Page 82 - Four Famous American Writers: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, James Russell Lowell, Bayard Taylor

as the work of "jingo" politicians, controlled in some degree by the slavery
power. Southern slaveholders wished to increase the territory of the United

States in such a way as to enlarge the territory where slavery would be
lawful. 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. He puts
the case admirably. I wish, however, he could have used good English."
Evidently Sumner did not suspect that so cultured and polished a poet as

James Russell Lowell was the author of a stanza like this:

'Wut 's the use o' meetin'-goin' Every Sabbath, wet or dry, Ef it's right to go
amowin' Feller-men like oats and rye? I dunno but wut it's pooty Trainin'
round in bobtail coats.-- But it's curus Christian dooty, This 'ere cuttin'

folks's throats.

The fact is, however, Lowell had written all this, even the letter with bad
spelling purporting to come from Ezekiel Biglow. He was deeply interested
in the antislavery cause, in good politics and sound principles; yet he saw

that it would be useless for him to get up and preach against what he did
not like. There were plenty of other earnest, serious-minded men like

Garrison and Whittier who were fighting against the evil in the
straightforward, blunt way. Lowell was as interested as they in having the
wrongs righted; but he was more cool-headed than the rest. He considered

the matter. A joke, he said to himself, will carry the crowd ten times as
quickly as a serious protest; and people will listen to one of their own

number, a common, every-day, sensible fellow with a spark of wit in him,
where they would go away bored by polished and cultured writing full of
Latin quotations. This is how he came to begin the Biglow papers. Their

instant success proved that he was quite right.

Of course it was not long before shrewd people began to see that this fine
humor, with its home-thrusts, was not in reality written by a country