The series, thus begun in the Courier in June, 1846, was closed in the Standard in September, 1848.[75] Although Lowell did not sign his name to any of the numbers either in the Courier or in the Standard, the authorship was a very open secret indeed. Still, he had the pleasure which sprang from the dramatic assumption, and he took good care not to confuse the personalities in the little comedy, by thrusting his own real figure on the stage. As he wrote forty years later: “I had great fun out of it. I have often wished that I could have had a literary nom de plume and kept my own to myself. I shouldn’t have cared a doit what happened to him.”
A dozen years later, on the eve of the war for the Union, Mr. Hughes, who was introducing the book to the English public, wanted Lowell to write an historical introduction. In declining to do this,[76] he gave a brief and clear statement of his political position at the time of writing the “Biglow Papers.” “I believed our war with Mexico (though we had as just ground for it as a strong nation ever has against a weak one) to be essentially a war of false pretences, and that it would result in widening the boundaries and so prolonging the life of slavery. Believing that it is the manifest destiny of the English race to occupy this whole continent, and to display there that practical understanding in matters of government and colonization which no other race has given such proof of possessing since the Romans, I hated to see a noble hope evaporated into a lying phrase to sweeten the foul breath of demagogues. Leaving the sin of it to God, I believed and still believe that slavery is the Achilles heel of our polity: that it is a temporary and false supremacy of the white races, sure to destroy that supremacy at last, because an enslaved people always prove themselves of more enduring fibre than their enslavers, as not suffering from the social vices sure to be engendered by oppression in the governing class. Against these and many other things I thought all honest men should protest. I was born and bred in the country, and the dialect was homely to me. I tried my first ‘Biglow Paper’ in a newspaper and found that it had a great run. So I wrote the others from time to time during the year which followed, always very rapidly, and sometimes (as with ‘What Mr. Robinson thinks’) at one sitting.”
The cleverness of the refrain in this last named poem started it on a hilarious career, and it is perhaps only in one of Gilbert’s topical songs that we can match the success of a collocation of words, where the quaintness of turn keeps a barren phrase perennially amusing. It was with an echo of it in his mind no doubt that when he had just done reading the proofs of the entire volume, Lowell snapped his whip in like fashion in a poem for the Standard, which he never reprinted, but which is interesting from the diversity shown in the handling of a single theme.
In the fall of 1848, Harrison Gray Otis, writing in advocacy of the election of Zachary Taylor, referred to an incident in 1831, when, as Mayor of Boston, he answered an application from the Governors of Virginia and Georgia for information respecting the persons responsible for The Liberator. “Some time afterward,” he says, “it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor: that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors.” Lowell saw the letter in one of the newspapers of the day, clipped out this sentence, pasted it on a sheet of paper, and wrote below it, with the title “the day of small things,” the notable lines which in his collected poems bear the heading “To W. L. Garrison.” The poem was published in the Standard, 19 October, 1848, but the incident evidently made a strong impression on him, especially when he considered what had taken place in seventeen years; for immediately afterward he wrote again, and in the number for 26 October, appeared
THE EX-MAYOR’S CRUMB OF CONSOLATION.
A PATHETIC BALLAD.[77]
“Two Governors once a letter writ
To the Mayor of a distant city,
And told him a paper was published in it,
That was telling the truth, and ’t was therefore fit
That the same should be crushed as dead as a nit
By an Aldermanic Committee:
‘Don’t say so?’ says Otis,
‘I’ll enquire if so ’t is:
Dreadful! telling the truth? What a pity!
“‘It can’t be the Atlas, that’s perfectly clear,
And of course it isn’t the Advertiser,
’T is out of the Transcript’s appropriate sphere,
The Post is above suspicion: oh dear,
To think of such accidents happening here!
I hoped that our people were wiser.
While we’re going,’ says Otis,
‘Faustissimis votis,
How very annoying such flies are!’
“So, without more ado, he enquired all round
Among people of wealth and standing;
But wealth looked scornful, and standing frowned;
At last in a garret with smoke imbrowned,
The conspirators all together he found,—
One man with a colored boy banding;
‘’Pon my word,’ says Otis,
‘Decidedly low t is,’
As he groped for the stairs on the landing.
“So he wrote to the Governors back agen,
And told them t was something unworthy of mention;
That t was only a single man with a pen,
And a font of type in a sort of den,
A person unknown to Aldermen,
And, of course, beneath attention;
‘And therefore,’ wrote Otis,
Annuentibus totis,
‘There’s no reason for apprehension.’