BIGELOW, JOHN (181 7-1911 ), American journalist and diplomat, was born at Malden (N.Y.), on Nov. 25, 1817. He graduated at Union college in 1835, practised law in New York, was joint owner (with William Cullen Bryant) and managing editor of the New York Evening Post (1849-61) ; was United States consul at Paris in 1861-64, and minister to France in 1864-67. While consul, Bigelow wrote Les Etats-Unis d'Amerique en 1863 to counteract the apparent desire of the French for a dissolution of the American Union, by showing them the relative importance of the commerce of the northern and southern states. On discovering, in 1863, that a French shipbuilder, with the con nivance of Napoleon III., was constructing two ironclads and two corvettes for the Confederacy, he succeeded in preventing the delivery of three of these vessels to Confederate agents. In his work, France and the Confederate Navy (New York, 1888), he gives an account of this episode. In 1865-66, it devolved upon him as minister to France, to represent his Government in its delicate negotiations concerning the French occupation of Mexico, and he discharged this task with credit. From 1875 to 1877 he served as secretary of state of New York. He wrote books of travel, of popular biography, and of historical or political discus sion, etc., but his principal literary achievements were editions (1868 and 1888) of Franklin's autobiographical writings, co piously annotated; and of the complete works of Franklin (New York, 1887-89), based in part upon the editor's personal investiga tions of manuscript sources in France and elsewhere. Bigelow, a close friend of Samuel J. Tilden, became the latter's literary executor, editing his speeches and other political writings (1885), publishing a biography in 1895, and editing a two-volume collec tion of Tilden's letters and literary memorials (igo8). He also wrote a biography of William Cullen Bryant (189o). In 1897 ne published a volume entitled The Mystery of Sleep (end ed., 1903 ). In 1909 he published Retrospections of an Active Life, covering his career to 1866. He died in New York on Dec. 19, 1911 ; and two additional volumes of the Retrospections, ending with 1879, were issued by his son in 1913.