Arts and Letters

The man of letters in public life practises a fine art second to no other. It is useless to analyze the causes which lead members of the Academy to choose their colleagues, for the finer senses are elusive in their action. But in the case of John Bigelow there was no mystery. He was not only a distinguished writer: he was also a famous publicist, statesman, and diplomat, with a genius alike for leadership and coöperation. In every impulse and instinct he was a colleague: when others faltered about the place of our organization in American life he was secure in his judgment, placing time, energy, and money at the service of this Academy. His convictions as to the work it had to do and his unshaken faith that in time, its place would be established in American life were a source of inspiration to us all.

This was due to the fullest knowledge of men and their institutions in all lands, and to his comparative study of life in America with that elsewhere. He was born at Malden on the Hudson River in 1817 and died at ninety-four. For him there was neither youth nor old age, but a beautiful childhood and adolescence until he was graduated at eighteen from Union College, when he seems to have entered instantly on a maturity which lasted without withering for over seventy-five years. And such years!—the years during which his own and every other civilized land was totally reconstructed. He studied law, was admitted to the bar, and built up a handsome practice. But his heart was not absorbed in his profession, because he was a born publicist and pamphleteer. His fixed purpose was to earn a competence so that he might as early as possible become a public servant. This he accomplished by the time he was fifty; but long before that he began to write, and was a welcome contributor to no fewer than seven newspapers and periodicals. Of one, the Plebeian, he became the literary editor.

It was about 1838 that the magnet of this metropolis drew him from Hudson, the local capital, to New York. At once he became a member of an association, known as The Column, composed of brilliant young lawyers, taking themselves most seriously, which was in itself an embryo Academy. Their purpose was to broaden their culture and magnify their influence by the force of organization. Sooner or later they all became members of the Century Association, and the two venerable survivors, Parke Godwin and John Bigelow, while the latter was president of that famous guild, placed their emblem, a handsome column surmounted by the lamp of learning, in the keeping of the Association. Their notable careers were measurably due to their reactions upon each other, and this was one of the facts which influenced John Bigelow in his devotion to the National Institute with its Senate, the Academy.

Having found his powers and solidified his convictions, he entered the field of national politics as an ardent Free-Soil Democrat. So skilful and convincing was his polemic in favor of Van Buren that William Cullen Bryant secured him as a partner in the ownership and as a co-editor of the Evening Post. The struggle to prevent the extension of slavery into the Territories was regarded by that paper as most important, and to this the new editor particularly devoted himself. In journalism he had the "heavy fist" of stern conviction; but simultaneously, until he sold his shares to Parke Godwin in 1861 and withdrew, he was busy with literary work. He traveled in Jamaica, Haiti, and Europe, writing almost continuously social and political studies of the lands he visited, all of which were printed. Some were collected into book form. For long years he continued his contributions to the press, and to the end of his life he was as famous a pamphleteer as any man employing the English language.

It was in 1845 that his public service began. For three years he was an inspector of New York prisons, and it was by his measures that Sing Sing penitentiary became the model prison it once was. This was the moment when Tilden was beginning his political career as assemblyman. Three years older than Bigelow, he was not yet a Free-Soiler. But the two young statesmen of similar faith formed about this time an acquaintance, which, considerably later, ripened into a friendship extremely important in molding the character of both. Tilden was a distant and reticent man, with a comparatively small circle of friends, even of acquaintances; but he knew how to bind a select few both to his person and his interests. Almost the last act of John Bigelow was to reject with scorn the proffer of Congress for a Tilden bust to be placed in the Capitol at Washington. He thought his friend worthy of a monumental statue. It was he who remedied the results of Tilden's defective will, which was likely, as an invalid document, to thwart every desire of the would-be testator. By his influence the city of New York secured the great Tilden Foundation for a public library; and, as far as word or deed could accomplish it, the memory of Tilden was impressed on posterity as a man of feeling, of power, and of rectitude. Such loyalty was characteristic of John Bigelow; it was that quality in him which gave us the Bryant monument in Bryant Park.

His public life was destined to shine with great luster. In 1861 he was sent as consul to Paris, when the admirable Dayton was head of the legation. The barriers between consular and diplomatic service were not then so high as to-day, and in 1864, when Dayton died, Bigelow was put in charge of the office. So admirable had been his foreign career that he was speedily made envoy and minister, a position he held until 1867. These seven years in Paris at least parallel, if they do not surpass, in service rendered any similar period in the career of an American diplomat. By an important volume written in French and published in 1864 he set the situation of his country clearly before the Frenchmen of the Empire, then as always dumbly hostile to America. The Napoleonic government had connived with secret agents to permit the escape from French harbors of four armed and iron-clad cruisers. Bigelow not merely discovered and collected the necessary evidence, but so presented it to the French Government as to prevent the escape of a single ship. When we recall what happened in the case of the Alabama and the Georgia, built in England, we may estimate what his work as a diplomat meant during and after the war. His, too, were the negotiations, backed by a stalwart administration in Washington, which compelled Napoleon III to abandon the dream of his uncle that a great Latin empire should embrace the Gulf of Mexico. It was in Paris, too, that he obtained and published to the world the original and complete manuscript of Franklin's Autobiography, so shamefully mutilated by a grandson under the guise of editing.

The influences of European life on John Bigelow were culturally very profound; he returned to its various countries again and again after his public service was completed. It would be difficult to recall a great name of his epoch with whose possessor he was unacquainted; with most of the highly eminent he was at times in personal touch; with Gladstone he waged a bitter controversy in America's behalf. There is a type of American, largely represented over the seas, who beholds and admires Europe only to weaken his loyalty and make him apologize for his origin. Of such was not Bigelow. He was a severe critic of his country, as he was of himself, but the intrinsic truth and power of the American system was a part of his gospel, a faith from which he never wavered; his highest aim was to illuminate it by comparative study. At the time of his death it was recalled that he had lived under every President of the country except Washington, and was even a contemporary of Napoleon. His mental range was as extensive as his life and experience of living; but everything focused in a land which was his as it belonged to few others: his family had been on the soil since 1642.

His passion for liberty made him a strong individualist. He was in economics the most extreme free-trader of his day. Socially he was exquisitely considerate of others, but his time was the capital of which his Creator had made him the steward, and his style of life was delightfully original. At a festival in the house of his birth a loyal son once put in use the pulpit and pews from the old Malden Presbyterian Church, of which his grandsire had been an elder and upon which his famous father had sat as a child; but spiritually John Bigelow was a rebel against the historic faith of his sires. While in the island of St. Thomas when he was about forty years of age a Swedish gentleman had drawn his attention to the work of Emanuel Swedenborg as an interpreter of the Bible, the literary supremacy of which volume then as ever fascinated Bigelow, though some of the contents were to him, literally construed, a hard saying. He was attracted by the doctrine of the Stockholm philosopher as to "correspondences" between nature and spirit, and was until his sixtieth year or longer a devoted and critical student of that type of theosophy. Later his ardor was somewhat diminished, and he told me, as doubtless others, when he was far advanced in the eighties, that he could not consider himself a regular member of the sect with which he had long identified himself. Yet he had found and stored deep in his mind the "arcana cœlestia," and never lost the serene optimism or the implicit trust of a childlike faith. As few others, he was a spiritually minded man.

Besides his fugitive writings, there are nineteen titles to John Bigelow's credit in the history of American letters. Most of these represent substantial books, in the biographies of Tilden, Bryant, and Franklin, as well as in his own recollections, two and three volumes. In all those thousands of pages there is not a careless word or thought. He was a conscientious writer, with a clear, vivid, trenchant style, and he expounded the truth without fear as it was given to him. To such as he was the world gives its confidence and imposes on them great trusts. He was, of course, connected with the leading historical societies, those of the nation and his native State among the number; he sat on the managing boards of the Public Library and the Metropolitan Museum; he was a member of the Municipal Art Commission, and president of the Century Association. Such were his known activities, but there was the commanded reticence between his two hands in the matter of private beneficence; not even his nearest and dearest were in that secret of the Lord, which is with them that fear Him.

A philosopher in thought, a citizen in action, a paragon in domestic life, he reaped in full measure where he had sown. Thinkers, statesmen, and a circle of worth-while friends respected and loved him. His person was always attractive and to the end he wisely cultivated the style of dress in which he was most at ease, that of his fifties and sixties. As ever-advancing age bestowed its abundant bounties upon him, he became the first citizen of New York, in a measure, of the nation, and was on all occasions unfailingly recognized as such by those present. His features were boldly cut, generous but firm in line and dimension. His eyes were brilliant even in his latest years, and with his strong frame, his pleasant address, and self-respecting dignity there was something leonine in his personality. His humor was a never-failing buckler against an adversary's darts or his own petulance, an affliction carefully concealed if he had it. His wit was spontaneous, genial, and of his soul's very essence. For rising men and writers struggling with the adverse conditions of the hour he had a wealth of sympathy. His advice and suggestions were never perfunctory, and his sagacity generally indicated the tactics of practical common sense suited to each one of the many who consulted him. He was an asset of the greatest importance to this Academy, and his memory will abide in its history and traditions.