Bigelow scored another success when he obtained for the _Post_ most of Thomas Hart Benton’s “Thirty Years’ View” in advance of its issue in book form. No more effective feature in the middle fifties could have been imagined. Benton had been the choice of many for the Presidency in 1852; his great contemporaries in Congress, Calhoun, Clay, and Webster, were now dead, and men were eager to learn secret details of the disputes and intrigues in which they had been concerned; his peculiar uprightness, his energy, and his long public experience had given him a commanding influence. He sent the chapters of his book in advance to the _Evening Post_ because he, like it, had been a devoted Jacksonian, a low-tariff man, and a hater of the Bank, and was now at one with it in its free-soil views. From Bigelow’s private papers we learn that the original arrangement (July, 1853) was that he should supply an installment weekly, and be paid $10 a column. So wide was the interest in the work that Appleton’s first edition of the first volume, in 1854, was 30,000 copies. It aroused much pungent editorial comment, of which a single instance will suffice. An installment of the second volume which the _Evening Post_ published in June, 1855, asserted that Calhoun was favorable to the Missouri Compromise when it passed, and that for the first twenty years following he found no constitutional defects in it. The Richmond _Enquirer_ denied this, entitling the recollections “Historic Calumnies,” and declaring: Instead of devoting the few remaining years of an ill-spent life to the penitential offices of truth and charity, Col. Benton expends his almost inexhaustible energies in a paroxysm of fiendish passion; and when he should be imploring mercy for his manifold sins, in rearing upon the grave of a political opponent a monument to his own undying hate and reckless mendacity. But the _Evening Post_, with the aid, among others, of former Secretary of State John M. Clayton, had no difficulty in proving Benton right. These were years in which the business management of the newspaper began to feel markedly the hostility of the South. Its utterances against slavery were so biting and persistent that no one below Mason’s and Dixon’s line would advertise in it, and many Southern buyers boycotted New York merchants who patronized it. “Thousands of little merchants and traders in New York City,” as Bigelow later said, “jealous of the rivalry of the other more prosperous houses advertising with us, were in the habit of reporting them in the South, and in that way our advertising columns were made very barren.” New Englanders of large resources were equally offended by the paper’s low-tariff views. Bigelow’s business acumen, reinforcing Bryant’s, was very much needed.