James Jackson Higginson (June 19, 1836 – November 11, 1911) was an American stockbroker and soldier who was imprisoned at
Libby Prison for nine months during the Civil War.
Early life
Higginson was born in New York City on June 19, 1836.[1] He was a son of Boston merchant George Higginson and Mary Cabot (née Lee) Higginson. He was a brother of George Higginson, Jr.,
Henry Lee Higginson (who married a daughter of professor
Louis Agassiz and founded the
Boston Symphony Orchestra), Mary "Molly" (née Higginson) Blake (wife of Samuel Parkman Blake) and Francis Lee Higginson, Sr. (whose daughter Barbara married banker
Barrett Wendell Jr.).[2][3]
His maternal grandparents were Henry Lee and Mary (née Jackson) Lee. His paternal grandparents were George Higginson and Martha Hubbard (née Babcock) Higginson.[4] He was also a cousin of historian
Thomas Wentworth Higginson.[1]
Higginson graduated from
Harvard University with the class of 1857 and then studied law in Berlin but returned to the United States before the outbreak of the Civil War.[1]
Career
After the War, he started his career as a stockbroker and continued working until his retirement and the sale of his seat on the
New York Stock Exchange in 1892.[1] He worked for
Lee, Higginson & Co., which had been founded by his father and
John Clarke Lee in Boston in 1848.[5][6]
He served as a vice president and a director of the Nome-Montana-New Mexico Mining Company, a trustee of the Greenwich Savings Bank, and a director of the
Atchinson and Eastern Bridge Company. He was also a founding trustees of the
Metropolitan Trust Company in 1881.[7]
Higginson was married to Margaret Bethune Gracie (b. 1846), a daughter of Archibald Gracie Jr. and Elizabeth Davidson (née Bethune) Gracie. Margaret was a granddaughter of
Archibald Gracie and a sister of
Confederate Gen.
Archibald Gracie III and James King Gracie (who married Anna Louisa Bulloch, sister of
Martha Bulloch Roosevelt). Together, they were the parents of two sons and three daughters, including:[8]
Margaret Gracie Higginson (1872–1936), who married Clarence Stoughton Fiske in 1895.[9]
Elizabeth Bethune Higginson (1875–1974), who married Charles Cabot Jackson in 1909.[8]
Dorothy Lee Higginson (1878–1957), who married Arthur Delano Weekes Jr.[8][10]
James Jackson Higginson Jr. (1884–1930),[11] who married Virginia Lucy Mitchell, a daughter of Clarence B. Mitchell, in 1919.[12]
Thomas Lee Higginson (1887–1906), who died young.[8]