7pp. Legal petition to French Judge Bellesme. With: John Bigelow. Autograph Letter Signed. Highland Falls on Hudson [New York], July 10, 1899. 2pp. Explaining how he came into possession of the manuscript while serving as US ambassador to France during the Civil War.

The most prominent American journalist of the mid-19th century, Horace Greeley (1811-1872), guiding light of the New York Tribune, often visited Europe (where his correspondents included Karl Marx). When, in the summer of 1855, he arrived with his wife and two children, at his Paris hotel, he was looking forward to good food and conversation in Napoleon IIIs capital. Instead, returning from a pleasant Saturday of sight-seeing, he found himself abruptly taken into custody and imprisoned. A year before, he had joined in a doomed attempt to stage a worlds fair in New York to rival London's Crystal Palace Exhibition. Despite P.T.Barnum's efforts to rescue the million-dollar venture, it ended in bankruptcy. A French sculptor who had sent the Exhibition a plaster statue that was broken en route, had obtained a writ against Greeley, as a fair director, claiming damages of $2,500 in gold. Refusing to pay, Greeley was promptly carried off in a carriage to a debtors prison, while his alarmed wife appealed in hysterics to everyone she knew in Paris to come to his aid. The city's most influential American expatriates supported by financier James Rothschild indignantly threatened to leave France en masse unless Greeley was immediately released, and enlisted the help of Alexander Vattermare, a rich and famous ventriloquist-turned-philanthropist, well known in New York as promoter of Franco-American cultural exchange, to smooth the way. But nothing could be done on the weekend, and Greeley spent 96 hours in his 8 by 5 foot cell, scribbling out this petition to restore him to liberty- sent to a Judge who was shocked to learn that the eminent American had been arrested in his name. Greeley was finally released on Monday afternoon. In his 1868 autobiography, Greeley narrated in whimsical detail his Two Days in Jail in Paris, but by then had probably forgotten that he had left this petition with Vattemare, who preserved it in his library until, in 1862, he presented it to Greeley's friend and colleague John Bigelow, President Lincolns wartime ambassador to France. Thirty five years later, Bigelow wrote the statement of provenance which is included with this dramatic manuscript.