Background
He was born in 1817 in Malden-on-Hudson, New York, United States.
He was born in 1817 in Malden-on-Hudson, New York, United States.
He graduated at Union College in 1835.
He practised law in New York for several years after 1839; took up journalistic work; was joint owner (with William Cullen Bryant) and managing editor of the New York Evening Post (1849 - 1861); was United States consul at Paris in 1861-1864, and was minister to France in 1864-1867. In 1861 Bigelow, prosperous and widely known, retired from the Evening Post.
In his work entitled France and the Confederate Navy (New York, 1888) he gives an account of this episode.
These editions were based in part upon the editor's personal investigations of manuscript sources in France and elsewhere, and supplanted the well-known, long serviceable, but less accurate edition of Jared Sparks (Boston, 1836 - 1840); they have in turn been supplanted by the edition of A. H. Smythe.
He also wrote a biography of William Cullen Bryant (1890).
In 1897 he published a volume entitled The Mystery of Sleep (2nd ed. , 1903).
In 1909 he published Retrospections of an Active Life.
(Book by Bigelow, John)
Bigelow joined the antislavery Republican party, despite his dislike of its high-tariff policies.
He engaged in active politics only briefly thereafter - to help his friend Tilden, governor of New York, in his campaign against political corruption in the state in the early 1870, to run as a Democrat for secretary of state of New York in 1875, to work for Tilden's election as president in 1876, and to serve as a delegate to the New York constitutional convention in 1894.
On June 11, 1850, Bigelow married Jane Tunis Poultney and they had nine children.