John Bigelow

• John Bigelow
• Born: November 25, 1817
• Died: December 19, 1911

Journalist, reform politician, diplomat, was the youngest of the three children of Asa B. Bigelow, a prosperous merchant, and his wife Lucy (Isham) Bigelow, daughter of a farmer and storekeeper. The Bigelow family had emigrated from Connecticut to Bristol (now Maiden), New York, where a family group purchased 200 acres of choice riverfront property and developed its commercial potential. At the age of fourteen John enrolled in Washington College at Hartford, Connecticut (now Trinity College), where he studied for three years before transferring to Union College in Schenectady, New York, from where he was graduated in 1835. He read law first in Hudson, New York, then moved to New York City to continue his apprenticeship and gain admission to the bar.

Bigelow’s first public appointment was as a state inspector of Sing Sing prison in 1845. He made significant improvements in the institution by appointing competent wardens, systematizing discipline, and eliminating graft. He also recognized the simple, human needs of the prisoners; at his insistence the convicts were issued a weekly ration of tobacco, and a prison library was begun that offered novels by Charles Dickens and other current writers.

Bigelow was a practical reformer, not interested in Utopian schemes. He believed change to be a slow, evolutionary process, best accomplished by scientific innovation. As a Jacksonian Democrat, he advocated the widest possible political liberty to ensure the freedom of personal initiative; he campaigned for universal suffrage without regard for property ownership, race, or gender. He also subscribed to the Democratic economic doctrines of free trade and sound money, opinions he held in common with his New York City neighbor William Cullen Bryant, editor of The New York Evening Post.

Bigelow had already begun contributing a political column to The Democratic Review; his friendship with Bryant heightened his interest in journalism as a reform vehicle, and he began writing articles for The Evening Post as well.

In the mid-forties Bigelow became a fervent member of the reform wing of the New York State Democratic party, known as the Barnburners, who became identified with opposition to the annexation of Texas and to the extension of slavery into the territories. Stimulated by the political climate, and bored with his law practice, Bigelow in 1848 agreed to become coeditor of Bryant’s Evening Post, but not until he was offered a one-third ownership of the paper.

Under the editorship of Bryant and Bigelow The Evening Post became an organ of the Free-Soil wing of the Democratic party. Bigelow’s opinions were reflected in its columns: he opposed the extension of slavery; advocated prison reform and lobbied for the abolition of capital punishment; favored the employment of women, urging equal pay for equal work; and criticized the results of the patronage system. In the 1850s he visited both Jamaica and Haiti to gather materials on the abilities of free blacks; as a result, he published Jamaica in 1850 (1851), and the Wit and Wisdom of the Haytians (1877). Along with his rival George Ripley of The New-York Tribune, he developed the modern art of book reviewing. In 1850 he married Jane Poultney of New York. They had eight children, of whom six lived to maturity: Grace, Flora, Jenny, John, Poultney, and Annie.

Late in 1855 The Evening Post finally broke with the Democratic party and gave its support to the infant Republican organization. Bigelow worked for John Charles Frémont’s presidential nomination, then wrote the official campaign biography, which was serialized in The Evening Post, and helped to direct the campaign. With Lincoln’s election in 1860 he considered the slavery question settled; he considered southern secession to be a bluff that would quickly collapse with the inauguration. In January 1861, he sold his interest in The Evening Post and retired to the country to write.

The outbreak of the Civil War badly shocked him; he offered his services to the government, and was named consul-general to France, becoming minister in 1865. Bigelow distinguished himself during his service in France. He cultivated ties with French journalists and liberals, effectively counteracting Confederate war propaganda. Most significantly, he exposed and halted the building of Confederate warships in French ports. From 1865 until the end of his tenure in 1866 he had to deal with the delicate question of French military support for the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico, finally finding a formula that would allow Napoleon III to withdraw his troops without losing face. His quiet diplomacy created a storm of protest within the United States, where his policy was considered too weak.

Once again Bigelow tried to retire to the country, but he was temperamentally incapable of withdrawal from public life. For a brief period in 1869 he served as the second managing editor of The New York Times following the death of Henry J. Raymond. During his two-month tenure he alienated many of the staff. His hasty resignation as editor, however, was due to a colossal mistake. President Ulysses S. Grant often conferred with Bigelow when he was in New York City, and the paper gained a reputation as an accurate barometer of the administration. Exploiting this, in August 1869 Jay Gould, the infamous financial manipulator and robber baron who was attempting to corner the gold market, had a mutual acquaintance give Bigelow an article for publication supposedly representing Grant’s views, and indicating that the government would support a rise in the price of the metal. Less than a month later the Wall Street panic known as “Black Friday” occurred. In the recriminations that followed Bigelow resigned.

He spent the next two years living as a private citizen in Germany. He could not long resist the lure of politics, however. Returning to New York, he gradually shifted his allegiance from the Republican to the Democratic party, now headed in New York State by his old friend Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden appointed him to a commission charged with investigating graft in Erie Canal construction projects, and in 1875 he was elected New York Secretary of State, an office he held for two years. He served as an aide to Tilden and participated in his presidential campaign, which resulted in the disputed Hayes-Tilden election of 1876. Bigelow always believed that Tilden had been legitimately elected to the presidency.

At last retiring from politics to pursue his literary ambitions, Bigelow produced a large body of work, including several commentaries on French society and politics. Molinos the Quietist (1882) and The Mystery of Sleep (1897) reflected his youthful conversion to the doctrines of Swedenborg. Probably his greatest contribution to American letters was his Life of Benjamin Franklin (1874) based on original manuscripts, which he located and purchased in France, and his editing of a definitive edition of the Complete Works of Benjamin Franklin (10 vols., 1887-88). Of interest to historians is his France and the Confederate Navy, 1862-68: An International Episode (1888). He chronicled his long life in Retrospections of an Active Life (5 vols., 1909-13).

As a trustee of Tilden’s estate, Bigelow guided the merger of the Tilden Trust with the Astor and Lennox foundations to form the New York Public Library, and, to a degree, designed the collection and devised its management system. He was United States commissioner to the Brussels Exposition in 1888, and a delegate to the 1893 state constitutional convention. In the mid-eighties he met Philippe Bunau-Varilla, the young French engineer in charge of the Panama Canal Project. Bigelow became his confidant, and the Bigelow home served as a haven for the Frenchman in the last hectic days of the canal intrigue while Bunau-Varilla finessed the Panamanian Revolution. The first flag of that Central American Republic was made in the library of the Bigelow home by Bunau-Varilla, his wife, and Bigelow’s daughter Grace.

During his extraordinarily long career John Bigelow devoted his keen mind and his articulate pen to the cause of a broader democracy. His most important contribution to American society was as a political journalist and a Civil War diplomat, but he put his stamp on a variety of American institutions. His wide-ranging interests reflected a nineteenth-century eclecticism sadly lost to the modern world.

John Bigelow’s papers and the papers of his son Poultney Bigelow are in the collection of the New York Public Library. Additional family papers are owned by Mr. and Mrs. Constantine Sidamon-Eristoff, and Ms. Anne Eristoff. The definitive biography is M. Clapp, Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow (1947; reprinted 1968). For a complete list of the writings of Bigelow see Clapp’s bibliography. See also Memorial Addresses delivered before the Century Association, New York, March 9,1912, The Dictionary of American Biography, (1929), A. Nevins, The Evening Post: A Century of Journalism (New York, 1922), and B. Willson, America’s Ambassadors to France (London, 1928). An obituary appeared in The New York Times, December 20, 1911.