JOHN BIGELOW AS AN EDITOR OF THE “EVENING POST”  
In the closing days of 1848 John Bigelow, who like Bryant lived to be called “The First Citizen of the Republic,” became one of the proprietors and editors of the Evening Post. His official connection with it lasted eleven years, when he graduated from it into that diplomatic field in which he won his chief fame; but his real connection might be said to have been lifelong. Bigelow’s protracted career was one of great variety and interest. He lived in the lifetime of George III, Napoleon, and every President except Washington, dying in 1911. His first prominence was given him by the Evening Post, and thereafter he was always a landmark in New York life. John Jay Chapman wrote in 1910 that he “stands as a monument of old-fashioned sterling culture and accomplishment—a sort of beacon to the present age of ignorance and pretence, and to ‘a land where all things are forgotten.’” His wide culture is attested by the variety of his books—a biography of Franklin and a work on Gladstone in the Civil War; a treatise on Molinos the quietist, and another on sleep; a history of “France and the Confederate Navy” and a biography of Tilden. It has fallen to few of our ministers to France to be so useful as he. He was prominent in almost every great civic undertaking in New York during the last half century of his life. Withal, his fine presence, simple dignity, and courtesy made him a model American gentleman.
It was with good reason that Bryant requested him to become an 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 a229 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 of230 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 editorial231 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 Literari?,” 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 at232 home and abroad. In the fifth of the “Nuces Literari?” (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”233 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 had234 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, ............