At once Bigelow showed marked journalistic aptitude. He brought a lightness of touch to his writing that was as valuable as his cultivation and good judgment. One early evidence of this was a weekly series of interviews with a “Jersey ferryman,” purporting to be snatches of political gossip which this illiterate but shrewd fellow picked up from Congressmen, Governors, and other public men whom he carried over the river. It enabled Bigelow to give readers the benefit of inside information obtained from Tilden, O’Conor, John Van Buren, Charles Sumner (a constant correspondent of Bigelow’s), and the free-soil leaders generally. His enterprise was equally marked. In 1850, nettled by the assertion of slavery men that since the British Emancipation Act the island of Jamaica had relapsed into barbarism, he spent three weeks there making observations, and wrote an admirable series of letters to the _Evening Post_. This refutation of the slavery arguments attracted attention in England. Early in 1854, when it was necessary to give shape to the inchoate elements of the Republican party by finding a candidate, he wrote a campaign biography of Fremont in installments for the _Evening Post_, the first chapter of which Jessie Benton Fremont contributed. During the winter of 1852–4 he was in Haiti, studying the capacity of the negro for self-government, and again sending the _Evening Post_ valuable correspondence. His book upon Jamaica was for some time considered the best in print, and his life of Fremont sold about 40,000 copies. Early in 1851 Bigelow began publishing a series of random papers called “Nuces Literariæ,” signed “Friar Lubin,” in which he commenced one of the most famous historical controversies of the time--the controversy with Jared Sparks over the latter’s methods of editing.