American Realities with Bill Youngs
  • Home Page
  • About Me
    • Brief Résumé
    • Illustrative Films
  • Summary
  • Workshop
    • Jobs for Historians
    • Maps
    • Slideshows
  • Images
    • A Walk Through Turnbull
  • Fireside Talks
    • American History >
      • Indigenous Alaska: The Baidarka
    • National Parks
  • Spoken Word
  • Books
    • Gods Messengers: Religious Leadership in Colonial New England, 1700-1750 >
      • Table of Contents
      • Preface
      • Chapter 1: The Ministers and Their Times
      • Chapter 2: The Minister's Calling
      • Epilogue
      • Appendix: Length of Ministerial Settlement
      • Abbreviations
    • The Congregationalists >
      • Timeline
      • Bibliographic Dictionary of Leaders
    • Eleanor Roosevelt: A Personal and Public Life >
      • Prologue: The South Pacific, 1943 >
        • Eleanor Roosevelt South Pacific
      • A Victorian Family
      • The Legacy
      • Growing Up
      • Eleanor and Franklin
      • A Politician's Wife
      • Grief
      • Public Service
      • First Lady
      • The Democratic Crusade
      • On Her Own
    • American Realities (Book) >
      • History as a Story
      • A Note on Wikipedia as a Source
      • Volume One >
        • The Native Americans
        • The English Background
        • The British American
        • Reform in Colonial America
        • Divided Loyalties
        • The American Revolution
        • Testing the Constitution
        • Republican Nationalism
        • The Limits of Jacksonian Democracy
        • Abolitionists and Anti-abolitionists
        • Texas Revolution
        • Reform in the Early Republic
        • Manifest Destiny
        • A Slave's Story
        • The Civil War >
          • Two Soldiers
      • Volume Two >
        • The “Taming” of the West
        • Beyond Emancipation
        • The New Industrial Era
        • The Birth of Environmentalism
        • New Immigrants
        • Expanding American Democracy
        • World War I
        • Modernity versus Tradition
        • The New Deal
        • Total War
        • The Cold War
        • The Civil Rights Movement
        • Turmoil on the Campuses
        • The New Computer Age
        • America, the Cold War, and Beyond
      • Additional Essays >
        • Norsemen in the New World
    • The Fair and the Falls >
      • Part I: Possessing the Falls >
        • Chapter One: James Glover: Purchasing the Falls
        • Chapter Two: Waiting for the Indians
        • Chapter Three: Harnessing the Falls
        • Chapter Four: "The World's Fair of the Northwest"
        • Chapter Five: The City Beside the Falls
      • Part II: Rediscovering the Falls >
        • Chapter Six: The Twilight of Old Spokane
        • Chapter Seven: Urban Blight and Urban Renewal
        • Chapter Eight: King Cole and The Heart of a City
        • Chapter Nine: Visualizing a World's Fair
      • Part III Redesigning the Falls >
        • Chapter Ten: From Spokane to Paris >
          • Tom Foley's Turn
        • Chapter Eleven: Wooing the Foreign Exhibitors
        • Chapter Twelve: Wooing the Domestic Exhibitors
        • Chapter Thirteen: The Environmental Debate
        • Chapter Fourteen: Building the Fair
        • Chapter Fifteen: Marketing, Money, and Management
      • Part IV: The Fair by the Falls >
        • Chapter Sixteen: Opening Day
        • Chapter Seventeen: A Mingling of Peoples
        • Chapter Eighteen: Days at the Fair
        • Chapter Nineteen: The Press of New Ideas
        • Chapter Twenty: The Final Tally
      • Part V: An American Environment >
        • Chapter Twenty-One: Spokane Falls, An American Environment
      • The Fair and the Falls Map

HIGGINSON, FRANCIS

(1586, Claybrooke, England-6 August 1630, Salem, MA). Education: B.A., St. John's College, Cambridge University, 1610, M.A., St. John's College, 1613. Career: Curate, Claybrooke, 1615-17; lecturer, St. Nicholas, 1617-27; minister, Salem, MA, 1629-30.

Francis Higginson served a dozen years as an Anglican minister and was comfortable with life in the established church until he came into contact with Thomas Hooker*, whose nonconformist views he came to embrace. Consequently he had to relinquish his position. For a time under the moderate regime of the bishop of London, he was able to continue his ministry, but then harsher authorities heard of his case and determined to bring him to trial in a court of high commission. To avoid prosecution Higginson elected to go to New England under the auspices of the Massachusetts Bay Company in 1629, a year in advance of the Winthrop migration to Boston.

He settled in Salem (then Naumkeag) and formed a Congregational church, sharing responsibility with Samuel Skelton. Higginson was ordained teacher and Skelton, pastor, but in practice those two offices, common in the early Congregational church, overlapped. The Salem Puritans, unlike those in Plymouth, adopted non separating Congregationalism, thinking of themselves as a reformed branch of the Anglican church. Higginson and Skelton are sometimes credited with establishing a precedent followed by the numerous churches founded in Massachusetts and Connecticut in the following years.

Higginson is best remembered for New England's Plantation, a tract he wrote to oppose the notion, then circulating in England, that Massachusetts was a barren wasteland. With Puritan simplicity Higginson described the attraction of New England's wilderness to the pioneers. The region, he says, is a "most healthful place." Long before urban congestion changed the face of eastern Massachusetts, Higginson could write enthusiastically, "A sup [sip] of New England's air, is better than a whole draft of old England's ale." Amid the seemingly endless forests of America he wrote, "Here is good living for those that love good fires."

Ironically Higginson died during his first summer in the allegedly salubrious climate of New England, apparently weakened by the rigors of the previous winter. So while his writing correctly describes some of the attractions offered by America, his death is a reminder of the hardships faced by the Puritan pioneers.

Bibliography
A: New England's Plantation; or, A Short and True Description of the Commodities and Discommodities of that Country (London, 1630; Salem. MA. 1908).
B: AAP 1.6-10; DAB 9. 11-12; DARB, 204; NCAB 1,380; J. B. Felt. Memoir of the Rev. Francis Higginson (Boston. 1852); Thomas W. Higginson. Life of Francis Higginson (New York. 1891).