Henry Lee Higginson (November 18, 1834 – November 14, 1919) was an American businessman best known as the founder of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a patron of Harvard University.
Biography
Higginson was born in New York City on November 18, 1834, the second child of George Higginson and Mary Cabot Lee. He was a brother of James J. Higginson and a distant cousin of Thomas Wentworth Higginson.
When Higginson was four, his family moved to Boston. George jointly founded a brokerage as a junior partner, was extremely patriotic, and never owned a house or a horse of his own until within a few years of his death. Henry's mother died of tuberculosis, from which she suffered for some time, when Henry was 15. Henry graduated from Boston Latin School in 1851, only after withdrawing twice due to eye fatigue problems. He began studies at Harvard College, but withdrew after 4 months when he again experienced eye fatigue and he was sent to Europe. Upon returning to Boston in March 1855, Henry's father secured a position for him in the office of Messrs. Samuel and Edward Austin, India merchants, a small shipping counting house on India Wharf where he worked as the sole company clerk and bookkeeper.
Henry Lee Higginson entered the Union Army in May 1861, as second lieutenant of Company D in Colonel George H. Gordon's 2nd Massachusetts Regiment, and fought at the First Battle of Bull Run. He was commissioned major in the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry in March 1862. In the Battle of Aldie (1863) Higginson was knocked from his saddle and received three saber cuts and two pistol wounds. While recovering in Boston he married Ida Olympe Frederika Agassiz (born 9 August 1837 in Carlsruhe, Grand Duchy of Baden), daughter of Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, on 5 December 1863 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They had two children, Cecile Pauline Higginson (1870–1875) and Alexander Henry Higginson (born 2 April 1876 in Boston).
Though he retired from the military as a colonel, he was commonly addressed as "Major" for the rest of his life to avoid confusion with his older cousin Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who was called Colonel Higginson.
Career
After the war, he worked as an agent for the Buckeye Oil Company in Ohio from January to July 1865, purchasing equipment and contracting laborers to work in the oil fields. In October 1865, he and friends paid $30,000 for five thousand acres (20 km²) of cotton-farming land in Georgia. This failed adventure left him more than $10,000 in debt. Reluctantly at first, out of desperation, he started on January 1, 1868, as a clerk and later became a junior partner in his father’s business, Lee, Higginson & Co., which at the time was a modest brokerage. His father had been a junior partner until 1858 and worked until his death in 1889 at age 85. This brokerage and banking company eventually became very profitable. Henry Lee Higginson was eventually a senior partner.
In 1913, he offered this assessment of changes in business over the course of his career: "There has been a steady improvement in the management of the Stock Exchange since I came down to the financial district. The methods in use to-day are very much better than they were many years ago. Men dealing with the Exchange are better protected." He allowed that there were still "rascals" and "a good many men who still need watching," but "not so many as there have been in years past."
Boston Symphony Orchestra
Higginson described his plans for a symphony orchestra two years after he launched the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881: