Of all the newspapers established as party organs in the time when Federalists and Democrats were struggling for control of the government of the infant republic, but one important journal survives. It is the oldest daily in the larger American cities which has kept its name intact. The Aurora, the Centinel, the American Citizen, Porcupine’s Gazette, whose pages the generation of Washington and Adams, Jefferson and Burr, scanned so carefully, are mere historical shades; but the Evening Post, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton and a group of intimate political lieutenants, for the expression of Hamilton’s views, remains a living link between that day of national beginnings and our own. The spring of 1801, when plans were laid for issuing the Evening Post, was the blackest season the Federalists of New York had yet known. Jefferson was inaugurated as President on March 4, and the upper as well as the lower branch of Congress had now become Democratic. In April the State election was held, and the ticket headed by gouty old George Clinton won a sweeping victory over the Federalists, so that at Albany the Democrats took complete control; the Governorship, Legislature, and Council of Appointment were theirs. Many Federalists sincerely believed that the nation and State had been put upon the road to ruin. They were convinced that the party of Washington, Hamilton, and Adams, which had built up a vigorous republic out of a ramshackle Confederation, was the only party of construction; and that Democracy meant ruin to the public credit, aggressions by the States upon a weak central government, and national disintegration. Hamilton wrote Gouverneur10 Morris after the election, in all seriousness, that the Constitution had become “a frail and worthless fabric.”
For Hamilton himself, inasmuch as many of his own party deemed him responsible for the disaster which had overtaken it, the hour was doubly black. No other leader approached him in brilliance, but his genius was not unmixed with an erratic quality. He and John Adams, men of wholly different temperaments, tastes, and habits, had always instinctively disliked each other; and during Adams’s Administration the latter had provoked an open breach with Hamilton, which meant a division of the Federalists into two factions. Hamilton, stung by Adams’s hostility and in especial by the charge that he was too Anglophile to be patriotic, had so far lost control of himself as to commit a capital political blunder. He had written just before the election of 1800 a bitter analysis of “The Public Conduct and Character of John Adams,” and though he designed this attack for confidential circulation only, it soon became public. The Democrats, their victory already assured, had made the most of it, and the resentment of Adams’s adherents was intense. The party schism was widened when it fell to the House of Representatives early in 1801 to decide the tie for the Presidency between Jefferson and Burr. Of the two, Hamilton patriotically preferred Jefferson, and used his influence to persuade the Federalist Representatives to vote for him. But the New England Federalists, Adams’s friends, opposed this view, and to Hamilton’s disgust, all the New England States save Vermont went into Burr’s column.
Hamilton gladly turned in April, 1801, from his pre-occupation with politics to his law practice. Forty-three years old, with eight children and a wife to support, with no savings, and ambitious of building himself a country home on the upper part of Manhattan, he needed the $12,000 a year which he could earn at the city bar. When he thought of public affairs, he felt not tired—he was too intense for that—but chagrined, and misused. After all, the real causes of Adams’s defeat were the11 alien and sedition laws, the persecuting temper of the Administration, its hot and cold policy in dealing with French outrages, and Adams’s vanity, caprice, and irascibility. But Hamilton by his pamphlet attack on the President had seriously damaged his own reputation for generalship. His friend, Robert Troup, wrote that this misstep had been most unfortunate. “An opinion has grown out of it, which at present obtains almost universally, that his character is radically deficient in discretion. Hence, he is considered as an unfit head of the party.” Hamilton himself admitted, Troup says, “that his influence with the Federal party was wholly gone.” He might well think of the assistance a newspaper would lend in defending himself from the Adams faction, restoring Federalist prestige, and attacking the triumphant Democrats.
Hamilton had many local companions in defeat, ready to support such a journal. Troup himself, and one other close friend, the cultivated merchant, William W. Woolsey, had been beaten for the Assembly. A general removal of Federalists from office followed the overturn. Though President Jefferson proved milder than had been feared, he made a number of changes, the most notable being that by which the wealthy Joshua Sands, with a store at 118 Pearl Street, lost the Collectorship of the Port. As for the new authorities at Albany, they were merciless. The Council of Appointment was dominated by young De Witt Clinton, the Governor’s pushing nephew, and its guillotine worked night and day till every obnoxious head was off. In place of the tall and dignified Richard Varick, who had been one of Washington’s secretaries, and to whose public spirit the American Bible Society, which he founded, is still a monument, it appointed Edward Livingston to be Mayor. In place of the scholarly Cadwallader Colden, it made Richard Riker the Attorney-General. Sylvanus Miller was brought down from Ulster to be Surrogate, and Ruggles Hubbard from Rensselaer to be Sheriff. The very Justiceships of the Peace were transferred. The12 Clerkship of the Circuit Court whose jurisdiction covered the city was taken from William Coleman and given to John McKesson. A majority of the people of the city were Federalists, and they watched all these transfers with pain.
The local leaders, and especially Hamilton, had for some time been aware that they lacked an adequate newspaper organ. Three city journals, the Daily Advertiser, and the Daily Gazette, both morning publications, and the Commercial Advertiser, an evening paper, were Federalist in sympathy. But Snowden’s Daily Advertiser, and Lang’s Gazette were almost exclusively given up to commercial news; and while E. Belden’s Commercial Advertiser, which still lives as the Globe, devoted some attention to politics, it lacked an able editor to write controversial articles. As the chief Democratic sheet remarked, “it is too drowsy to be of service in any cause; it is a powerful opiate.” This Democratic sheet was the American Citizen, edited by the then noted English refugee and radical, James Cheetham. He was a slashing and fearless advocate of Jeffersonian principles, who daily filled from one to two columns with matter that set all the grocery and hotel knots talking. Some one as vigorous, but of better education and taste—Cheetham had once been a hatter—was needed to expound Hamiltonian doctrines.
It was hoped that this new editor and journal could give leadership and tone to the whole Federalist press, for a sad lack of vigor was evident from Maine to Charleston. The leading Federalist newspapers of the time, Benjamin Russell’s Columbian Centinel in Boston, the Courant in Hartford, the Gazette of the United States in Philadelphia, and the Baltimore Federal Gazette, did not fully meet the wishes of energetic Federalists. Their conductors did not compare with the chief Democratic editors: James T. Callender, whom Adams had thrown into jail; Thomas Paine; B. F. Bache, Franklin’s grandson; Philip Freneau, and William Duane. Some agency was needed to rouse them. They should13 be helped with purse and pen, wrote John Nicholas, a leading Virginia Federalist, to Hamilton. “They seldom republish from each other, while on the other hand their antagonists never get hold of anything, however trivial in reality, but they make it ring through all their papers from one end of the continent to the other.” In the summer of 1800 Hamilton called Oliver Wolcott’s attention to libels printed by the Philadelphia Aurora upon prominent Federalists, and asked if these outrageous assaults could not be counteracted. “We may regret but we can not now prevent the mischief which these falsehoods produce,” replied Wolcott.
The establishment of journals for party purposes had become, in the dozen years since the Constitution was ratified, a frequent occurrence, and no political leader knew more of the process than Hamilton. He had won his college education in New York by a striking article in a St. Kitts newspaper. No one needs to be reminded how in the Revolutionary crisis, when a stripling in Kings College, he had attracted notice by anonymous contributions to Holt’s Journal, nor how in the equally important crisis of 1787–88 he published his immortal “Federalist” essays in the Independent Journal. Samuel Loudon, head of the Independent Journal, used to wait in Hamilton’s study for the sheets as they came from his pen. To support Washington’s Administration, Hamilton in 1789 encouraged John Fenno, a Boston schoolmaster of literary inclinations, to establish the Gazette of the United States at the seat of government; and in 1793, when Fenno appealed to Hamilton for $2,000 to save the journal from ruin, the latter took steps to raise the sum, making himself responsible for half of it. Hamilton also financially assisted William Cobbett, the best journalist of his time in England or America, to initiate his newspaper campaign against the Democratic haters of England. He, Rufus King, and others in New York helped provide the capital with which Noah Webster founded the Minerva in that city in 1793, and he and King together wrote for it a series of papers, signed14 “Camillus,” upon Jay’s Treaty. If Hamilton’s unsigned contributions to the Federalist press from 1790 to 1800 could be identified, they would form an important addition to his works.
It is evident from the published and unpublished papers of Hamilton that at an early date in 1801, when he was devoting all his spare time to the hopeless State campaign, he was giving thought to the problem of improving the party press. He wrote Senator Bayard of Delaware a letter upon party policy, to be presented at the Federalist caucus in Washington on April 20. In it he gave a prominent place to the necessity for “the diffusion of information,” both by newspapers and by pamphlets. He added that “to do this a fund must be raised,” and proposed forming an extensive association, each member who could afford it pledging himself to contribute $5 annually for eight years for publicity. Hamilton’s fingers whenever he was in a tight place always itched for the pen. Noah Webster had withdrawn from the Minerva three years previous, while Fenno had died about the same time, leaving the Gazette of the United States to a son; so that Hamilton could no longer feel at home in these journals.
But if a Hamiltonian organ were started, who should be editor? Fortunately, this question was easily answered. To the party motives which Hamilton, Troup, Wolcott, and other leading Federalists had in setting up such a journal, at this juncture there was added a motive of friendship toward an aspirant for an editorial position. In 1798, there had been admitted to the New York bar a penniless lawyer of thirty-two from Greenfield, Massachusetts, named William Coleman. He had come with a record of two years’ service in the Massachusetts House, an honorary degree from Dartmouth College, and warm recommendations from Robert Treat Paine, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who at this time was a judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. After a brief and unprofitable partnership with Aaron Burr, a15 misstep which he later declared he should regret to his dying day, Coleman formed a partnership with John Wells, a brilliant young Federalist attorney. Wells was just the man to draw Coleman into intimacy with the Federalist leaders. He was a graduate of Princeton, a profound student of the law, was rated by good judges one of the three or four best speakers of the city, and was a member of the “Friendly Club,” an important literary society. Governor John Jay offered him a Justiceship of the Peace, and Hamilton trusted him so much that, in 1802, he selected him to edit the first careful edition of The Federalist, for which Hamilton himself critically examined and revised the papers.
Through Wells, in 1798–99 Coleman came to know the members of the “Friendly Club,” including W. W. Woolsey, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, the dramatist William Dunlap, Anthony Bleecker, and James Kent, later Chancellor. He had already met Hamilton, on the latter’s trip into New England in 1796, and now he fell completely under the great man’s spell. In his later life he dated everything from the beginning of their friendship. The two had much in common besides their political views, for Coleman possessed a dashing temper, a quick mind, and a ready bonhomie. In the spring of 1800, there took place in New York the famous trial of Levi Weeks, charged with murdering Gulielma Sands, a young girl, and throwing her body into one of the Manhattan Company’s wells; a trial in which Hamilton and Burr appeared together for the defense, and saved Weeks from conviction by a mass of circumstantial evidence. Coleman, a master of shorthand, immediately published a praiseworthy report of the trial. One of his political enemies admitted that “it is everywhere admired for its arrangement, perspicuity, and the soundness of judgment it displays.” Coleman was encouraged to plan a volume of reports of decisions in the State Supreme Court. At that moment the Clerkship of the Circuit Court fell vacant. Hamilton at once wrote16 Governor John Jay and also Ebenezer Foote, a member of the Council of Appointment, requesting that the place, which paid $3,000 a year, be given his friend Coleman. There was another candidate with a really superior claim, but he was passed by. Governor Jay announced the result in the following hitherto unpublished letter to Hamilton:
Mr. Coleman, who was yesterday appointed Clerk of the New York Circuit, will be the bearer of this. Mr. Skinner was first nominated—for where character and qualifications for office are admitted, the candidate whose age, standing, and prior public service is highest should, I think, take the lead; unless perhaps in cases peculiarly circumstanced.—Mr. Skinner did not succeed. Mr. Coleman was then nominated, and the Council, expecting much from his reports, and considering the office as necessary to enable him to accomplish that work, advised his appointment. Mr. Coleman’s embarrassments, and whatever appeared to me necessary to observe respecting the candidates, were mentioned antecedent to the nomination. My feelings were in Coleman’s favor, and had my judgment been equally so, he would have suffered less anxiously than he has. I mentioned your opinion in his favor; and I wish the appointment may be generally approved. Ten or eleven of the members recommended Mr. Skinner—some of them will not be pleased.
I hope Mr. Coleman will be attentive to the reports. Much expectation has been excited, and disappointment would produce disgust. It is, I think, essential to him that the work be prosecuted with diligence, but not with haste; and that they may be such as they already hope.
But in the general overturn of 1801, Coleman—who had duly commenced the compilation of the Supreme Court Law Reports, beginning with 1794, and whose labors later bore fruit in what is called Coleman and Caines’s Reports—lost his post. He could have resumed practice with Wells, who also lost his justiceship in the ten-pound court. But the bar was overcrowded, having about a hundred members in a city of 60,000, and Coleman had starved at it before. While a lawyer in Greenfield, he had established the first newspaper there, the Impartial Intelligencer, and had written for it, and17 he had then half formed an ambition to conduct a newspaper in New York. Far from having any money of his own, he had been left deep in debt by his participation in the unfortunate Yazoo speculation in Georgia lands. But he knew that the party leaders were thinking of the need for a better Federalist newspaper, and he stepped forward to offer his assistance in establishing one.
During the spring Coleman was busy campaigning for Stephen Van Rensselaer, Federalist candidate for Governor, who happened to be Hamilton’s brother-in-law, and for the Assembly ticket. The American Citizen repeatedly commented on his activity; on April 22, it predicted that this “seller of two-pence halfpenny pamphlets, this sycophantic messenger of Gen. Hamilton ... will at one time or another receive a due reward.” During probably May and June, in consultations among Hamilton, Wells, Mayor Varick, Troup, Woolsey, a Commissioner of Bankruptcy named Caleb S. Riggs, and Coleman, the plan of the Evening Post was drafted. Woolsey had married a sister of Theodore Dwight, the editor of the Connecticut Courant at Hartford, and wished Dwight placed in charge, but he finally acquiesced in entrusting the new enterprise to Coleman.
A founders’ list was secretly circulated among trusty Federalists, and signers were expected to contribute a minimum of $100. The initial capital required was probably not much in excess of $10,000. A Baltimore newspaper, the Anti-Democrat, was established at this time by Judge Samuel Chase, Robert Goodloe Harper, and other Federalists, for $8,000. Hamilton’s adherents, who included almost the whole commercial group of New York, were wealthy; and Hamilton himself, liberal to a fault with his large income, probably offered not less than $1,000. Besides the names already listed, we know of some other men who contributed, as the merchant, Samuel Boyd, and the dismissed Collector, Joshua Sands. Coleman told the poet Bryant, his successor, that Archibald Gracie, one of the richest and most dignified merchants, had assisted, and a tradition in the family18 has it that the Evening Post was founded at a meeting in the Gracie home. The American Citizen of the time declares that a certain auctioneer—perhaps Leonard Bleecker, perhaps the elder Philip Hone, perhaps James Byrne—“contributed largely.” These men did not present the money outright, but vested the property in Coleman, who gave his notes in return; unfortunately, he was never able to meet them, and before 1810 all his American creditors, as one of his friends states in a letter of that year, “signed his discharge without receiving anything.” The project was rapidly matured. “In a moment thousands of dollars were raised,” wrote Cheetham. During the summer of 1801 a fine brick office was made ready on Pine Street, and about the beginning of November would-be readers were asked to enter their subscriptions.
The initial subscribers numbered about 600, and among the names entered in the journal’s first account book, which was unfortunately lost years ago, were the following:
Daniel D. Tompkins, 1 Wall Street
John Jacob Astor, 71 Liberty Street
Garrett H. Striker, 181 Broadway
Henry Doyer, Bowery Lane
Anthony Lispenard, 19 Park Street
Strong Sturges, 13 Oliver Street
Anthony Bleecker, 25 Water Street
Joel and Jonathan Post, Wall and William Streets
Isaac Haviland, 186 Water Street
John McKesson, 82 Broadway
Matthew Clarkson, 26 Pearl Street
Nathaniel L. Sturges, 47 Wall Street
Philip Livingston, Yonkers
Philip Hone, 56 Dey Street
R. Belden, 153 Broadway
Col. Barclay, 142 Greenwich Street
John Cruger, 30 Greenwich Street
Anthony Dey, 19 Cedar Street
Robert Morris, 33 Water Street
Robert Thorne, 2 Coenties slip
Isaac Ledyard, 2 Pearl Street
19 James Carter, 195 Greenwich Street
Cornelius Bogert, 24 Pine Street
Grant Thorburn, 22 Nassau Street
Philip L. Jones, 74 Broadway
Robert Swarthout, 62 Water Street
 
In the first issue, Nov. 16, 1801, appeared a prospectus which may have been written by Coleman alone, but is more likely the product of his collaboration with Hamilton. Every reader looked first to see what was said of party affairs. The editor promised to support Federalism, but without dogmatism or intolerance; he declared his belief “that honest and virtuous men are to be found in each party”; and he made it clear that the columns would always be open to communications from Democrats. Merchants were assured that special attention would be paid to whatever affected them, and that the earliest commercial information, which in those days meant chiefly arrivals and sailings of ships, would be obtained. Newspaper exchanges, and current pamphlets, magazines, and reviews would be searched for whatever was most informing and entertaining. Letter-writers were asked not to enclose their names, a bad rule which Coleman soon found it expedient to abrogate. Prominent in the prospectus was the paragraph still carried at the head of the Evening Post’s editorial columns:
The design of this paper is to diffuse among the people correct information on all interesting subjects, to inculcate just principles in religion, morals, and politics; and to cultivate a taste for sound literature.
An effort was actually for a time made to teach religious truths. In an early issue a letter was printed, probably from some cleric, combating certain atheistic views expressed by Cheetham’s American Citizen; an editorial article soon after was devoted to a discussion of the Revelation of St. John; and Coleman never tired of attacking the deism of local “illuminati.”
In its opening sentences the prospectus stated that the20 journal would appear in a dress worthy of the liberal patronage promised. To modern eyes the first volumes are cramped, dingy, and uninviting. Each issue consisted of a single sheet folded once, to make four pages, as continued to be the case until the middle eighties; a page measured only 14 by 19? inches; and the conventional cuts of ships, houses, stoves, furniture, and coiffures would be disfiguring if they were not quaint. But when we compare the Evening Post with its contemporaries we see that the statement was not empty. Editor Callender remarked that “This newspaper is, beyond all comparison, the most elegant piece of workmanship that we have seen, either in Europe or America.” The Gazette of the United States commented that it was published “in a style by far superior to that of any other newspaper in the United States.” How could it afford this style? it asked. Advertisements were the secret, for out of twenty columns, fourteen or fifteen were always filled with the patronage of Federalist merchants. Few journals then had more than two full fonts of type, and some were set entirely in minion. Coleman and his printer, a young man from Hartford named Michael Burnham, had started with four full fonts of new type beautifully cut; they used a superior grade of paper; and the arrangement and use of headings had been carefully studied. Dignity was then, as always later, emphasized.
Every Saturday a weekly edition, called the Herald, was sent to distant subscribers, from Boston to Savannah, with fewer advertisements and at least twice the reading matter. Noah Webster, in conducting the Minerva, had been the first New York editor to perceive the economy and profit in publishing such a journal “for the country” without recomposition of type, and had himself used the name Herald. The New York Federalists relied principally upon the weekly for a national diffusion of their views, and with reason, for at an early date in 1802 the circulation rose above 1600, as against slightly more than 1100 for the Evening Post itself. These were respectable figures for that time.
21 What should the Federalist chieftains, Hamilton, Wolcott, King, Gouverneur Morris, and others, make of these two instruments? To answer this, we shall have to look first at the qualifications of “Hamilton’s editor,” as other journals called him.
The abilities of Coleman, an interesting type of the best Federalist editor, were as great as those of any other American journalist of the time. His formal training was unusually good for a day in which powerful figures like Duane, Cheetham, Binns, and Callender were comparatively uncultivated men, who wrote with vigor but without polish or even grammatical correctness. Born in Boston on Feb. 14, 1766, he was fortunate enough to be sent to Phillips Andover, the first incorporated academy in New England, soon after it opened in 1778. Though he was a poor boy, he had for fellow-pupils the sons of the best families of the region, including Josiah Quincy, the future mayor of Boston and president of Harvard; and for “preceptor” the famous Eliphalet Pearson, a master of the harsh type of Keate of Eton or Dr. Busby of Westminster. Here he gained “a certain elegance of scholarship” in Greek and Latin which, Bryant tells us, “was reckoned among his qualifications as a journalist.” He formed a taste for reading, and his editorials bear evidence of his knowledge of all the standard English authors—Shakespeare, Milton, Hume, Johnson, Fielding, Smollett, and the eighteenth-century poets and essayists. Sterne was a favorite with him, and like all other editors, he knew the “Letters of Junius” almost by heart. Most Phillips Andover boys went on to Harvard, but Coleman began the study of law in the office of Robert Treat Paine, then Attorney-General of Massachusetts, at Worcester. Nothing is known of his life there save that he became an intimate friend of the Rev. Aaron Bancroft, father of the historian George Bancroft; and that he dropped his books to serve in the winter march of the militia in 1786 against Shays.
Bryant knew Coleman only in his declining years, but he tells us that he was “of that temperament which some22 physiologists call the sanguine.” Hopefulness and energy were fully evinced in the decade he spent at the bar in Greenfield, Hampshire County, from 1788 to the end of 1797. He practiced across the Vermont and New Hampshire lines, made money, showed marked public spirit, and seemed destined to be more than a well-to-do squire—to be one of the dignitaries of northwest Massachusetts. The newspaper which he founded at Greenfield early in 1792, but did not edit, prospered, and under a changed name is now the third oldest surviving newspaper in the State. In the same year Coleman set on foot a subscription for the town’s first fire-engines. He was active in a movement, which many years later succeeded, to divide Hampshire County; he set out many of the fine street-elms; and in 1796 he was one incorporator of a company to pipe water into the town. He began training young men to the bar in his own office. In the Presidential campaign of 1796 he made many speeches, and his political activity was further exemplified by terms in the Massachusetts House in 1795 and 1796. He was only thirty years old when in September of the latter year he received his honorary degree at Dartmouth. When he invested his money in the Yazoo Purchase, he believed that he would make a fortune—a Greenfield contemporary says that he estimated his profits at $30,000. In the flush of this delusion, he married, and bought a spacious site in the town with a fine view of the Pocumtuck Hills and Green River Valley, where he commenced the erection of a house now regarded as one of the finest specimens of Colonial architecture in the section.
The disaster which overtook Coleman when, at the close of 1796, the Georgia Legislature annulled the Yazoo Purchase on the ground that it had been effected by corruption, he faced without flinching. It was natural for him, on settling his affairs in 1797, to seek his fortune in New York. We find it stated by a journalistic opponent that he had received promises of help from “Mr. Burr and other leading characters.” At any rate, his first partnership, which he later lamented as “the greatest23 error of my life,” was with Burr, who had just ended his term in the United States Senate. Coleman later wrote that his share of the office receipts “came essentially short of affording me a subsistence.” One other man destined to be a famous Federalist editor, Theodore Dwight, had previously had a similar partnership with Burr and had dissolved it. Coleman did better when he joined his fortunes first with Francis Arden, and then with John Wells. But he was still desperately poor, and his creditors pressed him. Among those whom he owed money were Gen. Stephen R. Bradley, of Westminster, Vt., later a United States Senator, and a friend of Bradley’s, Edward Houghton; these two brought suit, and on Jan. 27, 1801, obtained judgments in a New York court, the former for $691.71, the latter for $443.67.
Yet under these trying circumstances Coleman’s amiable deportment, frankness, and activity made him well-wishers among the best men of the city. He was of athletic frame, and at this time of robust appearance; with curling hair and sparkling eyes, he was a figure to attract attention anywhere. “His manners were kind and courteous,” says Bryant; “he expressed himself in conversation with fluency, energy, and decision”; and his enemy Cheetham testifies that “no man knew better how to get into the good graces of everybody better than himself.” Resolving to demonstrate to the bar the utility of accurate reports of all important cases and decisions, he spared no labor or pains upon his report of the trial of Levi Weeks; for this little volume of ninety-eight pages he collated five other notebooks with his own.
In all, Coleman was well fitted to become the leading Federalist editor of the nation. The Evening Post was expected by the party chieftains to take a prompt and vigorous stand on every great public question, and to voice an opinion which lesser journals could echo. It was a heavy responsibility. “The people of America derive their political information chiefly from newspapers,” wrote Callender in 1802. “Duane upon one side, and Coleman upon the other, dictate at this moment the24 sentiments of perhaps fifty thousand American citizens.” When in 1807 the first journal of the party was established at the new capital, Jonathan Findley’s Washington Federalist, its founder, after enumerating all the requisites of an editor, named Coleman as their foremost exemplar. “I cannot, in the field of controversy, vie with a Coleman.” In the summer of 1802 Coleman was nicknamed the “Field-marshal of the Federal Editors” by his opponent Callender, and the fitting appellation stuck.
Wielding a ready pen, Coleman was apt in literary allusions. His knowledge of law enabled him to write with authority upon legislation, constitutional questions, and practical politics. Unlike his successor Bryant, he mingled freely with men in places of public resort, and kept his ear to the ground. He took an interest in letters and the drama which was quite unknown to other “political editors.” Some pretensions to being an authority upon style he always asserted, and he never tired of correcting the errors of Democratic scribblers. Against certain expressions he made a stubborn battle—for example, against “averse from” instead of “averse to,” and against “over a signature” instead of “under” it; in 1814 he offered $100 for every instance of the last-named phrase in a good author since Clarendon. He was excessively generous, always ready to lend his ear to a pitiful story; Dr. John W. Francis relates that his eyes would moisten over the woes of one of the paper-boys. This kindliness made the columns of the Evening Post always open to charitable or reformative projects. Coleman’s chief faults were three. His style, like Hamilton’s, was diffuse; he sometimes forgot taste and decency in assailing his opponents; and he was a wretched business man. A few years after the journal was founded its money affairs fell into such embarrassment that friends intervened, and an arrangement was made by which Michael Burnham, the printer, became half owner, with entire control of the finances.
25
II
 
Contemporary writers from 1801 to 1904, however, seldom spoke of the Evening Post as Coleman’s newspaper; it was usually “Hamilton’s journal” or “Hamilton’s gazette.” Just so had Freneau’s National Gazette a decade before been called “Jefferson’s journal,” so Cheetham’s American Citizen was now sometimes called “Clinton’s journal,” and there was even “Levi Lincoln’s journal,” the Worcester National Aegis, which Attorney-General Lincoln helped support. During 1801 Burr and his partisans were much dissatisfied with Cheetham’s newspaper, and this dissatisfaction came to a head after the spring elections the following year. A group which included Burr, John Swartwout, W. P. Van Ness, Col. William S. Smith, and John Sanford established a paper called the New York Morning Chronicle, and after offering the editorship to Charles Holt, who refused, gave it to Washington Irving’s brother, Dr. Peter Irving, known for his tea-table talents and effeminate manners as “Miss Irving.” The Chronicle was of course for several years called “Burr’s journal.” Just how close was Hamilton’s connection, never openly avowed, with the Evening Post?
The most direct evidence on the subject outside of newspaper files of the period is furnished by the autobiography of Jeremiah Mason, a native of Connecticut, who practiced law in Vermont and New Hampshire alongside Coleman, and became a United States Senator from the latter State. He writes of Coleman:
As a lawyer he was respectable, but his chief excellence consisted in a critical knowledge of the English language, and the adroit management of political discussion. His paper for several years gave the leading tone to the press of the Federal party. His acquaintances were often surprised by the ability of some of his editorial articles, which were supposed to be beyond his depth. Having a convenient opportunity, I asked him who wrote, or aided in writing, those articles. He frankly answered that he made no secret of it; that his paper was set up under the auspices of26 General Hamilton, and that he assisted him. I then asked, “Does he write in your paper?”—“Never a word.”—“How, then, does he assist?”—His answer was, “Whenever anything occurs on which I feel the want of information I state matters to him, sometimes a note; he appoints a time when I may see him, usually a late hour in the evening. He always keeps himself minutely informed on all political matters. As soon as I see him, he begins in a deliberate manner to dictate and I to note down in shorthand; when he stops, my article is completed.”
There is ample corroboratory proof that Hamilton contributed much to the opinions and expression of the Evening Post, and there is every reason to believe that this is the way he frequently did it. Coleman could readily have taken the dictation in shorthand. Seldom in the thirty-two months between the founding of the Evening Post and the death of Hamilton could the General have found time for deliberate writing. He had one of the largest law practices in the country, and he was the leader of a great party, regarded by a majority of Federalists as the dashing strategist who would yet perhaps make them as powerful as in the days of Washington. Yet that energetic fighter could not be kept out of the columns.
“Those only who were his intimate friends,” wrote Coleman in 1816, “know with what readiness he could apply the faculties of his illuminated mind.” No doubt Coleman resorted for guidance on many nights to Hamilton’s home at 26 Broadway—the editor’s house was a few blocks distant, at 61 Hudson Street—and on not a few week-ends to his country residence, called “The Grange” after the ancestral Hamilton estate in Scotland, which stood on Kingsbridge Road at what is now the corner of 142d Street and Tenth Avenue.
 
Alexander Hamilton
Chief Founder of the Evening Post.
(The Hamilton College Statue)
From 1801 to 1804 only a single bit of signed writing from Hamilton’s pen appeared in the Evening Post. This was a communication denying the hoary legend, originally circulated in derogation of Washington and Lafayette, that at Yorktown Lafayette had ordered Hamilton to put to death all British prisoners in the redoubt which he was sent forward to capture, and that he had declined27 to obey the inhumane command. But a much more important contribution was hardly concealed. This was a series of articles upon President Jefferson’s first annual message, written under the signature “Lucius Crassus,” and published irregularly from Dec. 17, 1801, till April 8, 1802. They were eighteen in all, and not equal to Hamilton’s best work. At one time the series was interrupted by a trip of Hamilton’s to Albany, but the editor explained the delay by saying that he was waiting to let the distant journals copying the series catch up with back installments. Before their publication was quite completed in the Evening Post, Coleman issued them in a neat pamphlet of 127 pages, with an introduction by himself, for 50 cents.
All other contributions must be sought for upon internal evidence, and such evidence can never be conclusive. No one is yet certain who wrote some of the essays of “The Federalist,” and it is impossible to point to unsigned papers in the Evening Post and say, “These are Hamilton’s.” The style might be that of almost any other cultivated man of legal training; the content might be that of such other able contributors as Gouverneur Morris or Oliver Wolcott. It is possible that a long, well-written article of March 12, 1802, upon Representative Giles’s speech for the repeal of the Judiciary Act is Hamilton’s; it contains a good deal of information upon the proposals which Hamilton made for indirect taxation when he was Secretary of the Treasury. It is possible that Hamilton dictated part or all of the attack of April 19, 1803, upon the Manhattan Bank founded by De Witt Clinton’s faction, for it contains much sound disquisition upon the principles of public finance. It is quite possible that he furnished at least an outline for the article of July 9, 1803, upon neutrality, which deals in considerable part with the r?le he, Knox, and Jefferson played in the Genet affair; and that he assisted later the same month in an article upon the funding system, land tax, and national debt. But it is bootless to pile up such conjectures. The editorials upon the diplomatic aspects of the Louisiana28 treaty, the Chase impeachment, and the navigation of the Mississippi certainly represented Hamilton’s views.
There is abundant evidence that Coleman wished to do Hamilton personal as well as political service in the Evening Post. His first opportunity to do this occurred less than ten days after the founding of the journal, when on Nov. 24, 1801, it announced the death of Philip, Hamilton’s eldest and most promising son—“murdered,” said the editor, “in a duel.” The attendant circumstances were obscure, and Coleman spared no labor to inquire into them and set them forth accurately and tactfully, correcting the accounts in the Democratic press. It appeared that Philip Hamilton, a youth of twenty, was sitting with another young man in a box at a performance of Cumberland’s “The West Indian,” and that they exchanged some jocose remarks upon a Fourth of July oration made the previous summer by one George I. Eacker, a Democrat. Eacker overheard them, called them into the lobby, said that he would not be “insulted by a set of rascals,” and scuffled with them. The two excitable boys challenged him. Young Hamilton’s companion fought first, Sunday morning on the Weehawken dueling-ground, and no one was injured. On Monday afternoon the second duel occurred. “Hamilton received a shot through the body at the first discharge,” reported the Evening Post, “and fell without firing. He was brought across the ferry to his father’s house, where he languished of the wound until this morning [Tuesday], when he expired.” Coleman took occasion to utter a shrewd warning against dueling. “Reflections on this horrid custom must occur to every friend of humanity; but the voice of an individual or the press must be ineffectual without additional, strong, and pointed legislative interference. Fashion has placed it upon a footing which nothing short of this can control.” The truth of this statement had a melancholy illustration within three years.
Coleman also contradicted in detail, using information which Hamilton alone could have furnished, a spiteful story to the effect that President Washington, when29 Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury, used to send him public papers with the request, “Dear Hamilton, put this into style for me,” and that Hamilton boasted of the service. Again, Coleman assured his readers, using more information from Hamilton, that the letters which Jefferson wrote as Secretary of State to the British Minister, George Hammond, upon the debts owed to the British, were given their finishing touches by Hamilton.
When Cheetham and other Clintonians charged Hamilton with having procured Burr a large loan at the Manhattan Bank—some Democrats were always sniffing a coalition between the Federalists and the Burrites—Coleman placed the story in the ridiculous light it deserved. However, he steadily refused to dignify the many grosser slanders uttered against Hamilton by any notice. After the statesman’s death, the editor repeatedly delivered utterances which he said he had “from Hamilton’s own lips,” some of them upon matters of great importance; for example, upon the r?le which Madison played in the Federal Convention. Coleman in his later years also professed to be an authority upon the authorship of the “Federalist.” It appears from the Evening Post files that Senator Lodge, the editor of Hamilton’s works, is mistaken in believing Coleman the editor of the 1802 edition of that volume—that John Wells edited it; but Coleman took a keen interest in its publication.
“It is hardly necessary to say that Mr. Coleman, in difficult cases, consults with Mr. Hamilton,” Cheetham observed in 1802. “Editors must consult superior minds; it is their business to draw information from the purest and correctest sources.” Coleman never denied such statements. In the summer of 1802 the Baltimore American remarked that the Evening Post was “said to be directly under the control of Alexander Hamilton.” The editor rejoined that it was “unnecessary to answer him whether the Evening Post is so much honoured as to be under the influence of General Hamilton or not,” and went on to imply distinctly that it was. Callender referred to Coleman as “Hamilton’s typographer.” It30 is worth noting that when Charles Pinckney, leader of the South Carolina Federalists, found that the weekly Herald was not being regularly received by the Charleston subscribers, he wrote in expostulation not to Coleman but to Hamilton, asking him to speak to the editor.
Upon the Evening Post, as upon the Federalist party, the tragic death of Hamilton fell as a stunning blow. Announcing the calamity on June 13, 1804, Coleman added that “as soon as our feelings will permit, we shall deem it a duty to present a sketch of the character of our ever-to-be lamented patron and best friend.” The press of the nation looked to him. The best report, said the Fredericktown (Md.) Herald, a Federalist sheet, “is expected in the Evening Post of Mr. Coleman, than whom no man perhaps out of the weeping and bereft family of his illustrious friend can more fervently bewail the loss.” On the day of the funeral the Evening Post was suspended, the only time in its history that it missed an issue because of a death, and for a week all its news columns carried heavy black borders. Unfortunately, the editor did not redeem his promise of a character sketch, professing himself too deeply grieved. After devoting a month to discussion of the duel and its causes, he turned from “the most awful and afflicting subject that ever occupied my mind and weighed down my heart”; he could write no more “of him whom I can never cease to mourn as the best of friends, and the greatest and most virtuous of men.”
Hamilton’s family and associates wished a volume compiled from the various tributes to his memory, and by Mrs. Hamilton’s express wish, the task was entrusted to Coleman. Before the end of the year he published it with the title of “Facts and Documents Relative to the Death of Major-General Hamilton”; a careful and tasteful work which not many years ago was reissued in expensive form. There was some talk then and later of a more ambitious commission. Thus in 1809 the Providence American, deploring the fact that no biography of Hamilton had yet appeared, suggested that Coleman was31 “the only person qualified.” The editor, however, responded that a gentleman of more leisure, by whom he meant the Rev. John M. Mason, had already accepted the undertaking.
Yet the death of its great patron and mentor detracted less from the vigor of the Evening Post in controversy than might have been supposed. Coleman from the beginning had been assisted not only by Hamilton but by a half-dozen of the ablest New Yorkers of Hamiltonian views. Gouverneur Morris was in the United States Senate until 1803, but Duane of the Aurora declares that he found time to contribute to the new journal. It is not unlikely that three admirably written articles upon the peace of Amiens, in the last month of 1801, were by him; the first gave a survey of European affairs, the second considered the effects of the peace upon American business, and the third dealt with its effect upon American parties. In 1807 he was still writing, for Coleman later revealed the authorship of two articles he then sent in upon the Beaumarchais claims. Oliver Wolcott was a Federal judge when the Evening Post was established, and later entered business in New York. He also contributed from time to time, though after Hamilton’s death he was gradually converted from Federalism to Democracy. In 1807 he offered Coleman a long editorial article signed “Camillus.” As Coleman ruefully said later, he was “a man of whose political as well as personal rectitude I then entertained so little suspicion that I should have delivered any article by him directly to the compositor without even reading it”; and the editor had it published without carefully examining it. Its views were so heretical to Federalists that in 1814 the Democrats were still tauntingly reprinting it, and Coleman was still speaking of the episode with pain.
According to Cheetham, the able merchant, W. W. Woolsey, whose grandson, Theodore Winthrop, lives in our literature, appeared now and then in the columns of the newspaper he had helped found. Ebenezer Foote, the former State Senator and member of the Council of32 Appointment, who had helped Coleman obtain his clerkship of the Circuit Court, contributed signed articles. Rufus King, when he finished his service as Minister to England in 1803, lent a valuable hand, and as late as 1819 we find him advising Coleman as to the proper editorial treatment of the Florida question. The editor came to know him sufficiently well to give an intimate character sketch of him in Delaplaine’s Repository, a magazine of the day. Almost indispensable help was lent by Coleman’s old partner, John Wells, who at times acted as virtual associate editor, and took charge of the journal during occasional absences of Coleman. Wells had a taste for literature and the drama as well as politics, but, says Coleman, “he dealt chiefly in the didactic and the severe.”
Of the counsel and assistance of these prominent Federalists Coleman was proud, but he keenly resented any imputation that he was their mere tool and mouthpiece. This accusation was made by Cheetham when the Evening Post was not a year old:
Mr. Coleman says that to pay a man for writing against the late Administration was a crime. He will allow that the application of the rule will be just when applied to the present Administration. We then say that Mr. Coleman receives the wages of sin; for he is in every sense of the word paid for writing against the present Administration. The establishment at the head of which he is, is said not to be his own; it is said to belong to a company, of which General Hamilton is one. The paper was commenced for the avowed purpose of opposing the Administration. Mr. Coleman, it is believed, receives a yearly salary for writing for it, and for his wages he is bound to write against the Administration, whether the sentiments he pens accord with his own or not. He runs no risk, he has no responsibility upon his shoulders. He may, in fact, be called a mere hireling.
Coleman replied:
Cheetham says that the establishment of the Evening Post does not belong to the editor, but to a company, of which General Hamilton is one; and that the editor receives a yearly salary for writing for it. Now, though we do not perceive that this is of33 much consequence in any way but to the editor’s pocket ... we shall not permit it to pass uncontradicted. We therefore declare that not one word of it is true. The establishment of the Evening Post is, and always since its commencement has been, the sole property of the editor: it does not, nor did it ever, belong to a company, or to General Hamilton, or to any one else but the editor; and lastly, the editor is not a hireling, nor has he at any period of his life received wages for writing.
Not at all discomfited, the Jeffersonian organ remarked—and hit near the truth—that the journal had probably been given to Coleman by the men who were known to have raised large sums to found it. Certainly Coleman until after 1804 was hardly a free agent. The distinction and prosperity of his newspaper depended largely upon Hamilton’s good will. He gladly served the statesman whom he called “my best earthly friend, my ablest adviser, and my most generous and disinterested patron,” but he had no real alternative.
Hamilton bequeathed to the Evening Post certain principles which guided it for years to come. The Federalist party in the nation at large gradually crumbled away, but fortunately for the Evening Post, it remained powerful in New York city until near 1820. Until the close of the second war with England, a majority of the people of the city held Hamiltonian views. The primary object of Hamilton was to establish a strong national sovereignty, victorious over all forms of disintegration. His financial policy, which embraced insistence upon sound money, and adequate revenues without dependence either upon the States or Europe, was made effective while he was head of the treasury. The commercial policy which he favored was one which would develop manufacturing, by a judicious protective tariff, to a parity with agriculture, and make the nation self-sufficient. In foreign affairs, he wished the United States to steer clear of European intrigue, and as he feared French influence more than British, he tended to be more sympathetic toward England. The Evening Post hence steadfastly opposed extreme State Rights ideas, even when some New England34 Federalists asserted them in the War of 1812. It never ceased quoting Hamilton on financial questions, and its recollection of his tariff views delayed a firm opposition to protection until Bryant took the helm. It opposed the identification of America with either party in the Napoleonic struggle, but for a variety of reasons it supported Great Britain.