“A single circumstance will perhaps enable you to form as good an idea of how we stand as a sheet full of statistics,” Bryant wrote Bigelow on April 11, 1859. “Mr. Henderson puts on a severe look in which satisfaction is mingled with resignation, and says quietly, ‘The _Evening Post_ is prosperous--very prosperous.’”
Indeed, Bigelow’s investment of 1848–9 proved the cornerstone of a snug fortune. In 1860, a campaign year in which the circulation boomed again, the net income was no less than $68,774.23. That is, his share of the profits--he now owned a full third--was very decidedly more than the $17,100 which his part of the newspaper had cost him. Immediately after the election he offered Parke Godwin, who was seeking a place in the customs service, his interest in the newspaper for a price, as finally agreed upon, of $111,460--a bargain; and since he was willing to take a small cash payment, Godwin eagerly accepted. Bigelow later gave three reasons for his sudden decision to leave the _Evening Post_. By the election of Lincoln the great free-soil cause seemed to have triumphed, and he felt that there was no public movement urgently needing his pen; he wanted leisure for deliberate literary work; and he believed that from a dozen years of journalism he had received all the intellectual nourishment it could give him. “In the twelve years that I had spent on the paper,” he wrote, “I had managed to pay out of its earnings what it had cost me; I had lived very comfortably; I had purchased a country place of considerable value; I had had two trips to the West Indies, to which I devoted five or six months, and a tour in Europe with all my family, of nineteen months; and was able to retire with a property which could not be fairly valued at less than $175,000.”
But before Bigelow severed his connection with the _Evening Post_ he attempted one highly interesting service; he tried, with temporary success, to obtain the French critic Sainte-Beuve as a literary correspondent. He was in Europe from the last days of 1858 until the late spring of 1860. In his unpublished journal for Jan. 24, 1860, when he was staying in Paris, he records that he went at one o’clock to see Sainte-Beuve “and to conclude an agreement partially negotiated” on behalf of the newspaper. The great Frenchman, fifty-six years old, was at the height of his fame, having just been made commander of the Legion of Honor. If the rate of pay he was willing to consider from the _Evening Post_ seems small, we must remember that he was busy with his “Causeries du Lundi” for the _Moniteur_, and that he probably thought he could re-use this material for the American journal. Bigelow offered him 125 francs, or about $25, for each letter, stipulating that Sainte-Beuve should pay the translator, who, Bigelow thought, ought to accept $5. Sainte-Beuve had already written and mailed his first letter, and he made no immediate demur to these terms. Next day, however, he wrote that his inquiries had convinced him that no good translator would do the work for less than $10, and that he could not go on. Bigelow at once increased his offer to $30 a letter, of which $20 was to go to Sainte-Beuve, but the critic persisted in his refusal. The compensation, he said, was adequate, but he was too old for such a burden as this would impose. Sainte-Beuve’s letter, filling two and a half columns with its 5,500 words, had meanwhile appeared in the _Evening Post_, under the heading “Literary Matters in France.” The greater part was devoted to a beautifully written and fine critical disquisition upon the recently published correspondence of Béranger, but prefixed to this were several paragraphs of general comment. “French literature for some years past has produced nothing very new or brilliant,” he wrote, “especially in the department of poetry.... But in the department of history, political and literary, and in that of erudition, good books and meritorious monographs have been written.” Political events since 1848, he explained, had thrown many men into a retirement favorable to literary pursuits--Villemain, Guizot, Remusat, and Victor Cousin. In closing he alluded to the loss the Institut de France had suffered in Macaulay, and added: “The death of the illustrious Prescott had already deprived the same learned body of a corresponding member. It is thought that America will also provide the member to be named as Prescott’s successor (_primo avulso non deficit alter_), and we are informed that some influential members of that academy have thought of Mr. Motley, whose admirable historical work has been recently introduced here by M. Guizot.”
