Forgotten First Citizen: John Bigelow
by Margaret Clapp
Summary
Margaret Clapp built her Pulitzer winning biography out of her own doctoral dissertation, reviving a man whose real influence on nineteenth century American public life had, by her own telling, gone almost entirely unrecognized. The book follows John Bigelow from his early career as co owner and editor of the New York Evening Post, a partnership he bought into in 1848 alongside William Cullen Bryant, into a diplomatic career that mattered more than his relatively quiet public profile ever suggested.
Clapp centers the book on Bigelow's years in Paris during the Civil War, first as American consul and then as minister to France from 1865 to 1866, when he worked closely with Charles Francis Adams in London to keep France from recognizing the Confederacy or allowing Confederate warships to be built in French shipyards, quiet diplomatic pressure that helped deny the South the foreign intervention it needed to survive. The book follows Bigelow home to New York after the war, where he helped Samuel Tilden expose and dismantle the corruption of Boss Tweed's political machine, then served as New York's secretary of state and managed Tilden's disputed 1876 presidential campaign.
Clapp closes with Bigelow's remarkable final act, executing Tilden's will to found the New York Public Library and serving as its first president from 1895 until his death in 1911 at ninety four, a philanthropic legacy that has outlasted nearly everything else he did in public life. Reading the book means meeting a man who kept turning up at the edge of major nineteenth century events, wartime diplomacy, machine politics, and one of the country's great public institutions, without ever becoming a household name himself, and it suits a reader drawn to exactly that kind of overlooked, consequential public servant.
Historical Context & Significance
Forgotten First Citizen won the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for Biography for Margaret Clapp, who had spent twelve years teaching English literature at a New York girls' school before turning her graduate research on Bigelow into a full biography. The following year she became president of Wellesley College, a position she held for seventeen years, making the book something closer to a stepping stone in an academic and administrative career than the center of it.
Bigelow himself remains genuinely obscure next to the diplomats and politicians he worked alongside, and Clapp's biography is largely responsible for whatever modern recognition he has, still the standard account of a diplomat whose quiet work in Paris helped keep Britain and France from tipping the Civil War toward the Confederacy. The New York Public Library he helped found remains the most visible part of his legacy today.