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....”