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Updated: May 13, 2025
Though I was a devotee of the Biglow Papers, I did not know their distinguished author even by sight; and I was intensely amused by the air of easy mastery, the calm and almost fatherly patronage, with which this cultivated American overrode the indignant showwoman; pointed out, for the general benefit of the admiring tourists, the gaps and lapses in her artistic, architectural, and archaeological knowledge; and made mullion and portcullis, and armour and tapestry the pegs for a series of neat discourses on mediaeval history, domestic decoration, and the science of fortification.
The pieces were called "The Biglow Papers," and his father read them out of a Boston newspaper, and thought them the wisest and wittiest things that ever were. The boy always remembered how he recited the lines "Ez fur war, I call it murder There ye hev it plain and flat; 'N I don't want to go no furder Then my Testament fur that.
The antislavery people of New England were violently opposed to the war, and this poem by the Yankee Hosea Biglow immediately became popular, because it put in a humorous, common-sense way what everybody else had been saying with deadly earnest. Charles Sumner saw the common sense of the poem, but didn't see the fun in the bad spelling. Said he, "This Yankee poet has the true spirit.
It was the Mexican war that first aroused Lowell to the seriousness of the extension of slavery, and it was meeting a recruiting officer in the streets of Boston, "covered all over with brass let alone that which nature had set on his countenance," which inspired his writing the first of the "Biglow Papers."
We know that since Gulliver there has been no piece of original humor produced in England equal to "Knickerbocker's New York"; that not in this century has any English writer equaled the wit and satire of the "Biglow Papers."
The writer's name is not given, but he is not an American and he is ignorant, probably, of America as it was from 1830 to 1850. When the "Biglow Papers" appeared, I was a Democrat, and I am quite sure that the publication produced no effect, not even the least, upon the opinions of Democrats or the action of the Democratic Party. For this broad statement there is no evidence.
His cry ``on to Richmond'' during the first part of the struggle, his fearful alarm when, like the heroes in the ``Biglow Papers, he really discovered ``why baggonets is peaked, his terror as the conflict deepened, his proposals for special peace negotiations later all these things were among the serious obstacles which President Lincoln had to encounter; and now, fearing burdens which, in his opinion, could not and would not be borne by the State, and conjuring up specters of trouble, he came to Albany and earnestly advised members of the legislature against the passage of the bounty bill.
Biglow that we cannot settle the great political questions which are now presenting themselves to the nation by the opinions of Jeremiah or Ezekiel as to the wants and duties of the Jews in their time, nor do I believe that an entire community with their feelings and views would be practicable or even agreeable at the present day.
Lowell's "Biglow Papers" testified to the fundamental Yankee; but the Longfellows were endowed with a peculiar refinement and purity which seemed to distinguish them as much in Cambridge or London as it did in Portland, where there has always been a rather superior sort of society. It was like French refinement without being Gallic. No wonder that a famous poet should emanate from such a family.
Later figures of our literature allure us Hester Prynne, wrapped in her cloak of Nersus, the Scarlet Letter, Hosea Biglow, Evangeline, Uncle Tom, and Topsy but the charm of this figure is unfading. The new writers introduce us to their worlds, and with pleasure we make the acquaintance of new friends.
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