Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Thomas Wentworth Higginson was a minister who helped storm a courthouse to free a fugitive slave, funded John Brown, and commanded the first regiment of freed slaves in the Civil War. He also answered a letter from an unknown poet in Amherst and spent twenty-five years as Emily Dickinson's correspondent — then co-edited her poems after her death, regularising the punctuation, which scholars have never forgiven.