rs 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 bumpkin. Through the rough dialect and homely way of stating
the case, there shone the fine intellect of a cultivated and skillful
writer. The _Post_ guessed that James Russell Lowell was the real
author. This was regarded only as a rumor, however, and many people
scouted the idea that a young poet, whose books