Editorial pages of a century ago bore no resemblance to those of to-day. Sometimes no editorial at all would be printed; sometimes only a few scrappy paragraphs; sometimes two thousand words at once. Coleman was no less addicted than others to those series of numbered editorials which, dragging their slow length along from day to day, disappeared with Henry Watterson. This was the hey-day of the pamphlet, and it did not occur to most newspaper conductors that they could state an opinion on an important national event in fewer than several issues. Thus just after the Evening Post was founded, while Hamilton’s eighteen articles upon Jefferson’s message were being slowly run off, six other long editorial articles were sandwiched upon the repeal of certain discriminatory duties. The public had hardly finished digesting them when there ensued six upon the Georgia cession to the United States. They were followed by a series of twelve upon Jefferson and Callender. Frequently no effort was made to give unity to the single instalment, which began and ended abruptly. A good many of these long and ponderous editorials of Jeffersonian days would have been soporific had they not made up in shrillness what they lacked in liveliness. Our third President and the Evening Post stepped upon the stage almost simultaneously. “Hamilton’s gazette,” said travelers from the South, was to be seen at Monticello; while the Evening Post followed Jefferson with steady hostility as he came forward to play his part, in the words of a description in its meager news columns:
Dressed in long boots, with tops turned down about the ankles, like a Virginian buck; overalls of corduroy, faded by frequent36 immersions in soapsuds from a yellow to a dull white; a red, single-breasted waistcoat; a light brown coat with brass buttons, both coat and waistcoat quite threadbare; linen very considerably soiled; hair uncombed and beard unshaven.
Coleman’s most unjustifiable display of party animosity occurred when his promise of fairness in the Evening Post’s prospectus was still fresh in men’s minds. In the summer of 1802 he reprinted from the Richmond Recorder the treacherous Callender’s attack upon the personal morals of the President, arousing a storm of protest. Much of this storm fell upon the head of Hamilton, and on Sept. 29 Coleman published a statement that Hamilton had not seen the attack before it appeared. Indeed, wrote Coleman, Hamilton had been consulted upon only one of the twelve Jefferson-Callender articles, that one involving constitutional questions. When the statesman saw the accusations, he had expressed regret, for “he declared his sentiments to be averse to all personalities, not immediately connected with public considerations.” But the editor did not take his lesson to heart. From time to time he indulged in outbursts against Jefferson of a character which we can comprehend only when we recall how outrageously even Washington had been vilified by the opposition press. Coleman was not content with harping upon Jefferson’s actual humiliations and errors, as his flight before Tarleton in 1781 and his opposition to the Constitution in 1788. He accused him of trying to cheat a friend out of a debt, and repeated the tale of a black harem. In 1805 he wrote: “There is a point of profligacy in the line of human impudence, at which the most disguised heart seems to lose all sensibility to shame; and we congratulate the American public that our chief magistrate has so completely arrived at this enviable point.”
However, in most editorials upon national affairs the Evening Post displayed a breadth and coolness reflecting the sagacity of the Federalist leaders who helped shape its policy. From the outset it pressed the Federalist contention that everything should be done to develop a merchant37 marine and a strong navy; the aggressions of the Barbary pirates being frequently cited to prove the necessity for the latter. The Gallophile craze of Democratic circles was attacked week in and week out. When the claims of the sufferers by French spoliations were surrendered by the Administration, the indignation of the journal was outspoken. The destruction of most of the internal revenue system which Hamilton had laboriously built up was a cause of much beating of the breast. Not merely did it weaken the Federal Government, said the Evening Post; the nabob Virginia planter was given his carriage untaxed, and the Western backwoodsman his whisky, while the poor Eastern artisan still had to pay taxes upon his sugar, coffee, and salt. The pretensions of Gallatin to rival Hamilton as a master of finance were ridiculed. The repeal of the judiciary act passed under Adams was opposed as both unconstitutional and inexpedient.
But the primary achievement of Jefferson’s administration, the Louisiana purchase, was treated in a tone so unlike that of other Federalist journals that it is clear Hamilton guided Coleman’s pen. That noisy, artificial denunciation which went up from most Federalists was thoroughly discreditable. The Evening Post admitted that “it is an important acquisition”; that it was “essential to the peace and prosperity of our western country”; that it opened up “a free and valuable market to our commercial states”; and that “it will doubtless give éclat to Jefferson’s Administration.” Of course it did its best to spit into the Democratic soup. It asserted that Jefferson merited little credit for the purchase, since the fruit was knocked into his lap by the great losses of the French in the Dominican insurrection, and by the constant threat of the British to seize Louisiana. This was true, for Jefferson had set out only to buy an island for a dockyard, and had been momentarily bewildered when Napoleon offered the whole western domain. No one at that time understood the real value of the purchase, for Louisiana was an untraversed land, believed to be largely38 desert. Hence it is not surprising to find the Evening Post asserting that the region was worth nothing for immediate settlement, especially since not one sixteenth the original area of the republic was yet occupied; and that its chief use might well be as something to barter for the Floridas, “obviously of far greater value to us than all the immense, undefined region west of the river.”
The Evening Post could not miss the opportunity to ridicule Jefferson’s characteristic exuberance. The President, in his enthusiastic message to Congress, told of a tribe of giant Indians, of river bluffs carved into antique towers, of prairie lands too rich to produce trees, and, one thousand miles up the Missouri, of a vast saline mountain, “said to be 180 miles long and 45 in width, composed of solid rock salt.” Coleman descended upon this last assertion:
Lest, however, the imagination of his friends in Congress might take a flight to the mountain and find salt trees there, and salt birds and beasts too, he with the most amiable and infantine simplicity, adds that there are no trees or even shrubs upon it. La, who would have thought it? Methinks such a great, huge mountain of solid, shining salt must make a dreadful glare in a clear sunshiny day, especially just after a rain. The President tells them too that “the salt works are pretty numerous,” and that salt is as low as $1.50 a bushel, which is about twice as high as it can be bought in New York, where we have no salt mountain at all.... We think it would have been no more than fair in the traveler who informed Mr. Jefferson of this territory of solid salt, to have added that some leagues to the westward of it there was an immense lake of molasses, and that between this lake and the mountain of salt, there was an extensive vale of hasty pudding, stretching as far as the eye could reach, and kept in a state of comfortable eatability by the sun’s rays, into which the natives, being all Patagonians, waded knee deep, whenever they were hungry, and helped themselves to salt with one hand to season their pudding, and molasses with the other to give it a relish.... Nothing seems wanting this affair in genuine style but for the House to “decree it with applause.”
During Jefferson’s second administration the Evening Post concentrated its fire upon his foreign policy. By39 the beginning of 1807, when Coleman published a long series of articles reviewing the international situation, the great struggle raging in Europe was plainly threatening to involve America. He accused the government of studied unfriendliness toward Great Britain. He held that Jefferson had made any agreement with England impossible, first, by dispatching the mediocre Monroe as Minister to London, and second, by causing the passage in the spring of 1806 of a non-importation measure aimed directly at the British. Why had the Administration been so tame toward the Spaniards, who had actually invaded American soil in the West, and tried to bribe the leading Kentuckians to be traitors? “Instead of framing a spirited remonstrance to Spain, demanding satisfaction for the repeated injuries she has done us, Jefferson has been able to go quietly into his study and amuse himself with pleasing reveries about the prairie dogs and horned frogs of the Missouri.” Above all, why had the government been so compliant toward Napoleon?
Napoleon, by the Berlin Decree of November, 1806, had declared that no ship which touched at an English port should be admitted to a port of France or her allies; the British, by an Order in Council of January, 1807, had tried to close all French ports to neutrals. Coleman regarded both acts as outrageous, but centered his attack upon the Berlin decree. Napoleon, as he said, was the primary aggressor, and the British step could be palliated as one of mere retaliation. “Our administration ... were bound in duty to their constituents to have immediately sent a spirited remonstrance to Paris against the Berlin Decree, as being not only a violation of the known and established law of nations, but a direct and flagrant breach of the existing treaty between the two countries. And if such remonstrance failed in obtaining from the French Government an explicit exception of the United States from the operation of the Decree, the course that was formerly adopted by the Federalist administration, in 1798, should have been again adopted—ships of war should have been immediately equipped, and our merchantmen40 permitted to arm for the protection of our trade.” This position Coleman maintained throughout 1807. When the Administration tried to make the Order in Council more odious by declaring that the French had not put the Berlin Decree into effect before the British acted, the editor flatly contradicted it. He supported his contradiction by evidence from John B. Murray, a Federalist merchant who did an immense shipping business from the foot of Beekman Street, and others who had suffered from the French seizures.
But worse foreign encroachments were to come. Late in 1807 news arrived that a fresh British Order in Council had been issued, requiring all neutral vessels trading at ports closed to the British to stop at an English port and pay a duty, and to repeat this stop on the return voyage; while from Paris came word that Napoleon had told our Minister “there should no longer be any such thing as a neutral nation.” Napoleon answered the new British Order by his Milan Decree, declaring that any ship which paid a tax in a British port might at any time thereafter be seized in French waters. It was difficult for an American to say a word for either combatant. Coleman admitted that the British action “carries something on the face of it humiliating to our national pride.” But he continued so far as possible to defend the English, and attacked the French with increasing zeal.
This policy did not cause him to condone the attack of the Leopard upon the Chesapeake, which stirred even Federalist New York as nothing since the surrender of Cornwallis. It will be recalled that the British Minister requested the surrender of three men who had deserted from an English warship into the Chesapeake; that Jefferson refused; and that the Leopard followed the Chesapeake from Hampton Roads out to sea, poured a heavy fire into her, compelled her to strike colors, and took the three men by force. The Evening Post flared up in common with all other patriotic organs. It condemned the attack as an indefensible outrage. It demanded prompt and drastic action, and the editor’s one fear was that41 Jefferson would not resent the injury with proper vigor. It would be a mistake, wrote Coleman, simply to call upon the British Government for disavowal of the dastardly assault, and for trial of the offenders. The British would grant the disavowal, summon a court martial, and acquit the guilty naval officers. No, Congress must be convened, intercourse suspended, an embargo laid, and then, if England wished to negotiate, she could humbly send her envoys to us. In the meantime, the coast should be fortified, and steps should be taken to give the nation frigates instead of Jefferson’s useless gunboats. For weeks Coleman harped upon this string:
We entertain respect for Great Britain; it is the land that gave birth to our ancestors, and we feel an attachment to the soil that covers their bones; we venerate her institutions; we look with anxiety upon the struggle in which she is now engaged for self-preservation; we hope she will maintain her independence uninjured, and that it will yet be long, very long, before the sun of her glory will begin his descent to the west with diminished luster; but we can never behold with a criminal indifference the ill-judged, the unwarrantable attempts of an unwise ministry to trench upon the perfect rights of other nations; especially of one which both interest and inclination strongly unite to render friendly to her.... We shall always stand ready to raise our feeble voice and call upon the patriotism of our countrymen to rouse and resist them.
Four years later occurred the encounter between the President and Little Belt. The former vessel had been sent out from Annapolis to demand from the Guerriere the surrender of a seaman whom the British were said to have impressed. It encountered instead a ship which showed no colors, and which it overtook just at nightfall. The unknown craft refused to answer the American hail; shots were exchanged—both captains later claimed to have been fired upon first; and at daybreak the President found that it had cut to pieces a little British corvette of half its strength. Again the general excitement was intense. The Evening Post admitted that people were too inflamed to listen to a cool discussion of laws42 and propriety. But in this instance it inclined to the British view. Not only did Coleman maintain that the President had been sent out with indefensible orders, being instructed to reclaim the impressed sailor by force if necessary; he held that the Little Belt had been justified in requiring the American ship to reveal its identity first, inasmuch as the Little Belt was exposed to a surprise attack by a French cruiser.
As the leading spokesman for the commercial community in New York, the Evening Post of course bitterly opposed the embargo. This stoppage of all foreign trade stunned the city. The day after the news came, Coleman referred to the universal “uncertainty, apprehension, dismay, and distress,” in which “every one is running eagerly to his neighbor to inquire after information.” He declared that it would bankrupt the merchants, and reduce thousands of laboring men to starvation. What! no more ships to leave any Manhattan slips, no more barges of grain to drop down the Hudson for foreign marts, no more droves of hogs and herds of cattle to be driven through Westchester for slaughtering and consignment abroad? The editor hastened to write a stinging article, and then, after consulting leading Federalists, put it aside in favor of an unsigned series by Rufus King.
It was pointed out that the embargo meant a direct loss of fifty millions a year, a sum that would build a navy amply sufficient to protect American rights at sea from France and Great Britain. The Evening Post painted a highly colored picture of the ruin of the city’s shippers and wholesalers, the distress of shipwrights, shopkeepers, clerks, and cartmen, and the despair of Hudson Valley farmers. It ridiculed the notion that the embargo was a valuable implement for negotiation with England. The British markets were well supplied, and Britons were secretly rejoicing that the new American policy gave them a monopoly of the world’s commerce. “Why is the United States like a pig swimming?” asked Coleman. “Because it cuts its own throat.” The embargo certainly had no such effect abroad as its sponsors hoped. From43 France it brought only the Bayonne decree, by which more than two hundred American ships were seized in French-controlled waters—an outrage of which the Evening Post made much; in England the shipping and farming interests were greatly benefited. As Rufus King predicted, it not only threw whole business communities into bankruptcy, but emptied the national treasury and depleted the strength of the nation. When the spring election came on, the Post announced a motto for Federalists which might have been made into the first American party platform: “No Embargo—No Foreign Influences—No Mystery—Freedom of Debate—Freedom of Suffrage—Freedom of Navigation and Trade—Liberty and Independence.”
Right as the Evening Post and other Federalist sheets were upon the main issue, they were not always quite fair. They consistently held that Jefferson was keeping the object of the embargo secret,
But though this in its operation
May scatter ruin through the nation
And starve the mouth of ragged labor,
Or bankrupt his rich merchant-neighbor,
It must be endured without one moan,
Its causes and object both unknown!
while they never tired of capitalizing Thomas Paine’s indiscreet statement in the Public Advertiser that the embargo was really preparatory to war with England. Yet it was plain to the blindest that the measure was a desperate, almost despairing, effort to avoid war. Again, the Evening Post accused the South and Southwest of sheer heartlessness. Jefferson cared not who starved at the North; he had saved a fortune from his salary, and could feed his negroes herring as well as hominy. “Who is Macon?” demanded Coleman when that leader supported legislation for preventing violations of the embargo. “A man who lives on the frontier of North Carolina; who can send out his negroes to provide for him his venison and his wild turkey; who raises his own hominy and grows his own cotton by the sweat of his hundred44 slaves, and who I suppose feels just about as much sympathy for the millions of people in the Eastern States, at whom he levels his death-doing blow, as the Bashaw of Tripoli.” Yet the South suffered in the long run more than the North, where manufactures speedily began to arise, and Jefferson saw his property in Virginia alarmingly impaired.
Until the last the Evening Post struggled against war with England, but it saw clearly that it was coming. As early as 1807 its Washington correspondent, probably one of the Federalist Congressmen from New York, stated that a Cabinet officer had told him that the country would have to choose between war with England or with France, and that England would probably be selected. In 1810 the editor himself wrote that America could not remain at peace with both belligerents, “and it is very clear how the country will decide.” The journal opposed the Macon bill in 1810, permitting importation and exportation only in American bottoms, as involving certain retaliation from Great Britain. It kept its two or three short news columns garnished with paragraphs upon the many American seamen languishing in French prisons since the Bayonne Decree. Thus in 1808, giving a long account of the mistreatment of two skippers from the city, Captains Palmer and Waterman, the editor exclaimed: “My blood boils in my veins.” The next year he reproduced a pitiful letter from a tar confined at Arras, compelled to subsist on a franc a day, and burst out: “Would you rest so silent and tame under a thousandth part as much from Great Britain? You know you would not.” He wanted an instant rupture of relations with France. The military tyranny which Napoleon spread over unwilling nations of Europe was attacked in fitting terms, and we find the French cruelties in the Peninsular campaign dwelt upon at length. When in 1808 Napoleon strengthened his alliance with the Russian Emperor, Coleman demanded: “Shall we join the confederacy against England, the only free and independent nation left in Europe?”
45 There was a fitful gleam of sunshine in 1809, when the British Minister, Erskine, announced that the Orders in Council would be withdrawn; but the clouds closed in again when it appeared that he had exceeded his instructions. Coleman, examining these instructions at length, blamed Erskine harshly for this disappointment to American hopes, but not the British Government. Like other Federalist organs, the Evening Post regarded the dismissal of the next British envoy, Jackson, as “frivolous and unfounded,” saying that “no public Minister was ever so shamefully dealt with.” Helped by King and others, Coleman bestowed great labor upon a series of articles dealing with the Jackson episode, which he flattered himself would have more than ephemeral value. The Secretary of State, Robert Smith, gave particular notice to this series. Coleman rejoiced over the manner in which other Federalist sheets caught up and echoed his points. The Boston Repertory, he said, is “always ready, independent, correct, and able”; Dwight’s Mirror in Connecticut “shines preéminent”; in New Jersey the Trenton Federalist was a firm ally; in Philadelphia the United States Gazette, long alone, was now supported by the Freeman’s Journal and the True American, while the Baltimore Federal Republican and the Virginia Patriot had been active. All these journals recognized in the Evening Post the voice of King, Gouverneur Morris, and Col. Varick.
It became evident late in 1811 that the paper’s long fight was lost. In reply to a war article by Duane, Coleman in a paragraph of deep pessimism admitted as much:
We have not, we never had, but one opinion respecting our public affairs with Great Britain; no differences will ever be brought to a termination; no negotiations for that purpose will ever be seriously entered upon, while Madison, or any other man in Virginia, is President. All who entertain different views or different hopes, will find themselves wofully mistaken. And if war must come, why not the sooner the better? I am free to confess, that I think a breeze from any quarter is better than that stagnant and sickly atmosphere which we have breathed so long, and which must, sooner or later, bring with it pestilence and46 death. It is the violent storm, the tremendous hurricane, with hailstone, thunder, and lightning, which cools and purifies the air, reanimates the face of nature, and restores life to pristine vigor and health.
There was in this statement almost the force of prophecy. The war actually had just the benefits it foreshadowed. It cleared a sultry, oppressive atmosphere, brought new and vital forces in national life into play, and gave Americans a unity and self-confidence they had not felt before. But this note was of course not struck again. As the country moved steadily toward war in the spring of 1812, it was with the Evening Post denouncing Clay, the chief of the “war hawks,” as a liar and demagogue; accusing the government of deliberate misrepresentation when it said that the Napoleonic decrees were no longer being enforced; and calling for public meetings in New York to protest against the drift to hostilities. When in April an effort was made to float the “Gallatin Loan,” Coleman did all that he could to discredit it. There was no security, he said; the interest rate, six per cent., was too low. “As it will very much depend upon the filling up of the loan whether we shall or shall not go to war, it is evident that no man who is averse to that calamity can ever, consistently, lend his assistance to the government to plunge us into it.”
The great majority of men of property in the city were with the Evening Post in its opposition; so were most of the lawyers, the faculty of Columbia College, the pastors of the leading churches, and professional men in general. On June 15, four days before the declaration of war, the Evening Post published a memorial of protest signed by fifty-six principal merchants, John Jacob Astor heading the list. It is clear that the Evening Post was at all times in close touch with commercial sentiment. In April it said that the best-informed men in town calculated the amount of American shipping and goods within British reach abroad, and liable to confiscation, at $100,000,000. All seaport towns, it added, were exposed to bombardment and destruction by the British seventy-fours.47 Coleman but expressed the fears of the counting rooms along lower Broadway and the rich shopkeepers of Pearl Street when he assured New Yorkers that the State would be undone. “This portion of the country will,” he warned, “on account of its wealth and the easy access to it by water, become the seat of war; and our defenseless situation will subject us, in the case of a few years war, to a desolation which a half century cannot restore.”
II
 
Twice has the Evening Post opposed with passionate detestation, from beginning to end, an American war. The two editors responsible, Coleman and E. L. Godkin, were as far as D’Artagnan from being weak-kneed pacifists. Both in their youth had shouldered arms; both were of Anglo-Irish blood, with a Celtic inclination toward battle; both went through life joyfully snuffing new frays from afar. It is well at this point, with Coleman taking the leadership of all the anti-war journals south of the Connecticut, to stop a moment to note what were his personal qualities, as shown in his editorship, and what the conditions of his work. The old-time journalist did not speak softly, and carried a big stick. Coleman had as much need as the rest to learn the use of dueling pistols, and to know how to graze the libel laws. “He was naturally courageous,” says Bryant, “and having entered into a dispute, he never sought to decline any of its consequences.”
We have noted that when Philip Hamilton was killed, the editor condemned dueling as barbarous, and called for a rigid legislation against it. Yet in 1803 he was himself provoked into a duel. The previous autumn Cheetham had in an indirect, cowardly fashion charged him with the paternity of a mulatto child in Greenfield, a charge which Coleman had no difficulty in showing utterly false, but which he resented by a challenge. Cheetham accepted. News of the impending encounter got abroad, and Judge Brockholst Livingston immediately issued a48 bench warrant, compelled the appearance of the two editors before him, and allowed them to depart only after they had engaged not to use more deadly weapons than pen and ink. Unfortunately, one Captain Thompson, an ardent Democrat, accused Coleman of letting the secret of the duel escape, and of having been animated by a cowardly motive. Coleman promptly challenged the fire-eating captain, and early in the new year the pair fought in Love Lane, a sequestered road, then well outside the city, which followed the present line of Twenty-first Street between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. It was dusk of a cold winter’s day when they met, with snow falling and other circumstances uniting, as a second quaintly observed, to make the affair “uncomfortable.” They fired two shots at ten paces, and then, darkness coming down, moved closer and fired two more. Thompson, exclaiming “I’ve got it!” sank mortally wounded into the arms of his physician, Dr. McLean. He was carried to his sister’s house in town, was laid on the doorstep, the bell was rung, and the family found him bleeding and near death. He refused to tell who had shot him, or to give any evidence whatever regarding the duel, saying that everything had been honorably done—and his antagonist must not be molested.
Coleman had repeated encounters of a less serious character. In the Evening Post of January 12, 1807, he begged the public to discredit Cheetham’s “account of the fracas on Saturday between Dr. Walker and myself,” as it was full of errors, but he did not offer the correct particulars himself. In 1810 blows were struck when his vote was challenged and he was insulted at the polls by a tavern-keeper who said that Coleman could not be a citizen because he had published the statement, “I had rather be a dog and bay the moon than own myself an American.” This was a Democratic garbling of a half-sentence in one of the Post’s editorials.
Early in 1818 the editor published a narrative of the misconduct of a certain Democrat named Henry B. Hagerman while traveling as a Judge Advocate up-State.49 Hagerman stopped at a Kingston hotel, kept by an estimable widow, and for some fancied grievance insulted her so grossly that no newspaper of to-day would print the details which Coleman laid before the public. On the evening of April 11 Coleman was overtaken by Hagerman near sunset at the corner of Murray and Church Streets, and attacked without warning from the rear. His assailant used the loaded butt of a rawhide whip. The editor was stunned by the first blow, was repeatedly struck and kicked as he lay prostrate, and when he staggered to his feet, half blind with blood, was given a still more savage beating. Public indignation against Hagerman rose so high that he was hurried to jail for safety, and not being able to ask for a change of venue, pleaded for postponement of his trial until it subsided. Two years to a day after the murderous attack, Coleman was awarded $4,000 in damages, a huge sum for 1820. But it was none too large. The editor had been prostrated for weeks, recurrent strokes of paralysis followed, and he was never in sound health again.
The physical violence to which editors were then exposed harmonized with a violence of temper and manner which was far too prominent in journalism, as in politics. In noting this abusiveness it must be remembered that the press was the product and mirror of its time. Politics was conducted with far more scurrility and coarseness than now, and the newspapers were largely an appendage of politics. A day of backwoods gouging and fashionable dueling, of constant fighting between street gangs in all the large cities, of fisticuffs on the floor of the House of Representatives, of a low standard of manners everywhere, was not a day for refined newspaper methods. It took time for editors to learn that hard reasons do more execution than hard names. Editors, moreover, were prone to set up medieval conventions; they regarded themselves as so many knights errant, roaming the land for battle, no sooner seeing a strange crest than they galloped to shiver lances.
It is usual to quote Coleman’s quatrain
50
Lie on, Duane, lie on for pay,
And Cheetham, lie thou too,
More ’gainst truth you cannot say
Than truth can say ’gainst you,
as a bold specimen of the editorial amenities of a century ago. But Coleman went far beyond the lie direct and countercheck quarrelsome. The American public has always refused to take at face value the epithets which editors exchange, and doubtless in Jefferson’s time it put a Pickwickian construction upon them. Referring to the most prominent Democratic editor, Coleman once quoted Milton’s line, “Squat like a toad at the ear of Eve,” adding: “I beg the devil’s pardon for comparing him in any shape with Duane.” Of Cheetham he said that he was so habituated to lying that given a choice of truth and mendacity he invariably preferred the latter, and on another occasion he listed twenty-five lies in a single article by “the President’s unlucky toad-eater.”
Coleman thought nothing of referring to Dr. Peter Irving, head of the Morning Chronicle, as a “malevolent coxcomb,” and to his partner as “a pedant and blackguard.” Other journals fared no better. When the Public Advertiser, a new Clintonian organ, libeled the Evening Post, Coleman denounced its “villainy” and challenged the “vile reptiles” editing it to produce their evidence. The conductor of the Long Island Star also fell afoul of the Evening Post. “This Kirk I have always despised as a flippant, conceited, shallow fellow,” wrote Coleman, “but I did not take him for so great a fool as his nonsense shows him to be, nor think him so black-hearted and malignant a calumniator.” In 1806 he termed Samuel H. Smith of the Washington National Intelligencer, the so-called “court journal” of Jefferson, “the little monkey.” Nine years later, when the era of good feeling was commencing, he prided himself upon his repression in speaking of the same able newspaper, in the columns of which Clay had been glad to appear: “I shall take no other notice of the charge in that profligate paper51 than to say I have long observed there is no misrepresentation too base, no violation of truth too palpable, not to be gladly adopted and circulated by that infamous organ.”
Be it said to Coleman’s credit that these examples are the worst to be selected from the files for fifteen years, during which the issues of the Aurora and American Citizen teemed with such expressions. Moreover, there was some justification for them. Cheetham, and to a less extent Duane, were unabashed liars; Peter Irving was so much of a coxcomb that even his friends called him “sissie Irving”; and Kirk certainly was a calumniator. Most creditable of all to Coleman, he refrained from dastardly slanders upon the private life of his contemporaries, whereas they gave him no such consideration. In 1807 he declared his conviction that Duane was in receipt of French gold, and many years later accused M. M. Noah, the famous Jewish journalist, of avowing himself open to a money bribe from the Clintonian faction, but he said nothing of the conduct of any such man apart from his editorial office. Yet his own enemies fabricated a story that he had been dismissed from the Vermont bar because he had bored a hole in a courthouse ceiling to overhear rival counsel, and accused him of illegally converting the funds of Greenfield neighbors to his own uses.
It is not strange that when the press was filled with this sort of utterance, libel suits were numerous. Cheetham at the beginning of 1804 had fourteen actions pending against him, and in 1807 admitted that the total damages which he had been compelled to pay reached almost $4,000. Aaron Burr had brought one of these suits, while ex-Mayor Varick in 1803 had obtained a judgment of $200. It is evidence of the comparatively moderate tone of the Evening Post that no suit against it ever succeeded, though a number were begun. One of these actions was brought by Robert Macomb, clerk of the Sessions Court, whom Coleman had accused of taking illegal fees, and another by a politician named Arcularius.
52
III
 
When war was actually declared in June, 1812, this belligerent editor, like most New York merchants, like four men in five throughout New England, believed that it meant the bootless ruin of trade and agriculture. It had come with such final suddenness, he said, that American ships in European waters would almost all be taken by British cruisers. It was professedly a war for freedom of the sea; in reality the shipping States believed, as Coleman put it, that it grew out of “the Southern anti-commercial spirit.”
De Witt Clinton, the ambitious mayor, who was courting the help of King, John Wells, and the Evening Post in his aspirations for the Federalist nomination against Madison that summer, told Coleman that he believed ninety-nine men in every hundred in the city really were opposed to the war. The editor was highly sarcastic in his references to the local Democrats as “fellow subjects of our loving Emperor Napoleon,” and in those to “Monsieurs Gallatin and Madison.” For a few weeks, while an alliance with France was thought a possibility, the Evening Post steadily declaimed against it. A war with Great Britain, fought single-handed, “will be neither a predatory war nor a bloody war,” it said; but if France sends her squadrons to the American coast, British fleets will follow, and the seaport towns will suffer. When Daniel Webster, a young man of thirty almost unknown outside New Hampshire, delivered a Fourth of July oration denouncing any co?peration with France, he was fervently praised.
New Yorkers were fearful of two perils: a British invasion across the St. Lawrence or Niagara Rivers, and bombardments by sea. “We are fighting the world’s greatest Power,” protested Coleman, “without the means of annoyance or even defense.” He told his readers, incorrectly, that the frigate Constitution was sent from Norfolk to Boston with only two rounds of cannonballs; and correctly, that Fort Niagara, on an “exposed and53 utterly defenseless frontier,” had scarcely powder enough for a Fourth of July salute.
For armaments at sea the Evening Post was always eloquent, but it took a different attitude toward the bustle of preparations to invade Canada. When President Madison requested the Governors to place the militia at his disposal, Coleman applauded the New England executives who refused. Conjuring up a vision of a harsh military despotism, he pronounced the President’s action one “highly dangerous to the liberties of the people, and to our republican form of government.” In editorial after editorial, moreover, he discouraged recruiting for Federal regiments. Are you willing, he asked volunteers, “to attempt foreign conquests while your wives and little ones are left exposed to an exasperated and unfeeling foe?” As autumn came on, he made the most of the reports of suffering among underclad troops. He wished no one to forget that their misery had been caused by “a wretched, incapable, mob-courting administration, less concerned to provide supplies for their army than to secure by low intrigue the places they so unworthily fill.”
It required no little courage to declare that the war was “a great national calamity,” that it was “clearly unjust,” and that the points in dispute were not worth the blood and treasure being spent. Two years previous, when the Evening Post was angrily opposing the impending conflict, a mob of Democrats had gathered at Martling’s Porter-House, and just before midnight had attacked the house of Michael Burnham, part-owner of the journal, smashing his windows, and nearly killing an infant. Just after the declaration of war occurred the memorable mob attack upon the Baltimore Federal Republican, in which Gen. James Lingan, a Revolutionary veteran defending the office, was killed, and Gen. Henry Lee crippled. Jack Binns, in the Philadelphia Democratic Press, proclaimed that it would be only natural if a body of angry men executed the same summary justice upon the traitorous editor of the Evening Post. For some time anonymous threats poured in upon Coleman.54 Among them was one which left him so certain that violence was actually brewing that he applied to Mayor Clinton for protection; and the city watch was doubled, special constables were held in readiness, and a party of armed friends spent the night at Coleman’s house. Nothing, however, occurred.
Coleman defiantly maintained that his right to free speech was in no way abridged by the declaration of war, and published a special series of editorials, highly legalistic in nature, denouncing the Baltimore outrage. He reminded the Democrats that in intimidating and attacking the Federalists for their opposition they had short memories. Had they forgotten their open resistance to the hostilities which the United States waged against France in 1798? This attitude, fortunately, met with powerful support. At a great peace mass-meeting in Washington Hall on Aug. 18, John Jay, Rufus King, Gouverneur Morris, Egbert Benson, and Richard Varick all assailed the war and asserted the right to outspoken criticism of it. By this date Coleman’s views had met what seemed to him the strongest possible confirmation. It had become known early in August that the British had repealed the Orders in Council, which were the great cause of the war, and for a moment hopes of peace had risen high; but Madison immediately rejected the armistice proffered by the British commander Prevost. The anger of New York and New England Federalists passed all bounds. “God of truth and mercy!” raged the Evening Post. “Our treasure is to be wasted, our immense frontiers are to be one scene of devastation, where the merciless savage is to revel in the blood of defenseless men, women, and children, because the form of the revocation is not satisfactory to our precise and critical President!”
The first news of an important military event confirmed Coleman’s gloomy apprehensions. On Aug. 31 he was able to write a long editorial upon Hull’s surrender at Detroit in that I-told-you-so spirit which is an editor’s subtlest joy. He called it disgraceful:
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A nation, counting eight millions of souls, deliberating and planning for a whole winter and spring, and part of a summer, the invasion and conquest of a neighboring province, at length making that invasion; and in one month its army retiring—captured—and captured in a fortified place—captured almost without firing a gun! Miserably deficient in practical talent must be the administration which formed the plan of that invasion; or the army which has thus surrendered must be a gang of more cowardly poltroons, than ever disgraced a country....
What! March an army into a country where there were not more than seven or eight hundred soldiers to oppose them, and not make the army large enough! March them from a country, which is the granary of the world, and let them famish on the very frontiers for want of provisions! Issue a gasconading proclamation threatening to exterminate the enemy, and surrender your whole army to them! If there be judgment in this people, they will see the utter unfitness of our rulers for anything beyond management, intrigue, and electioneering.—They have talents enough to influence a misguided populace against their best friends; but they cannot protect the nation from insult and disgrace.
Similar attacks upon the Administration’s incompetence followed every other reverse. From the early defeat at Queenstown Heights to the “Bladensburg Races,” when an American force fled ignominiously before Cockburn’s invaders and exposed Washington to capture, the Evening Post missed no opportunity for harsh criticism. “Woe to that nation whose king is a child!” was a favorite quotation of Coleman’s. The journal was far from unpatriotic, and sincerely deplored the several defeats, but it held the government rigidly responsible for them.
The editor never changed his opinion that, to use his words in the last year of the war, it was “an unsuccessful war, ... a war declared without just cause and without preparation, for the continuance of which no man can assign a reason, and from the termination of which no man expects an advantage.” And patriotic though Coleman was, he rejoiced in the failure of the successive efforts to invade Canada. He thought conquest in that quarter the most shameless territory-grabbing. In these utterances56 we catch the first accents of the Evening Post’s century-long campaign against “imperialism.” He wrote late in 1814:
Uti Possidetis, or Keep What You’ve Got.—The Lexington paper (Kentucky) some time ago, before the British had got possession of Fort Niagara, Michilimackinac, Castine, Moose Island, etc., etc., about the time when Gen. Wilkinson was to sup “in Montreal or Heaven,” this paper then said if any ministers should make a treaty on any other basis, than each to keep what they had got, they ought to have a halter. But then it was my bull and your cow.
In sharp contrast with these editorials were the exultant comments of the journal upon the dazzling successes of the Americans at sea. The Federalists since 1801 had constantly called for a larger navy. The first-known and most famous sea-fight of 1812 was the victory on Aug. 19 of the Constitution over the Guerriere, a vessel with which a London paper had declared no American ship could cope. “We have always contended that on an equal footing Americans can be whipped by none,” cried the Evening Post. “Man for man and gun for gun, even the veteran British tars can get no advantage over the Americans.” With a shrewd appreciation of the opportunities which Perry and McDonough seized, it began to insist upon a naval force on the lakes. Naturally, it still taunted the Democrats:
Though very little present benefit is to be expected from the war, commenced as it has been and carried on as it will be, under the present administration, yet it may have one good effect; it will prove that in a contest where the freedom of the seas is the object, a naval force is much superior to an army on the land. It will prove, what the Federalists have always advocated, and what the present ruling party have always opposed, the necessity of a maritime force to a commercial people.
News came soon after of the capture of the British sloop Alert by the American frigate Essex, and on Dec. 7 it was known that the United States, commanded by Decatur,57 had taken the Macedonian. “This is the third victory which has crowned our little naval force with laurels—may they bloom perennial!” exclaimed Coleman. He rather ill-naturedly accused the Administration of begrudging the seamen, who were mostly Yankees, their victories. “Our language is,” he concluded, “give us commerce and let us alone to protect it. We have ships and we have men; nor will we go to France for either, though your Jeffersons may recommend it ever so warmly.”
Nor did the Evening Post fail to take a vigorously patriotic attitude upon the questions raised by the Hartford Convention. The year 1814 drew to a close with the entire coast tightly blockaded by the British, the invasions of Canada all failures, the capitol at Washington in ashes, the British in possession of northern Maine, and their hands at last free in Europe. Mr. Madison’s war had ceased to be an offensive war, and had become defensive. The national government, almost without an army, almost without money, seemed on the point of collapse. On Dec. 15 there met at Hartford a convention of delegates from all the New England States, who for three weeks deliberated in secret; some believed that they were laying plans to declare all New England—as Nantucket had already declared herself—neutral, and to throw open its ports to the British, while others said that they were plotting secession, and the erection of a Yankee republic.
Coleman at the time had been called to Middletown, Conn., on business, and proceeded to Hartford to see some friends. Theodore Dwight, the secretary of the convention, later stated that the editor tried to gain informal entrance, but this Coleman denied. He never, even when years afterward the Hartford Convention had become an object of deep reproach, condemned it. But upon returning to New York he did express a deprecatory opinion of it. He commenced by declaring that the uproar of the Southerners over this “treasonable” gathering was as hypocritical as it was groundless. Who were these canting Virginians who inveighed against separatism and58 State Rights? The North had not forgotten that when Jay’s treaty arrived, the newspapers of Virginia unanimously began to discuss secession. It had not forgotten that Senator Giles, author of the detestable Conscription bill which had just failed, had then openly advocated a dissolution of the union. Had not Madison maintained, in the Virginia Assembly, the abstract right of secession? But Coleman then proceeded to speak a word of reassurance, and another of warning:
What precisely the Convention will do, it would be presumption in any one to predict.... But from our personal knowledge of the gentlemen composing the Convention, it will not be difficult to pronounce with certainty what they will not do. They have been selected from the most respectable men in New England, distinguished for their prudence, for their wisdom, for their firmness.... We may be justified in saying this respectable body, with such a president [George Cabot] at their head, will not do anything rash or precipitate or violent; they will not take any step but what every man of sound principles, every friend to social order throughout the union, will approve.... While they are bent on preserving the rights that are reserved to the States or the people, from usurpation and abuse, they will take care not to trench upon those powers which are delegated to the United States by the Constitution. The vessel at present wears well, and while there is room to believe that she will go safe about, and there is sea-room enough to do it in, why should they attempt to throw her in stays?
The vessel did come safe about. When six weeks later the news of the treaty of Ghent reached New York late at night, the city was thrown into such jubilation by the mere ending of the conflict that no one stopped to inquire the terms. But Coleman and the other local Federalist leaders, as they watched the crowds surging up and down Broadway crying—“A peace! A peace!” knew that the Democrats had nothing to boast. After a calm Sunday, the editor presented his views on Monday morning. He would stake his reputation that when the terms became known, “it will be found that the government have not by the negotiation obtained one single avowed object,59 for which they involved the country in this bloody and expensive war.” He enumerated these objects—the stoppage of impressments, the conquest of Canada, and the abolition of commercial restrictions. He catalogued the loss of life, the suffering on every frontier, and the waste of $150,000,000 in treasure. The one gain that Mr. Madison had obtained was a second term at $25,000 a year in a marble executive mansion, gorgeously refurnished. But, he concluded, “let the nation rejoice—we have escaped ruin.”
A part of Coleman’s disloyalty in the war, as opposition journals called it, lay in his vindictive pleasure over every disaster that befell French arms. Editorials on foreign affairs were rare, and usually ill-informed. But three months after war was declared the Evening Post based upon Wellington’s victories in Spain the sound prediction that the French forces would soon be compelled to evacuate the Peninsula altogether. “Bonaparte will never be emperor of the world,” wrote Coleman, with an eye also upon Russia’s hostility; “it will require all his talents to maintain himself even on the throne of France.” On Dec. 12, 1812, when news had just reached New York of the burning of Moscow (Sept. 16–20), leaving Napoleon stranded on an ashheap, a really shrewd statement of his peril appeared:
We have conversed with an intelligent gentleman who resided a long time in Russia, and about seven years of the time in the city of Moscow. He informs us that the weather in that country is generally pleasant till after the first of October, when the frost sets in, and excessive storms of rain and sleet are experienced, and continue with very little intermission until about the middle of December. All the time the roads are so overwhelmed with water and ice, that traveling is extremely uncomfortable, and many times quite impracticable. After the middle of December the snows begin to fall in such quantities that all traveling is entirely at an end; and the usual communication from town to town is interrupted for several weeks, the snows sometimes falling to the depth of eight or ten feet. He thinks, if Bonaparte did not commence his retreat from Moscow by the middle of October, that60 he will be obliged to winter there; for after that time it will be impossible for him to get out of Russia.... If he is obliged to winter there, the Russians have nothing to do but to cut off his supplies until about the middle of December, after which time all travel ceases until spring, and the great army of the north will be annihilated.
Indeed, it is plain from all the accounts we can collect from ... the French papers ... that the Russians have nothing to do but to hold out this winter, and their country will be relieved from its invaders. That they are determined to persevere appears to be certain; the destruction of such a city as Moscow is a proof of that determination, and a sure pledge that they will never surrender while they can hold a foot of ground.
Although the defeat of Napoleon at Leipsic meant that England would thenceforth be able to turn Wellington’s veteran armies against us, Federalist editors rejoiced as if it had been an American victory. They forgot for the moment the implications of the event for the war on this side; they thought only of the triumph of freedom over a military despot. “It is the morning dawn of liberty in Europe after a long, a dark, and a dismal night,” wrote Coleman. “This is the first ray of light which has visited the eyes of an oppressed people for many years past. For while Bonaparte remained in power even hope was dead—nothing but tyranny and oppression could be expected. And so firm had he fixed himself in his usurped seat, that it appeared almost out of the power of human exertions to shake him.... New prospects are opening up on the thinking mind; humanity appears to be near the end of her sufferings.”
The wars in Europe and America over, the old rancors forgotten, Coleman gladly accepted the era of good feeling. In the spring of 1816 the Evening Post supported Rufus King in his losing fight for the Governorship. But from the beginning of the year it had made up its mind that the Democrats, headed by Monroe, would gain the Presidency that fall, and it went through the motions of sustaining King for the higher office—he received only 34 electoral votes against Monroe’s 183—listlessly. Monroe’s61 success made of the Federalist party a mere corpse, over which factions in State politics fought like hyenas. Coleman showed no reluctance in admitting the demise, though he conventionally explained it as resulting from the Democratic adoption of Federalist principles. When in 1819 the Aurora attacked Monroe, the Evening Post actually flew out in the President’s defense. It was satisfied, wrote the editor, “that, take it all in all, the administration of James Monroe is, at this day, more generally acceptable to all classes of society in the United States, than that of any other man has ever been, since the days of Washington.” Coleman was entertained in 1819 by Vice-President Tompkins at the latter’s Staten Island home, and confessed later that he fell quite under the sway of Tompkins’s “great affability” and “his winning and familiar manner.” In short, by 1820 no one would have been surprised if some prophet had foretold that the journal of the “Federalist Field-Marshal” would shortly become the leading Democratic organ in the city.
But while it became half-Democratic, the Evening Post never ceased to be the spokesman of the best commercial sentiment in the city. As such, it opposed, with a bitter show of sectional feeling, the Missouri Compromise in 1820. The question at issue, said Coleman, was nothing more or less than “whether they shall or shall not be allowed to establish a new market for the sale of human flesh.” When the Virginia Legislature made a veiled threat of secession unless Missouri were admitted, Coleman rated the South angrily. They were hypocrites to talk about the Hartford Convention; they had been cowards when Washington was burned; on John Randolph’s own statement, they were in constant fear of a slave insurrection—these and other “bitter taunts,” as the Richmond Enquirer called them, proved the force of Jefferson’s statement that the Missouri controversy was like a firebell in the dark.
But the disintegration of the Federalist party of course robbed the Evening Post of a great part of its influence. It was no longer a sounding board for the best leadership62 of that party; men no longer recognized in its utterance the voices of Hamilton’s ablest and most energetic successors, King, Troup, Jay, Kent, and Morris. It became merely one of a half dozen journals recognized to have editors of brains and principle; and in 1816 it was destined to wait just a decade until it began to receive distinction from a man of something more than brains—a man of genius.