1863, Ida, the daughter of Prof. Louis Agassiz. He rejoined his regiment at City Point, Va, but just missing the spectacular battle at Petersburg, he was invalided home again, where he resigned. From January to July 1865, he was employed in the Ohio oil fields.
With two other Boston men he undertook the Utopian experiment of operating a cotton plantation in Georgia in 1866-67. They expected to demonstrate that free negro labor could be profitably and pleasantly employed. Their losses from two cotton crops were $65,000 and they gladly sold for $5,000 land which had cost them $30,000.
On Jan. 1, 1868, Higginson became, somewhat reluctantly, a member of Lee, Higginson & Company with which his father, an uncle, and a brother were already connected. "The Major," as he was known in State Street, never believed himself meant by nature to be a banker. Others have said that his character rather than his commercial ability brought him success. People's trust in his honesty and judgment was a very valuable asset of the house. Attending faithfully to multitudinous responsibilities he became a prosperous and moderately wealthy man, and was rated as worth $750,000 when he founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra. His youthful interest in music was renewed when in 1873 he represented Massachusetts as an honorary commissioner at the Vienna Exposition. He then resumed acquaintance with former teachers and other musicians and began to formulate plans for a Boston orchestra of Continental standards. The depression following the 1873 panic caused postponement of his design, but in 1881, selecting George Henschel as its first conductor, he launched the Boston Symphony, which under successive conductors, Wilhelm Gericke, Arthur Nikisch, Emil Paur, Max Fiedler, and Karl Muck, became the leading organization of its kind in America. Perferring to be its sole underwriter, he paid during his long connection with it, deficits aggregating nearly $1,000,000. Although strongly pro-Ally, he endured personal humiliation during the World War because of his loyalty to its conductor, Dr. Muck. On May 4, 1918, he announced from the platform of Symphony Hall that others must carry the burden of the concerts.
Aside from his support of the Orchestra his principal benefactions were to educational institutions: to Harvard, to which he conveyed, June 10, 1890, land for Soldiers' Field in an address that ranks high as an example of oratory....
His death and interment in Mount Auburn Cemetery followed an operation in November 1919. His wife and a son survived him.
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