John Bigelow

John Bigelow Sr. (November 25, 1817 – December 19, 1911) was an American lawyer, statesman, and historian who edited the complete works of Benjamin Franklin and the first autobiography of Franklin taken from Franklin's previously lost original manuscript. He played a central role in the founding of the New York Public Library in 1895. Early life Born in Malden-on-Hudson, New York, he graduated in 1835 from Union College, where he was a member of the Sigma Phi Society and the Philomathean Society and was admitted to the bar in 1838. From 1849 to 1861, he was one of the editors and co-owners of the New York Evening Post. Political and literary career Bigelow began his political career as a reform Democrat, working with William Cullen Bryant in New York. In 1848, his antislavery convictions led him to leave the party, and he joined the Free Soil Party. In 1856, he led other former Democrats into the newly formed Republican Party and wrote a campaign biography of John C. Frémont, who won the Republican presidential nomination that year. In 1861, President Abraham Lincoln appointed him American consul in Paris, and Bigelow progressed to Chargé d'Affaires and Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to the Court of Napoleon III. In this capacity, working together with Charles Francis Adams, the United States minister to the United Kingdom, Bigelow helped to block the attempts to have France and the United Kingdom intervene in the American Civil War in favor of the Confederacy and thereby played a material role in the Union victory. On March 15, 1865, Lincoln appointed Bigelow ambassador to France. After leaving this position, he went to Germany, where he lived for three years, through the period of the Franco-Prussian War, and he became a friend of Otto von Bismarck. After the war's conclusion, he returned to New York, where he assisted his old friend Samuel J. Tilden in opposing the corruption that flourished in New York City under William Magear Tweed. Because of the universal respect in which Bigelow was held in New York, he was offered nominations by both political parties for state office in 1872. Under the influence of Tilden, Bigelow decided to rejoin the Democratic party, accepted its nomination, and was elected Secretary of State of New York, a position he held until 1876.