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.

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.

[4] 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.

"[5] The scheme, half-baked, no doubt, was simply this: to give concerts of good music, very well performed, in such style as we had all heard for years in Europe; to make fair prices for the tickets and then open wide the doors.

[16] From the very beginning through at least the first 30 years of the BSO, through Julius Epstein, a Jewish friend in Vienna, Higginson had access to a continuous stream of the best conductors in the world, all European and German-speaking.

I was brought up in the Vienna school (as you know) and there were plenty of men living then who had heard Beethoven conduct, as well as Mendelssohn, and knew how he wished his music given.

In 1882, he forged a new contract requiring his musicians to make themselves available from Wednesday to Saturday during the season and on those days to "neither play in any other orchestra nor under any other conductor...except if wanted in your leisure hours by the Handel and Haydn Society," a collegial gesture to a much older organization.

[19] After the fourth season, he authorized the BSO's conductor Wilhelm Gericke to recruit twenty musicians while summering in Europe to replace some who were "old and overworked.

Furthermore, over time he dropped musicians with ties to Boston and imported men from Europe of "high technical accomplishment, upon whose loyalty he could count.

Muck's ties to the German Kaiser made for exaggerated press coverage, but Higginson was the particular focus of criticism.

"[25] On June 5, 1890, Higginson presented Harvard College a gift of 31 acres (130,000 m2) of land, which he called Soldiers Field, given in honor of his friends who died in the Civil War: James Savage Jr., Charles Russell Lowell, Edward Barry Dalton, Stephen George Perkins, James Jackson Lowell, and Robert Gould Shaw.

[26] On June 10 of that year, at the dedication of Soldiers Field, he said:[27] One of these friends, Charles Lowell, dead, and yet alive to me as you are, wrote me just before his last battle:-- "Don't grow rich; if you once begin, you'll find it much more difficult to be a useful citizen.

Once, when advising a cousin to make a large contribution to Harvard he wrote:[28] How else are we to save our country if not by education in all ways and on all sides?

Their avoidance of more straightforward racial categories and quotas only masked their fundamental bias against immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.

A few years later, he raised $10,000 to defray the costs of tuition and living expenses for students from China, a program somewhat at odds with America's exclusion of Chinese immigrants at the time.

Annoyed by drivers speeding by his summer home in Ipswich, Massachusetts, with anonymous impunity, Higginson drafted a petition to the state legislature.

[31][32] On January 25, 1915, Higginson was a participant in the first transcontinental telephone call along with Thomas Watson, Alexander Graham Bell, Theodore Vail and Woodrow Wilson.

[34] He died on November 14, 1919, and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, following funeral services that were later described as "gala obsequies.

"[35] One cousin's tribute described him: "He always seemed to me like the old knight of the castle–a part he played in some theatricals–giving sympathetic, spirited advice and inspiration of high example to the apprentice squires.