associate. His views were just those of the _Evening Post_. He was an
old-school Democrat, but a devoted free-soiler. He was such a confirmed
hater of protection that in later years he called it “a dogma in a
republic fit only for a highwayman, a fool, or a drunkard,” and that
he wanted absolute free trade, not merely “revision downward.” He
liked the pen; from his first admission to the bar, he tells us, there
was never a time when he had not material before him for the study of
some subject on which he intended to write. In 1841, at the age of
twenty-three, he contributed an article to the _New York Review_ upon
Roman lawyers, and followed it with essays in the _Democratic Review_.
His taste for the society of intellectual men early showed itself, and
like Lord Clarendon, “he was never so content with himself as when he
found himself the meanest man in the company.” He finished his law
studies in the office of Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., where he first met
Bryant; he became intimate with Professor Da Ponte, another of Bryant’s
friends, and he saw much of Fitzgreene Halleck.
Bigelow had been born in Bristol, later Malden, N. Y., in 1817, where
his father had a farm, a country store, and several sloops plying on
the Hudson. His was a good Presbyterian family, of Connecticut stock,
prosperous enough to send Bigelow first to an academy at Troy, and then
successively to Washington College (later Trinity) in Hartford, and to
Union College. While studying law in New York, he had the good fortune
to join a club of estimable young men (1838) called The Column, many
of whose members later became founders of the Century Association;
to this body Wm. M. Evarts was admitted in 1840, and Parke Godwin
in 1841. Another influential friend whom Bigelow made in 1837–8 was
Samuel J. Tilden, then a young lawyer living with an aunt on Fifth
Avenue. Tilden often wearied Bigelow by his talk on practical politics
and other subjects in which the latter had no interest, but their
relations soon ripened into a cordial friendship. In 1844 these two,
with a veteran journalist named John L. O’Sullivan, conducted for a
time a low-priced Democratic campaign sheet for the purpose of helping
elect Silas Wright as Governor. Probably as a reward for this service,
Gov. Wright appointed Bigelow one of the five inspectors of Sing Sing
Prison, at which it had become necessary to check notorious abuses; and
when Bigelow and his associates stopped the use of bludgeons they were
accused of “coddling” the prisoners as all later reformers have been.
During 1845 young Bigelow wrote many editorials for the _Evening Post_
advocating the calling of a State Constitutional Convention, and asking
for changes in the judiciary which that body actually made. In the
spring of 1847 Bryant, wishing to train some one to succeed him, asked
the young man to enter the office, but did not make an acceptable
offer. A year and a half later he renewed the proposal through Tilden,
saying that he would give a liberal compensation, and that when one
of the partners, William G. Boggs, who had charge of the publishing,
retired, he might come into the firm. Bigelow was pleased. “But,” he
told Tilden, “I might as well say to you here at once that I should
not think it worth while to consider for a moment any proposition to
enter the _Evening Post_ office on a salary. Unless they want me in the
firm, they don’t want me enough to withdraw me from my profession.”
This was a wise refusal to give up his independence. The result was
that after negotiations of several weeks, Boggs was induced to retire
at once. Bigelow purchased three and one-tenth shares of the _Evening
Post_ (there were ten in all) and two shares of the job office, for
$15,000, taking possession as of the date Nov. 16, 1848; later, at a
cost of $2,100, he increased his holdings to a full third. He had very
little money saved, and none which he could spare, but he persuaded the
large-hearted lawyer, Charles O’Conor, to endorse his note for $2,500,
while he became indebted to Wm. C. Bryant & Co. for the rest.
Like Bryant, Bigelow was glad to escape from law into journalism. “I
have never for one instant looked back upon my former employment,” his
unpublished journal runs, “but with regret for the time lost in it. I
do not mean that all my time was lost; on the contrary, I am satisfied
that my discipline at the bar gives me important advantages over most
of my associates in the editorial calling. But I was not progressing
mentally for the last two years of my practice, though I did in
professional position.” Financially, the exchange was a fortunate one.
At once Bigelow showed marked journalistic aptitude. He brought
a lightness of touch to his writing that was as valuable as his
cultivation and good judgment. One early evidence of this was a
weekly series of interviews with a “Jersey ferryman,” purporting to
be snatches of political gossip which this illiterate but shrewd
fellow picked up from Congressmen, Governors, and other public men
whom he carried over the river. It enabled Bigelow to give readers the
benefit of inside information obtained from Tilden, O’Conor, John Van
Buren, Charles Sumner (a constant correspondent of Bigelow’s), and the
free-soil leaders generally. His enterprise was equally marked. In
1850, nettled by the assertion of slavery men that since the British
Emancipation Act the island of Jamaica had relapsed into barbarism, he
spent three weeks there making observations, and wrote an admirable
series of letters to the _Evening Post_. This refutation of the slavery
arguments attracted attention in England. Early in 1854, when it was
necessary to give shape to the inchoate elements of the Republican
party by finding a candidate, he wrote a campaign biography of Fremont
in installments for the _Evening Post_, the first chapter of which
Jessie Benton Fremont contributed. During the winter of 1852–4 he was
in Haiti, studying the capacity of the negro for self-government, and
again sending the _Evening Post_ valuable correspondence. His book upon
Jamaica was for some time considered the best in print, and his life of
Fremont sold about 40,000 copies.
Early in 1851 Bigelow began publishing a series of random papers called
“Nuces Literariæ,” signed “Friar Lubin,” in which he commenced one of
the most famous historical controversies of the time--the controversy
with Jared Sparks over the latter’s methods of editing.
President Sparks of Harvard had issued in 1834–7 (redated 1842)
his twelve-volume “Life and Writings of George Washington,” the
fruit of years of research at home and abroad. In the fifth of
the “Nuces Literariæ” (Feb. 12), Bigelow remarked that he had been
greatly surprised while comparing some original letters by George
Washington with the copies given by Sparks. He had heard, he said,
that Hallam--Hallam had chatted with Bryant in England in 1845--had
commented upon the discrepancy between Jared Spark’s version of the
letters, and other versions. To test the alleged inaccuracies, Bigelow
had produced the recently published correspondence of Joseph Reed,
at one time Washington’s secretary, and long his intimate friend.
Comparing the letters in Sparks’s set with the same letters in the two
volumes by Reed’s grandson, “to my utter surprise I found every one
had been altered, in what seemed to me important particulars. I found
that he had not only attempted to correct the probable oversights and
blunders of General Washington, but he had undertaken to improve his
style and chasten his language; nay, he had in some instances gone so
far as to change his meaning, and to make him the author of sentiments
precisely the opposite of what he intended to write.”
Bigelow proceeded, in this paper and a longer one a few days later,
to state his charges in detail, alleging scores of discrepancies. It
was the sort of task he liked. Later, while Minister to France, he
came into possession of the MS. of Franklin’s autobiography, and by
careful examination found that more than 1,200 changes had been made
in the text of the book, as published by Franklin’s grandson, and
that the last eight pages, equal in value to any eight preceding, had
been wholly omitted. He published the first authentic edition of the
classic, and he later brought out an edition of Franklin’s complete
writings which superseded Sparks’s earlier collection. Now he alleged
that when Washington had written that a certain sum “will be but a
fleabite to our demands,” Sparks had dressed this up into “totally
inadequate.” Washington, he said, had referred to the “dirty, mercenary
spirit” of the Connecticut troops, and to “our rascally privateersmen,”
and Sparks had left out “dirty” and “rascally.” Washington put down,
“he has wrote ... to see,” and Sparks had made it, “He has written ...
to ascertain.” Washington referred to “Old Put,” and Sparks translated
this into “Gen. Putnam.” “The Ministry durst not have gone on,”
declared Washington, and this appeared, “would not have dared to go
on.” When the commander wrote that he had “everything but the thing
ready,” Sparks left out “but the thing,” by which Washington had meant
powder.
President Sparks was ill, but the Cambridge _Chronicle_ answered for
him. Would not Washington have corrected his correspondence for the
press, it asked, if he had known it was to be published? Bigelow
answered that this was no reason why Sparks should interpose between
the great man and admiring later generations. Washington did not send
his letters to the press, but to friends and subordinates, and it was
necessary to an accurate estimate of the man that we learn his faults
of grammar and temper. “It is a great comfort for unpretending and
humble men like the most of us, to know that the world’s heroes are
not so perfect in all their proportions as to defy imitation, and
discourage the aspirations of the less mature or less fortunate.”
The eminent president of Harvard maintained his silence, though the
_Evening Post_ recurred to the subject. In June, for example, it
mentioned approvingly a project for a new edition of Washington’s
writings, asserting that “The _authority_ of Sparks as an editor and
historian may be considered as entirely destroyed by the criticism” of
Bigelow. Early in 1852 it reviewed the sixth volume of Lord Mahon’s
History of England, the author of which censured Sparks severely upon
the ground that “he has printed no part of the correspondence precisely
as Washington wrote it; but has greatly altered and, as he thinks,
corrected and embellished it.” At last, faced by Lord Mahon as well as
Bigelow, President Sparks replied. On April 2, 3, and 6, 1852, three
long letters by him, later issued in pamphlet form, were published
in the _Evening Post_, explaining the exact principles on which he
had worked as an editor. “I deny,” he said, “that any part of this
charge is true in any sense, which can authorize the censures bestowed
by these writers, or raise a suspicion of the editor’s fidelity and
fairness.”
It was an effective, though not a complete, answer that he made. He
was able to show that at least one flagrant error in reprinting a
letter was not his, but that of Reed’s grandson. He showed that many
of the alleged garblings were not real, but arose from the fact that
Washington’s original letters as sent out, and the copies which his
secretaries transcribed into his letter-books, differed. Washington
himself had revised the manuscript of his correspondence during the
French war, making numerous erasures, interlineations, and corrections;
and which could now be called the genuine text? As Sparks explained,
the omissions over which Bigelow had grumbled were unavoidable because
of the necessity of compressing material for thirty or forty volumes
into twelve. But he did admit taking certain editorial liberties
which would now be thought improper. “It would certainly be strange,”
he wrote, “if an editor should undertake to prepare for the press a
collection of manuscript letters, many of them hastily written, without
a thought that they would ever be published, and should not at the
same time regard it as a solemn duty to correct obvious slips of the
pen, occasional inaccuracies of expression, and manifest faults of
grammar....”
The _Evening Post_ was anxious to do President Sparks justice. It
admitted his industry and conscientious devotion, shown in the labor
he had spent at the thirteen capitals of the original States, wherever
else he could find Revolutionary papers, and in the public offices of
London and Paris. It recognized that the demand for absolutely literal
transcriptions was a new one in the field of scholarship. But to this
demand the controversy gave a decided impetus.
Bigelow scored another success when he obtained for the _Post_ most of
Thomas Hart Benton’s “Thirty Years’ View” in advance of its issue in
book form. No more effective feature in the middle fifties could have
been imagined. Benton had been the choice of many for the Presidency in
1852; his great contemporaries in Congress, Calhoun, Clay, and Webster,
were now dead, and men were eager to learn secret details of the
disputes and intrigues in which they had been concerned; his peculiar
uprightness, his energy, and his long public experience had given him
a commanding influence. He sent the chapters of his book in advance to
the _Evening Post_ because he, like it, had been a devoted Jacksonian,
a low-tariff man, and a hater of the Bank, and was now at one with it
in its free-soil views. From Bigelow’s private papers we learn that
the original arrangement (July, 1853) was that he should supply an
installment weekly, and be paid $10 a column. So wide was the interest
in the work that Appleton’s first edition of the first volume, in 1854,
was 30,000 copies. It aroused much pungent editorial comment, of which
a single instance will suffice. An installment of the second volume
which the _Evening Post_ published in June, 1855, asserted that Calhoun
was favorable to the Missouri Compromise when it passed, and that for
the first twenty years following he found no constitutional defects in
it. The Richmond _Enquirer_ denied this, entitling the recollections
“Historic Calumnies,” and declaring:
Instead of devoting the few remaining years of an ill-spent life
to the penitential offices of truth and charity, Col. Benton
expends his almost inexhaustible energies in a paroxysm of fiendish
passion; and when he should be imploring mercy for his manifold
sins, in rearing upon the grave of a political opponent a monument
to his own undying hate and reckless mendacity.
But the _Evening Post_, with the aid, among others, of former Secretary
of State John M. Clayton, had no difficulty in proving Benton right.
These were years in which the business management of the newspaper
began to feel markedly the hostility of the South. Its utterances
against slavery were so biting and persistent that no one below
Mason’s and Dixon’s line would advertise in it, and many Southern
buyers boycotted New York merchants who patronized it. “Thousands of
little merchants and traders in New York City,” as Bigelow later said,
“jealous of the rivalry of the other more prosperous houses advertising
with us, were in the habit of reporting them in the South, and in that
way our advertising columns were made very barren.” New Englanders of
large resources were equally offended by the paper’s low-tariff views.
Bigelow’s business acumen, reinforcing Bryant’s, was very much needed.
Among his first acts was the reorganization of the job printing office.
The income from this branch of the establishment, the first half year
of Bigelow’s assistant-editorship, was but $1,812.52, and for the
last half year of 1860 it was $7,295. This revolution was wrought by
increasing the equipment, hiring a new foreman, and opening up new
sources of business. When Bigelow became a partner the higher courts
had adopted the rule that all cases reaching them on appeal should be
printed. He had an extensive acquaintance among judges and lawyers,
whom he gave to understand that the _Evening Post_ would do legal
printing more satisfactorily than most job offices, and that it would
always have the work done on time. Very shortly it was in command of
virtually all the legal printing, and a great deal of other business
came with the current. So competent was the supervision exercised by
the foreman and bookkeeper that neither Bryant nor Bigelow, after the
start was made, spent a total of three days time in this office, which
was earning them $10,000 a year or more.
An equally important change was the removal in 1850 from the cramped
quarters on Pine Street to a larger building on the northwest corner
of Nassau and Liberty Streets. The old property had afforded room for
only a hand press, which was operated by a powerful negro. Since the
daily circulation in 1848 was but about 2,000 copies, the black could
turn off the edition without exhaustion. In the new home it was able
to have a large power press. At first an effort was made to operate
it with one of the “caloric” engines which Ericsson had invented in
1835 and more recently perfected, but this was found inadequate, and
one of Hoe’s new “lightning” engines was installed. Inasmuch as the
circulation steadily rose, as the size of the newspaper was increased,
and as the weekly, following in the footsteps of Greeley’s _Weekly
Tribune_, became an important property, the improved press facilities
were an absolute necessity.
But Bigelow’s chief service to the counting room lay in his insistence
upon an absolute change of business management. When the new building
was purchased, the man who had succeeded Boggs as publisher, a
practical printer of no education named Timothy A. Howe, was entrusted
with refitting it, and his incompetence soon became plain. A belief
that his general business capacity was small had been growing upon
Bigelow, and he finally resolved that the existing state of affairs
must end:
I sent word to Mr. Howe [Bigelow said late in life in an interview
with Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard] that I wished he would meet me in
Mr. Bryant’s office at such an hour the following day, and when we
met there, I said to them both that the business below stairs was
not conducted to my satisfaction; that I did not see any prospect
of its amendment under existing arrangements, and I felt that we
needed another man in that department. That, if I remained in the
concern, there must be another one in that department; that I did
not wish to crowd Mr. Howe out, but I did not propose to stay in
with him conducting the business, and that I was ready to name the
figures at which I would either buy his share or sell my own if he
was ready to do the same, but that it was the only condition upon
which I could stay in. Well, Mr. Bryant did not look up at all--he
hung his head. Howe was as pale as a sheet, and he stammered a
little and looked at Mr. Bryant to see whether there was any
comfort there, but he did not find any. After a few remarks in
which I repeated my story, ... Howe said, “Very well, I see that
Mr. Bryant is with you in the matter, and I will go....”
The result was that Isaac Henderson, who had come to the _Evening
Post_ in May, 1839, as a clerk at $7 a week, was placed in charge of
the business side of the paper; and in May, 1854, he bought one-third
of it, of the building, and of the job office. He paid $17,083.33,
agreeing further to give Howe six per cent. of the semi-annual
dividends for the next five years. Whatever Henderson’s faults, lack of
shrewdness and industry was not among them. He pushed the circulation
higher and higher, and was so capable in attracting advertisers that
even during the panic of 1857 the columns were crowded. In June, 1858,
the combined circulation of daily, weekly, and semi-weekly was 12,334
copies and was rapidly growing. “I never before knew what it was to
have more money than I wanted to spend,” Bigelow wrote his chief,
who was then abroad. Cooper & Hewitt had stopped their advertising
in consequence of articles about the shaky credit of the Atlantic
Telegraph and the Illinois Central Railroad, in which this firm had
large sums invested, but the _Post_ could afford to laugh at that. The
dividends for the year 1848 for the first time surpassed $45,000, and
this golden prosperity was rapidly enhanced in 1859.
“A single circumstance will perhaps enable you to form as good an
idea of how we stand as a sheet full of statistics,” Bryant wrote
Bigelow on April 11, 1859. “Mr. Henderson puts on a severe look in
which satisfaction is mingled with resignation, and says quietly, ‘The
_Evening Post_ is prosperous--very prosperous.’”
Indeed, Bigelow’s investment of 1848–9 proved the cornerstone of a
snug fortune. In 1860, a campaign year in which the circulation boomed
again, the net income was no less than $68,774.23. That is, his share
of the profits--he now owned a full third--was very decidedly more than
the $17,100 which his part of the newspaper had cost him. Immediately
after the election he offered Parke Godwin, who was seeking a place
in the customs service, his interest in the newspaper for a price, as
finally agreed upon, of $111,460--a bargain; and since he was willing
to take a small cash payment, Godwin eagerly accepted. Bigelow later
gave three reasons for his sudden decision to leave the _Evening Post_.
By the election of Lincoln the great free-soil cause seemed to have
triumphed, and he felt that there was no public movement urgently
needing his pen; he wanted leisure for deliberate literary work; and
he believed that from a dozen years of journalism he had received all
the intellectual nourishment it could give him. “In the twelve years
that I had spent on the paper,” he wrote, “I had managed to pay out of
its earnings what it had cost me; I had lived very comfortably; I had
purchased a country place of considerable value; I had had two trips to
the West Indies, to which I devoted five or six months, and a tour in
Europe with all my family, of nineteen months; and was able to retire
with a property which could not be fairly valued at less than $175,000.”