The first carrier boys of the Evening Post had a city of 60,000, a little larger than Mount Vernon and a little smaller than Passaic of to-day, to traverse. From the pleasant park at the Battery it was a distance of only about a mile north to the outskirts of the town. Just beyond its fringes, partly surrounded by woods, lay the Collect or Fresh Water Pond, from which water was piped to the city, and in which, despite the ordinances, neighboring housewives occasionally washed the family garments. There were seven wards, designated, since the names Out-Ward, Dock-Ward, and so on had been lost, by numbers. The northern part of the town was the plain, plebeian part, with much more actual wretchedness and want in severe winters than New York should have tolerated. It was also the stronghold of Democracy, and the fastest-growing section. Every one who had any pretensions to gentility managed to crowd south of Reade and Chatham Streets, and the nearer a merchant or lawyer approached the Battery the greater were likely to be his claims to social eminence. The mansions that faced Bowling Green, or that, like Archibald Gracie’s, looked from State Street over the bay, many of them graceful with porticoes and pillars, were called “Quality Row”; and the neighboring streets shone in their reflected luster. Many rich citizens, of course, had suburban seats along the Hudson and East Rivers. The aristocracy prided itself upon substantial virtues and substantial possessions—solid mahogany, thick cut glass, heavy solid silver sets, old and pure wines, and old customs. It was made up of almost indistinguishable elements of Dutch, English, New England, and Huguenot blood. The members took no shame from64 their general absorption in mercantile pursuits; and Alexander Stewart would himself show you over his ship-goods establishment at 68 Wall, Robert Lenox would talk of the 35,000 acres of Genesee Valley land which he had in hand for sale, one of the Swords brothers would offer you his newest publication in his Pearl Street bookshop, and a scion of the De Peyster family, which had been in business since 1650, would himself sell you one of his hogsheads of sherry at Murray’s Wharf.
Twenty years later the Evening Post declared that “there is not a city in the world which, in all respects, has advanced with greater rapidity than the city of New York.” The population had leaped up to 130,000. “Whichever way we turn, new buildings present themselves to our notice. In the upper wards particularly entire streets of elegant brick buildings have been formed on sites which only a few years ago were either covered with marshes, or occupied by a few straggling frame huts of little or no value.” On Canal Street “almost a city of itself” had sprung up where recently there had been a stagnant marsh. In Greenwich Village and along the Bowery two other veritable cities were assuming shape. Large fortunes had been made by the sale of real estate, and the prospective opening of the Erie Canal was accentuating the boom. A visitor from Boston, whose impressions were published in the Evening Post, praised some of the Broadway stores as showing “more splendor and magnificence than any I have ever seen,” commended the paving of the north-and-south streets, and showed his interest in the city’s three show-places, the Museum, Trinity Church, and the new City Hall, with its rich Turkey carpets, crimson silk curtains, and eighteen imposing portraits of warriors and statesmen. In 1823 a new building was erected at the corner of Pearl and Flymarket Streets. The Evening Post listed the objects placed in the cornerstone—a paper by a local pundit on the supposed Northmen’s tower at Newport, a copy of the Plough-Boy, a life of Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill, the seventh report of the Bible Society, and some coins. But the journal’s chief65 interest lay in the amazing cost of the site—$20,500 for a plot 25 by 40 feet. This, it said, was as striking evidence of the city’s growth as the “twenty elegant ships” which now plied regularly to Liverpool.
What part had the Evening Post tried to play in this transformation of a provincial town into a metropolis? William Cullen Bryant states that when he joined the journal in 1826, it was “much occupied with matters of local interest, the sanitary condition of the city, the state of its streets, its police, its regulations of various kinds.” That had always been true. No other New York editor of the time took an interest in civic improvements that approached Coleman’s.
For the paper’s first fifteen years it might have been questioned whether it viewed with greater dismay the errors of the Democrats at Washington or the running at large of great numbers of hogs within the city limits. New Yorkers of to-day think of the toleration of swine as characteristic only of the backward Southern towns described by Mark Twain; but our great-grandfathers saw them rooting in City Hall Park and basking in Broadway and Wall Street. As Coleman told his readers in 1803, they were “a multitude.” Some men made a business of raising them. One householder of the Fifth Ward in 1803 had sixty at large; fifteen years later Coleman knew a colored man who had more than forty. Whenever, from a diet of dead cats and other gutter dainties, they threatened to become diseased, they were hurried to the butcher; with the result that fastidious people ate no pork. Every one admitted that they were unsightly, malodorous, and kept the walks filthy, while every few months a carriage upset over one. But the poor demanded them, and it was argued they were scavengers. The one restriction, ill-enforced, was that their noses be ringed to protect the turf.
As late as 1828 Coleman complained that pigs were met everywhere in the lower part of the city. In his campaign against them he gave full space to the accidents they caused. A not untypical mishap occurred in 1819.66 An alarm of fire in Maiden Lane brought the firemen and the usual crowd of boys racing down Broadway with ropes hauling a fire-engine. As they were at top speed a large hog darted into their path, the whole line went down, and the heavy engine passed over several. The corporation had already passed an ordinance (effective Jan. 1, 1818) making it illegal to let hogs go unpenned, but it was flagrantly violated. “Although every street in the city is thronged with hogs, yet none could be found who were individual owners,” said the paper soon afterward. When efforts were made to send “hog-carts” along the Bowery and other infested streets, angry owners gathered and overset the wagons. In the spring of 1829 three thieves were actually arrested for driving into the city, collecting fourteen fat shoats from the streets, and starting for the country; they intended to bring them back as prime corn-fed country pork. How long, asked the Evening Post, would the shameful indifference to the ordinance endure?
It was necessary to keep up an incessant fire of complaint against the wretched street-repair and street-cleaning systems of the time. As early as 1803 the Evening Post declared that the streets should in part be flushed, and that it would hence be well “if the waterworks were the property of the public, as was originally intended; and not of a private company, who are attentive only to their individual interest.” In the summer of 1807 Coleman, who was fond of a horse and gig, wrote that the Broadway road was in “such a state of neglect and ruin that no one could drive through it after dark but at the hazard of limbs and life,” that after a heavy rain horses sank up to their girths, and that serious accidents had occurred, one rider breaking his thigh and another his shoulder-bone. The ways were then crossed at intervals by open gutters, sometimes so deep as to be a serious impediment to traffic; even in front of St. Paul’s, in the heart of the city, Broadway when the Evening Post was founded was traversed by one almost impassable. A campaign had to be begun by the press for covered sewers.
67 In 1817 the streets were described as dirtier than at any other time since “the year of filth,” when the British had evacuated the city after the Revolution. In a sudden access of energy the next year the authorities set gangs of twenty to fifty men once a week to attacking the streets with brooms. A fearful dust was raised, and yet the roadways were still imperfectly cleaned. Coleman pointed out that more frequent sweeping by smaller forces would be better, and that in Boston much of the work was done at night. In 1823 there came new grumblings over the filth and garbage. “Notwithstanding the great extent of the city of London,” wrote Coleman, “we have seldom seen cleaner streets than those of the British capital. With those of New York the comparison would be odious.” What was chiefly needed he thought to be plenty of water, and common sewers connecting with every house. He waxed satirical:
To the Curious:—The collection of filth and manure now lying in heaps, or which has been heaped in Wall, Pearl, Water, and Front Streets, near the Coffee-House, and left there, will astonish those who are fond of the wonderful, and pay them for the trouble of a walk there.
Sanitary ordinances were few, and apparently honored rather in the breach than in the observance. The city was full of unleashed dogs, and whenever in hot weather a hydrophobia panic occurred—which was every two or three years—they were slain by the scores. During one season they were dumped by cartloads into a vacant lot at Broadway and Bleecker Street, and buried so shallowly that neighboring residents had to keep their windows shut against the pestilential air. Slaughterhouses were tolerated in the midst of residential blocks, and the Evening Post early in the twenties began to call for their restriction. A correspondent related in 1825 how one butcher had recently purchased a small plot, and threatened to erect a shambles there unless the owners of valuable improvements near by paid him a large bonus—which they did; and how when another butcher wished68 a piece of property, he put up a slaughterhouse adjoining it to compel the owner to sell at a low price. The ordinance against the summer sale of oysters was long a dead letter. “You can scarcely pass through any one street in the city,” grumbled Coleman, “without running against a greasy table, with plates of sickly oysters displayed, well peppered with dust, and swarms of flies feeding upon them.”
“The city of feasts and fevers” a visitor called New York—“feasts” in reference to the frequent banquets on turtle, venison, and Madeira, “fevers” in reference to the epidemics of yellow fever. There was one such epidemic in 1803. So great was the exodus that in September the population, which had been above 60,000, was found to be barely 38,000. “It is notorious,” declared a writer in the Evening Post at this stage, “that notwithstanding the prevalence of a malignant disease, and when great exertions are made to check its destroying progress, the streets of this city are in a most noxious state; and will continue to increase in putridity, unless we are favored with some refreshing rains to clear them.” The Evening Post removed its business office to an address on the outskirts of the city, and Coleman as far as possible edited it from the country. For a time, as he said, in most of the town there was “no business, no society, no means of subsistence even.” New Yorkers could only set their teeth and wait for the frosts.
With Noah Webster during 1803 the Evening Post conducted a long-winded debate upon yellow fever; Coleman maintaining that it was always imported by some ship or immigrant, and Webster that it was spontaneously generated at home. Coleman was right, though of course absolutely ignorant of the reasons why he was right; and while the articles, which abound in mutual complaints of discourtesy, became very tiresome, Coleman’s argument tended to a sound conclusion. He argued that the epidemics could be avoided by rigidly quarantining the city. It was always held contrary to public policy by many merchants and officials to breathe a word about yellow69 fever till the last possible moment; for that drove trade to Boston or Philadelphia. But Coleman never failed to play the Dr. Stockmarr r?le courageously.
In 1809, for example, the paper braved the anger of business men by asserting on July 24 that, despite all denials, several deaths from the fever had just occurred in Brooklyn. Though an epidemic was raging in Cuba, ships from Havana had been allowed to come up from quarantine within four days of arrival, and had not been unloaded and cleansed according to the law. On July 28, by diligent scouting among doctors, Coleman was enabled to report a death from fever in Cherry Street and another in Beekman Street. He renewed his charge of malfeasance and neglect by the Health Officer at quarantine, a political appointee who pocketed $15,000 a year. Why, he demanded, were the laws as to the removal of the sick and the reporting of new cases not enforced? Four days later Mayor De Witt Clinton by proclamation forbade intercourse with the village of Brooklyn. At last! exclaimed the editor. But why not look to conditions within Manhattan itself, and make the ordinary physician obey the law? “If he does, one of the learned faculty will set a young cub of a student upon him to tear him in pieces for alarming the old women; and then there is another set who declare him a public enemy.”
Just ten years later, remarking that “it has heretofore been the practice to stifle, as long as possible, the intelligence that the yellow fever existed in the city,” Coleman served notice that if it broke out, as it did in August, he would advertise the fact. In 1822 there was a severe pestilence. The first case occurred on July 11 in a house on Rector Street, and was immediately made known to the Board of Health and to the officer deputed by law to give the first notice of its appearance. Yet it was concealed from the public for nearly a month, deaths occurring all the while, but no precautionary measures being taken; and before the epidemic ended, late in October, 388 persons died. The flight of the population toward the open parts of the island was unprecedented.70 An immediate agitation was begun by the Evening Post for a different organization of the Board of Health. By an act two years previous, it consisted of such persons as the Common Council should appoint, a phrase which the Council always construed to mean that it should itself act as the Board. The members were quite untrained, while they were too numerous, and too busy with politics. Coleman suggested a Board of from five to seven qualified men, to be nominated by the Mayor and confirmed by the Council, and a reform actually did soon follow.
An irritant of the time, akin to automobile speedsters of to-day, lay in the Irish cartmen, who loved a race even more than a fight, and whom Coleman denounced the more vigorously because they were Democrats to a man. The bakers’ boys were called “flying Mercuries”; to excite terror, said the Evening Post in 1805, they particularly delighted in crashing round a narrow street corner at a dead gallop, splashing those whom they did not graze. The journal in 1817 felt it proper to attack the practice of riding fast horses home from the blacksmith’s without a bridle. Among the annoyances showing a lack of due city regulations was the appearance in 1820 of an ingenious mode of kite-flying. As flown in daytime, kites had always been admirably calculated to scare horses. Now they were being sent up at night by hordes of urchins, said the Evening Post, with a parachute and a little car affixed, the car containing lighted candles, and the whole so constructed that it could be separated from the kite at pleasure. They were miraculously adapted for setting roofs afire.
Most residential streets must have been fairly quiet; but they were not sufficiently so to suit the harassed editor. We find him in 1803 declaiming in order against the varied noises: “The measured ditty of the young sweep at daybreak, upon the chimney top; the tremendous nasal yell of ‘Ye rusk!’; the sonorous horn that gives dreadful note of ‘gingerbread!’; and the echoing sound of ‘Hoboy!’ at midnight, accompanied with its never-failing appeal to more senses than one.” These “hoboy gentlemen,”71 whose profession was connected with Mrs. Warren’s, were still an abomination in 1816, “bellowing out their filthy ditties” for two hours after eleven. As late as 1819, at the flush of dawn every morning, a stage traversed the whole length of Broadway northward, the guard merrily blowing his horn as it went and all the dogs barking. Hucksters, like beggars, seem at all times to have been troublesome. At any rate, Coleman in August, 1823, fulminated against them as to be found on every street and almost at every door, and as offering “almost everything that can be named, from a lady’s leghorn hat to a shoestring, from a saddle to a cowskin, from a gold ring to a jewsharp.” Busy householders and ordinary rent-paying tradesmen held them in equal dislike.
There was little of the moral censor or the preacher in the early Evening Post. Yet it did not neglect the city’s manners. Temperance sentiment was then weak, but the journal lamented the excessive number of corner groggeries; for in New York licenses cost but 40 shillings, and liquor-selling was more extensive than in Boston or Philadelphia. In 1810 the Mayor and Excise Commissioners granted 3,500 licenses, and it was estimated that of the city’s 14,000 families, no less than 2,000 gained a livelihood through the drink trade. Their little shops, many of them in cellars, were reported to exhibit perpetual scenes of riot and disorder. Six years later a writer in the Evening Post computed that there were more than 1,500 retail establishments for liquor, and added that it were better to let loose in the streets 1,500 hungry lions and tigers. The editor favored a heavy Federal tax to abate the evil.
The journal had the courage in 1818 to take a stand against lotteries, then resorted to not only for private gain, but to raise capital for bridges, canals, turnpikes, colleges, and churches. Their abolition would mean a sacrifice to the Evening Post, for in some periods of previous years they had furnished one-fifteenth or one-twentieth the whole advertising. But Coleman’s heart was touched by the losses of the poor. “Look at the crowd72 of poor, ragged wretches that beset the office-keeper’s doors the morning after the day’s drawing is over, waiting with their little slips in their hands, to hear their fate, and the yesterday’s earnings ready to be given to the harpies that stand gaping for the pittance.” He thought there were two palliatives short of abolition: first, to price the tickets so high that only people of means would gamble; and second, as in England, to compel managers to finish the drawings in a week or ten days, so as to end the pernicious practice of insuring the fate of tickets. Three years later, in 1821, an act passed providing that no new lotteries should be authorized.
The Evening Post said nothing against public executions, which during the first quarter of the century drew crowds of thousands; but it did cease at an early date, on principle, to publish long accounts of them. In June, 1819, it barely mentioned the fact that a great concourse gathered for the execution in Potter’s Field, now Washington Square, of a negress named Rose Butler for attempted arson, and that the disappointment was keen when she was respited. Next month her actual hanging was recorded in five lines. Imprisonment for debt was repeatedly attacked by the editor.
Little was said by Coleman or any one else against cock-fighting and other inhuman amusements of the time. In 1807, however, the Evening Post opened its columns to a writer who described with indignant reprobation a bull-baiting which he had just attended. The bull was worried by dogs until, with one horn broken off, his ears in shreds, his tongue almost torn out, and his eyes filled with blood, he stopped fighting and had to be driven away to save his life. In other cities about 1815, notably Philadelphia, a great deal was being said against the employment of chimney sweeps, a set of dirty, underfed, uneducated urchins, who suffered from harsh masters and a dangerous calling. Coleman joined the chorus, and printed extended accounts of British inventions for the mechanical cleaning of flues. It is interesting to note that in 1805 the Evening Post was as willing to give up its73 revenue from patent medicines as later that from lotteries. The editor, rendered angry by the death of a little girl who had taken a worthless nostrum, denounced “the quack medicines and quack advertisements which ... so much distinguish and disgrace the city.” Some daily papers were filled with advertisements of Restoratives, Essences, Balsams, Lozenges, and Purifiers warranted to cure all human ills; and the vendors had begun to publish in Maiden Lane a weekly organ, the Remembrancer, of which they distributed five hundred copies free.
Upon the contributions steadily made by invention and private enterprise to the comfort of the city many comments may be found in the Evening Post. Some of the most interesting relate to the old sailboat ferries, which were both slow and dangerous. Repeated accidents occurred early in the century. Following the capsizing of a Brooklyn ferry one bitter December day in 1803, with six passengers aboard, Coleman remarked that it was a notorious fact that such craft were placed in charge of fellows who were oftener half drunk than sober, and who, unable themselves to steer, committed the helm to any one who volunteered. He quoted the opinion of a competent sailor that in build these boats were the most dangerous ferries, especially in rough weather, of all he had seen throughout the world. The Paulus Hook (Jersey City) ferries, when contending against head winds and strong tides, required three hours to make a passage, and it was virtually impossible to get a horse and carriage across the North River. On summer Sundays, when many wished to go to Hoboken for picnics, and during the autumn racing on Long Island, prodigious queues would form at the piers. But on July 18, 1812, a steam ferry was set in motion between Manhattan and Paulus Hook by Robert Fulton. Surpassing all expectations, it proved able to accommodate six carriages and horses—driven easily aboard by a floating bridge—and 300 passengers at one time, and to cross during a calm in fourteen minutes, or against the tide in twenty. On July 27 some 1,500 people were ferried across and back; “a proud example74 of the genius of our country,” said Coleman.
When in the summer of 1807 Fulton’s steamboat, the Clermont, began her regular service between New York and Albany, the Evening Post was jubilant; he had made only a few trips before it wanted the mail service transferred to him. It proudly recorded each new reduction in the time, until one trip from Albany down was made in 28 hours. Even in October great crowds gathered to watch the boat start:
Among the thousands who viewed the scene [wrote “New York” on Oct. 2] permit a spectator to express his gratification at the sight, this morning, of the steamboat proceeding on her trip to Albany in a wind and swell of tide which appeared to bid defiance to every attempt to perform the voyage. The Steam Boat appeared to glide as easily and rapidly as though it were calm, and the machinery was not in the least impeded by the waves of the Hudson, the wheels moving with their usual velocity and effect. The experiment of this day removes every doubt of the practicability of the Steam Boat being able to work in rough weather.
Unfortunately, this particular trip was actually disastrous. Leaving the city at 10 a. m., the boat was forced by the gale and tide to tie up to the bank at noon, staying there overnight. Next morning, before reaching Tarrytown, she ran into a small sloop, and one of her paddle-wheels was torn away. It was 10 o’clock on the morning of Oct. 4 before she set her stiff and hungry passengers ashore in Albany. She was immediately withdrawn, and during the winter was almost completely rebuilt.
The journal appreciatively noticed the opening of steamship navigation on the Raritan and Delaware Rivers in 1809, as a means of shortening the trip between New York and Philadelphia. In March, 1815, it gave an account of the first trip through Hell Gate and the Sound to New Haven. The steamship Fulton left New York shortly after 5 a. m., and, the weather being bad and the wood for fuel poor, did not reach her destination till 4:30 that afternoon. Eight or nine hours would ordinarily be sufficient. The ease with which Hell Gate, theretofore thought impassable by steam, was navigated,75 amazed every one. No less than $90,000 had been spent on the boat. “We believe it may with truth be affirmed that there is not in the world such accommodations afloat,” wrote a correspondent. “Indeed, it is hardly possible to conceive that anything of the kind can exceed the Fulton in elegance and convenience.”
By the beginning of 1816 the Evening Post was giving much space to the possibilities of coal gas as an illuminant. A schoolmaster named Griscom lectured the evening of Jan. 26 on the light, the audience including the Mayor, Recorder, many aldermen, and prominent business men. He demonstrated the use of gas, argued that it would cost only half as much as lamps or candles, and showed that it gave a superior brilliancy without smoke or odor. At this time, as Coleman emphasized, Londoners had extensively employed coal gas for four or five years. During the summer of 1816 a successful trial was made in Baltimore. At last, seven years later, the Evening Post was able editorially to direct attention to the advertisement of the New York Gas Company, which was just issuing $200,000 worth of stock, and which the city government had given a franchise for lighting all the town south of Grand Street for the next thirty years.
But the use of old-fashioned illuminants involved no such hardships as did the city’s exclusive dependence, when Hamilton’s journal began its career, upon wood for fuel. As regularly as the Hudson froze and snowdrifts blocked the roads, prices soared. In January, 1806, for example, hickory rose from the normal price of $3.50 a load (three loads made a cord) to $7, and some speculators even tried to get $8. In 1821, after a severe snowstorm, $5 was charged for a load of oak, and $7.50 for better woods. It was with unusual satisfaction, therefore, that in the summer of 1823 the journal said that it “congratulated the public on the near prospect of this city being supplied with coal, dug from that immense range” of potential mines lately discovered in Pennsylvania. The new Schuylkill Coal Company and the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company were making preparations76 to ship the anthracite; and Coleman hoped that the city’s fuel bill of $700,000 or $800,000 would be cut in half.
Little criticism was given the watch or the firemen, though neither fully protected the city. In 1812 the journal very properly attacked the “snug watch-boxes” in which the police were wont to sit, and demanded that the men be warmly dressed and kept constantly on patrol. During 1818 its complaints of the insufficiency of the police redoubled, and in 1823, when the total annual expense to the city was $56,000, Coleman asserted that for almost the whole ward surrounding Coenties Slip, with many valuable warehouses, there was but one watchman. The editor, using the adjectives “noisome,” “beastly,” “filthy,” spoke of the jail and bridewell in 1812 as standing reproaches to New York. He also condemned “the abominable practises of the marshals, constables, low attornies, and a number of other wretches” who hung about the courts and bridewell to prey upon arrested men. The Evening Post at intervals till 1820 complained of a lack of inspection in public markets; while with almost equal regularity it scored the neglect of the Battery, whose only caretakers were too often the hogs.
The one reform of the time which the paper opposed was the aldermanic decree in the spring of 1820 that no more interments should take place south of Canal, Sullivan, and Grand Streets. This was good sense; but Coleman, as a spokesman for the wealthy merchant families, objected because it rendered many family burial plots or vaults worthless, and because the nearest available cemeteries were three and a half miles from the city.
II
 
We have already named the daily newspapers which existed when Hamilton and his associates established the Evening Post. The oldest of the five was the Daily Gazette, which had been founded as a weekly in 1725; the Post made six, Dr. Irving’s Morning Chronicle, patronized by Burr, seven, and the Public Advertiser eight. In 1807 the whole list of city publications was as follows:
77
Federalist:—Evening Post; Commercial Advertiser; Daily Gazette; Weekly Inspector; and People’s Friend.
Clintonian:—American Citizen; Public Advertiser; and Bowery Republican.
Lewisite (Morgan Lewis was the inheritor of Burr’s mantle):—Morning Chronicle.
Neutral:—Mercantile Advertiser; New York Spy; Price Current.
Literary:—Monthly Register; Ladies’ Weekly Miscellany; Weekly Museum.
Of the dailies, the Evening Post was the most important; its scope was the widest, its editorials were the best-written, and its commercial news was as good as that obtained by Lang or Belden. Yet even it had, at the beginning of its second year, but 1,104 subscribers for the daily edition, and 1,632, chiefly out-of-town, for the weekly. New Yorkers then regarded newspapers as a luxury, not a necessity. Since a year’s subscription cost $8, or ten days’ wages for a workingman, the poor simply could not afford it. Thrifty householders exchanged sheets, and at the taverns they were read to wide circles. The journal was never sold on the streets, and if Coleman had caught an urchin peddling it he would have boxed his ears for a fool; whenever a visitor at the City Hotel, or a merchant particularly pleased by some long editorial, wished a copy, he not only had to pay the heavy price of 12? cents, but had to go to the printer’s room for it. Coleman no more thought of his circulation as variable from day to day than does the editor of a country weekly at the present time.
We must remember that the dailies of old New York not only had small and fixed circulations, but that it was not their editors’ intention to make them purveyors of news in anything like the modern sense. Coleman in his prospectus made no promise of enterprise in supplying intelligence. An editor was glad to give a completer notification of new auctions or cargoes than any rival, or to be first to strike the party note upon a political event; but a news “beat” was unknown.
78 It was said of the Commercial Advertiser that wars might be fought and won, dynasties rise and fall, quakes and floods ravage the earth, and it would never mention them; but that if it failed to list a single ship arrival or sailing, the editor would meditate blowing out his brains. Several New York newspapers of 1800–1820 were principally vehicles of political opinion; several were principally organs for commercial information and advertisements; and some were a mingling of the two. A modicum of news was thrown in to add variety, and though it tended to grow greater, even by 1825 it was only a modicum. One great difficulty was that there was no machinery for news-gathering. Coleman was his own reporter for local events, and had no money to hire an assistant; while almost all news from outside was taken from exchanges, or from private letters whose contents were communicated to him by friends. The mails were slow and irregular. A still larger difficulty was that the news sense had been developed neither by editors nor by the public to whose demands the editors catered.
Illustrations of what would now seem an incredible blindness to important events might be multiplied indefinitely. A New Yorker who wishes to find in old files a real account of the first trial of Fulton’s Clermont will search in vain. No report worthy of the name was written, the brief newspaper references being meager and unsatisfactory. Yet there was much interest in Fulton, and the Evening Post of July 22, sixteen days before the experiment with the steamboat, did give a good account of his successful effort in the harbor to use torpedoes. More than twenty years later the Evening Post carried an advance notice of the opening of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, the real beginning of American railroad traffic; but, like most other papers, it gave no report of the actual occurrence.
Sometimes news was deliberately rejected. In 1805 Coleman published a long series of articles discussing Jefferson’s second inaugural address, but the address itself he never printed; it being assumed that interested men79 could find it in the Democratic press. Again, when in the autumn of 1812 a gang of robbers entered eight of the largest stores of the city in succession, during a few days, and took goods valued at $3,000, the editor made no effort to place the particulars before his readers; could they not ask the neighborhood gossips? He contented himself with a warning to the public and to the watch. On Jan. 10, 1803, early in the evening, the house of a well-to-do tallow chandler named Willis, in Roosevelt Street, was robbed. Next day the paper made only a casual allusion to it, na?vely adding: “For particulars see the advertisement in this evening’s Post.” The obliging Mr. Willis, in advertising a reward, had stated the details of his loss, which came to $2,500 or $2,600 in cash.
But on other occasions the editor made an earnest but unavailing effort to procure the news. A single issue of 1826 affords two examples: private letters in town had brought hints of a duel between Randolph and Clay, but it proved impossible to verify the reports, while of a fire that morning in Chambers Street no accurate facts were ascertainable. In September, 1809, the Common Council dismissed William Mooney, a Tammany leader, from the superintendency of the almshouse, and men surmised that the grounds were corruption. A few days later Coleman published the following notice:
Information Wanted:—I have been waiting some days in hopes that some person would furnish me with facts which led to the disaster which on Monday last befell the Grand Sachem, who lately presided over the almshouse. Surely the citizens have a right to be informed of such things. Will any person, acquainted with the circumstances, communicate them to the editor?
Unfortunately, no informed person came forward. During the last days of the War of 1812, commercial firms constantly tried to obtain private news of the progress of the peace negotiations. There is a pathetic note of frustration in the Evening Post’s item of Nov. 29, 1814: “Considering the public entitled to all the information in our power, we barely mention that there is a80 London paper of the 28th ult. in town, which is kept from the public eye at present. We will not conjecture what the contents are, but merely venture to say that it is probably something of moment.”
Nor was the news, collected under such great disadvantages, quite as accurate as news is now required to be. In August, 1805, the evening papers caused much stir and conjecture in the little city by announcing that Jefferson had called the Senate together upon important foreign business. Next day they explained that this false report had originated with a mischievous young man who had arrived from Philadelphia in the mail stage, and whose name they would like to learn. Coleman was somewhat embarrassed two years later to have to state:
We are requested by Mr. Wright to contradict the account published yesterday of his being lost in crossing the North River.
When in 1810 the town was on tiptoe to learn the President’s January message to Congress, or as Coleman called it, “the great War-Whoop,” two conflicting summaries reached the evening papers at once; one communicated by a gentleman who arrived direct from Washington, and one obtained through the Philadelphia Aurora from a commercial express rider. While waiting fuller news, they could only print both and let readers take their choice. During the spring of 1812, with war impending, the press was replete with mere gossip and rumor, sometimes well founded, more often baseless. As late as 1826 there occurred a striking illustration of the inaccuracy of much that passed for foreign news, and of the difficulty which truth experienced in overtaking error. The Greek revolution had broken out in 1821, and the massacres of Chios and Constantinople, the victory of Marco Bozzaris, and the death of Byron had kindled a flame of phil-hellenism throughout America. On April 26, 1826, the Greek stronghold of Missolonghi was captured. Despite this, late in May there reached New York a circumstantial account of the relief of Missolonghi, the slaughter of the Turks, the death of their hated commander81 Ibrahim, and the brightening prospect of Greek liberty, all of which the newspapers spread forth under such captions as “Glorious News From Greece.” Early in June this was contradicted by the true news. Nevertheless, wrote Coleman on July 20, “on taking up a late Tennessee newspaper we find that the ‘Glorious News’ has just reached our western neighbors and that they are now only beginning to rejoice at the deliverance of Missolonghi.”
We can most vividly appreciate just how far the early newspapers succeeded—for the Evening Post was typical of the best sheets—and how far they failed as purveyors of current information, by listing the materials presented in a single week chosen at random. In the seven days May 9–14 inclusive, 1803, Coleman published the following intelligence:
FOREIGN DOMESTIC
War Rumored Between Britain and France Fire in Troy, N. Y.
Monroe Arrives at Havre Editor Duane Apologizes for Libel
French Hunt Haitians With Bloodhounds Cheetham Fined $200 for Libel
  Column on Harlem Races
Two Columns on British Penal Reform Paine Publishes Letter from Jefferson
French Prefect Reaches New Orleans Grainger’s Record as Postmaster-General
British Give South Africa to Dutch Fire in New York Coach Factory
Demands of Dey of Algiers on Powers Two Benefits at Local Theatre
More Rumors of Anglo-French War Election Dispute in Ulster County
Agrarian Violence in Ireland Election Incident at Pawling
London Stock-Market Fluctuations Advance Sale of Marshall’s “Washington”
European Trade Rivalries in Levant XYZ Affair Reviewed
French Troops Concentrate in Holland
This was absolutely all, and many of these subjects were treated in only a few lines, and with obvious haziness and inexactitude. It is plain that the week’s budget did carry much illumination to the public mind; but it is also plain that only a tiny part of the world’s activities were being covered, that city news was appallingly neglected,82 and that a modern journal treating each day hundreds of subjects would then have been inconceivable.
Yet the press could boast of occasional feats of news presentation which would do credit to journalism even now. The political meetings of each party were almost always well reported by its own party organs. In 1807 Burr’s trial was covered for the Evening Post by a special correspondent whose reports were dry—there was no description of scene or personages, no attention to emphasis, and little direct quotation of counsel or witnesses—but were also expert, comprehensive, and minute. It is well known that the greatest of American earthquakes occurred in 1811 in the Missouri and Arkansas country just west of the Mississippi. The Evening Post was fortunate enough to obtain a three-column account of it, vivid, intelligent, and thrilling, from the pen of an observer who witnessed it from a point near New Madrid. The special Albany letters were fair; for years the Evening Post derived occasional bits of inside information from Federalist Congressmen, and made good use of them; and its London correspondence, which began in 1819 with an account of the Holkham sheep-shearing, was on a level with much London correspondence of to-day. One of the most extravagant items in the Evening Post’s first account book is $50 for getting President Madison’s annual message of 1809 to New York by “pony express.” An attempt was made to use carrier pigeons when the House in 1824 elected J. Q. Adams President, but it proved a failure.
After the commencement of the War of 1812, as we should expect, much more assiduous attention was paid to news. From five columns, the space allotted rapidly rose to six, seven, and even eight. Almost always, of course, it was very late news. Word of the first disaster of the war, Hull’s surrender at Detroit, was published by the Evening Post on Aug. 31, 1812. The capitulation has occurred on the 16th, and the news came by two routes. An express rider had carried it from Sandusky to Cleveland, and thence it was brought by a postal carrier83 to Warren, Pa., on the 22d, so that Pittsburgh had it on the 23d, and Philadelphia on the night of the 29th. At the same time it was coming by a southern path. Hull sent a messenger direct to Washington, who arrived in the capital on the 28th, and whose dispatches were relayed northward.
Hard on the heels of this blow came cheering news. The Constitution met the Guerriere on Aug. 19, and Capt. Hull’s victory was given to the public by Boston papers of the 31st, and New York papers of Sept. 2. Thus both the defeat and the victory were known to most Northerners about a fortnight after they took place. Of “the fall of Fort Dearborn at Chicagua,” on Aug. 15, the famous massacre, New Yorkers did not learn until Sept. 24, when a brief dispatch from Buffalo was inserted in an obscure corner by Coleman. All Washington news at this time still required two full days for transmission, and often more. When Madison on Nov. 3, 1812, sent a message to Congress at high noon, the Evening Post announced that it and the Gazette had clubbed together to pay for a pony express, and that it hoped to issue an extra with the news the following afternoon. It also stated that the previous evening an express had passed through the city towards New England, reputed to be bearing the substance of the message, and to have traversed the 340 miles from Washington in nineteen hours. Next day the editor stated that the express had really come from Baltimore only, and that it had been paid for by gamblers to bear the first numbers drawn in the Susquehanna lottery in advance of the mails. These numbers had been delivered to the gamblers in New York, who went to the proper offices and took insurance to the amount of $30,000 against their coming up that day; but the offices refused payment. It was nearly thirty-six hours before Madison’s message reached New York from Washington, and it was not printed until Nov. 5.
Late in the fall occurred an interesting example of the constant conflict of that day between rumor and fact. Gen. Stephen Van Rensselaer sacrificed a force of 90084 men at Queenstown Heights, just across the Niagara River, on Oct. 13. Seven days later the Evening Post in a column headed “postscript” gave the city its first intimation that a battle had occurred. Just as the paper at two o’clock was going to press, it said, the Albany boat had come in with word from Geneva that an army surgeon had arrived there from Buffalo, and had reported a great American victory—the capture of Queenstown and 1,500 prisoners. But the steamer also brought a rival report from the Canandaigua Repository of a disaster, in which hundreds had been killed and hundreds captured. The city could only wait and fear as the following day passed without news. Finally, on the afternoon of the 22d, the Albany steamboat hove in sight again, and a great crowd thronging the pier was aghast to learn that Van Rensselaer had lost a battle and a small army.
In the closing days of the war this episode was reversed, the rumor of bad news being followed by a truthful report of good. On Jan. 20, 1815, the whole city was in suspense as to the fate of New Orleans. Nothing had been heard from Louisiana for a month, and three mails were overdue, which boded ill, for every one knew that Sir Edward Pakenham and his 16,000 British veterans were ready to move upon the place. “It is generally believed here that if an attack has been made on Orleans, the city has fallen,” said the Evening Post. “But some doubt whether the British, having the perfect command of all the waters about the city, and having it in their power to command the river above, will not resort to a more bloodless, but a certain method of reducing the city.” On Jan. 23 the Evening Post published some inconclusive information received in a letter from a New Orleans judge, dated just before the preliminary and indecisive battle of Dec. 23. “We have cause of apprehension,” Coleman wrote, “that to-morrow’s mail will bring tidings of the winding up of the catastrophe.” New Yorkers were particularly concerned because city merchants owned a great part of the $3,200,000 worth of cotton stored in New Orleans. But a week,85 ten days, and two weeks passed while little news was procured and the tension grew steadily greater. Finally, on the morning of Feb. 6, three mails were received at once, with New Orleans letters bearing dates as late as Jan. 13, five days after Jackson had bloodily repulsed Packenham. The tidings fell upon New York with a tremendous shock of surprise and joy, and the Evening Post hastened to publish them in two columns and with its closest approach to the yet uninvented headline.
Under the stress of war the first news with conscious color, pathos, and strong human interest began to be written. The earliest account filled with human touches dealt with an incident of the privateering of which New York harbor was a busy center. The privateer Franklin, two months after hostilities began, returned from the Nova Scotia coast with a strange prize—an old, crazy, black-sided fishing schooner of thirty-eight tons, less than half the size of a good Hudson River market boat. Coleman, going aboard, found the owner a fine gray-haired woman, a widow. The little craft was her all. Wrapped in a rusty black coat as tattered as its sails, “she cried as if her heart would break” while she told the editor how she had left four children behind her and had pleaded with her captor not to be taken so far from home. It need not be said that the publicity Coleman gave to this incident helped persuade the captain of the privateer that honor obliged him to send the fisherwoman back.
Two years later occurred an incident the humorous values of which the Evening Post did not miss. Mr. Wise, part-proprietor of the Museum in New York, with a mixture of patriotic and business motives, had an extensive panorama painted of the glorious Yankee naval victories of 1812 and 1813. Having got all the New York sixpences that he could with it, he packed it up together with the lamps and other fixtures for its exhibition, and a valuable hand-organ, and set sail for Charleston to show it there. On the second day out from Sandy Hook, the British frigate Forth captured the vessel.86 Greatly amused, the commander promptly set the panorama up for inspection:
So valuable did the captain of the Forth consider his prize, that in the evening of the day he made his capture, he illuminated his ships with the lamps belonging to the panorama, and kept up a merry tune upon the organ. In the course of their merriment they asked Mr. Wise if it could play Yankee Doodle. Upon his answering in the affirmative, they immediately set the organ to that tune, and in a sailor step made the decks shake. The captain of the Forth said he intended to take the paintings to Halifax and make a fortune by exhibiting them.
But, remarked Coleman patriotically:
The frigate President, we understand, is preparing for a cruise now under the command of Decatur, and if they will have a little patience we will furnish another historical subject for their amusement.
As the war drew near its close, sometimes even ten columns of news were furnished, and on several occasions, as that of Gen. Hull’s trial, a one-sheet supplement was issued. The first cartoon in the Evening Post was evoked on April 18, 1812, by the act of Congress cutting off foreign trade by land. It showed two large tree-trunks in close juxtaposition, one labeled “Embargo” and the other “Non-Importation Act,” with a fat snake held immovable between them; from the snake’s mouth were issuing the words, “What’s the matter now?” and from its tail the answer, “I can’t get out!” Such wit was about equal to that of the second cartoon, on April 25, 1814, which showed a terrapin (the Embargo was often called “the terrapin policy”) flat upon its back, expiring as Madison stabbed it with a saber, but still clinging to the President with claws and teeth. Below was some doggerel expressing the determination of the terrapin to hold on until it dragged Madison down and slew him. Evidently readers were obtuse, for the next day appeared a solemn “Explanation of the emblematic figures in yesterday’s paper.” But as yet neither news nor cartoons were87 published on the first page, which was sacred, as in English papers of to-day, to advertisements.
Except for one advance intimation, the news of peace might have been as unexpected as that of the victory of New Orleans. This intimation came on Feb. 9, in a curiously roundabout manner. A privateer cruising in British waters captured a prize which bore London newspapers dating to Nov. 28, and carried them to Salem, Mass., whence their contents were reprinted all over the North. They contained the speech of the Prince Regent on Nov. 11, and the proceedings of the Commons immediately afterwards, holding out hope for a prompt ending of the war.
The news of peace itself electrified the city two days later, reaching it by the British sloop Favorite, which bore one of the secretaries of the American legation in London, at eight o’clock on Saturday evening. No journal was so indecorous as to issue a special Sunday edition, but on Monday the Evening Post contained a full account of the delirium of rejoicing with which the intelligence was greeted. Nearly every window in the principal streets was illuminated, and Broadway was filled with laughing, huzzaing, exalted people, carrying torches or candles, and jamming the way for two hours. On Tuesday the Evening Post recorded that sugar had fallen from $26 a hundred-weight to $12.50, tea from $2.25 a pound to $1, and tin from $80 a box to $25, while specie, which had been at 22 per cent. premium, was now only at 2 per cent., and six per cent. Government stock had risen from 76 to 86. The wharves were an animated scene, ship advertisements were pouring in, and “it is really wonderful to see the change produced in a few hours in the City of New York.”
And what of the Napoleonic wars? All European news was then obtained from files of foreign papers, some of which came to New York journals direct, and some of which were supplied by merchants and shippers. It was usual, whenever a packet arrived with a fresh batch, to cut the domestic news to a few paragraphs, stop any series of editorial articles in hand, and for several days88 fill the columns with extracts and summaries. Though in 1812 a ship came from Belfast in the remarkable time of twenty-two days, forty days was the average from London or Liverpool, and European news was hence from one to two months late. Sometimes a traveler, and frequently a ship-captain, brought news by word of mouth.
A detailed account from the London prints of Napoleon’s marriage at Vienna was not published by the Evening Post till ten weeks after the event. Wellington stormed Badajos on April 7, 1812, and the Evening Post announced the fact on June 11, or more than two months later; while the battle of Salamanca that summer, where Wellington “beat forty thousand in forty minutes,” was not known for sixty-six days, the news coming in part through a traveler who arrived from Cadiz at Salem, and was interviewed by a correspondent there. It was the middle of October when the armies of Napoleon and the Allies took position for the battle of Leipsic, and Coleman was not able to publish his three-column summary from a London paper till just after New Year’s. When the description of the battle of Toulouse came in, there occurred an office tragedy:
Here ought to follow an account of a great battle between Lord Wellington and Soult [explained Coleman after an abrupt break in the news], and other selections amounting to about two columns, but it being necessary to get it set up abroad, the boy in bringing it home blundered down in the street, and threw the types into irretrievable confusion. It will be given to-morrow.
After that wily and selfish old invalid Bourbon, Louis XVIII, given his crown by the Allies, visited London in state, a spectator sent a vivid account of his triumphal passage up Piccadilly to the Evening Post. Louis had passed so near that this tourist could have touched him. “He is very corpulent, with a round face, dark eyes, prominent features, the character of countenance much like that of the portraits of the other Louises; a pleasant face; his eyes were suffused with tears.” Then came the Hundred Days; and the greatest European news of all was thus introduced on Aug. 2, 1815:
89
IMPORTANT
 
We received from our correspondent at Boston, by this morning’s mail, the following important news, which we hasten to lay before our readers:
From Our Correspondent,
Office of the Boston Daily Advertiser,
July 31, 1815.
A gentleman has just arrived in town from a vessel which he left in the harbor, bringing London dates from June 24. The principal article is an official dispatch of Lord Wellington’s, dated Waterloo, June 19, giving a detailed account of a general engagement.
There followed Wellington’s succinct dispatch. Its modesty of tone misled many New York supporters of Napoleon, who made heavy bets that Wellington had really been drubbed, and who when fuller news came had to pay them.
Even in the third decade of the century news of every kind was unconscionably slow. The Evening Post of June 20, 1825, came out late because the presses had been held till the last minute in the vain hope of giving particulars of the dedication of the Bunker Hill monument on the 17th; the steamboat from New London having arrived without any intelligence. Only on the next day was a narrative carried, and though it filled four columns, it contained no extracts from Webster’s oration.
One year later one of the most impressive coincidences in our history afforded a striking illustration of the long wait forced upon each section of the United States for information from outside its borders. The fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was celebrated with fervor in every hamlet and city, though in New York a storm of wind and rain interfered with the ceremonies. Every American thought of the two aged ex-Presidents, one the author of the Declaration, the other the radical patriot who had done most to forward it in Congress. At 1 o’clock in the afternoon Jefferson died at Monticello. At 6 o’clock John Adams, after remarking90 that every report of the celebratory cannon had added five minutes to his life, passed away at Quincy. Which news would reach New York first? The Evening Post published the death of Adams on the seventh, and the demise of Jefferson on the eighth. Then began to come evidence that the two circles of intelligence were more and more overlapping each other, and, on the tenth, Coleman commented:
The newspapers of the North and East are filled with remarks upon the death of John Adams, while those from the South are equally filled with the obsequies of Jefferson, neither section having yet heard of the loss sustained by the other. How much is the surprise at each extremity of the country destined to be increased by the information which is now traveling from the South to the North, and from the North to the South! Last evening, in all probability, President Adams heard of the death of his father; at about the same moment news of the decease of Jefferson must have reached Quincy.
To a large proportion of subscribers—the wholesalers, retailers, auctioneers, shippers, and manufacturers—the most interesting news was generally to be found in the column headed “Evening Post Marine List,” and in the advertisements. The shipping news was at this time collected with the utmost attention to accuracy and completeness, for it was as much one of the journal’s grounds for claiming a superior position as its financial news became after the Civil War. A special employee obtained it from the custom house, counting rooms, and wharves, and regularly gathered some dozens or even scores of such items as the following:
CLEARED, Brig Caroline, Lee, Teneriffe, by N. L. and G. Griswold; schrs. Miranda, Sayre, St. Augustine, by the captains, Linnet, Paterson, Shelburne, by do.
ARRIVED, The schr. Red-Bird, Walker, in 12 days from Washington, N. C., with 447 bbl. of naval stores, 700 bushels of corn, for Mr. Gardiner, of Rhode Island. Spoke, five leagues from the capes of Virginia, the schr. Farmer’s Daughter, 24 days from Port Morant for Marblehead, the captain informed that he saw a large ship under jury masts, standing in for Havanna;91 being about two leagues distant; supposed to be English. At the same time, a brig to leeward, with her main-top-masts gone and both pumps agoing; she had black sides and supposed to be an eastern brig, & was making for Havanna.
Sloop Harriet, Lynds, 60 days from Jamaica, with rum, to George Pratt. Captain L. has experienced the most distressing weather, and his crew would have starved had it not been for supplies received from 3 vessels which he fell in with. On the 5th of Nov. he met with the schr. Goliath, Pinkham (arrived at this port), then out 35 days; and though Captain P. was then short, and on allowance, he humanely divided, as it were, his last mouthful with Captain Lynds. Nov. 10, in lat. 33, fell in with the bark Calliope, 46 days from Kingston for Norfolk—gave her some water, and received some bread and beef. Nov. 14, in lat. 36, got some bread from the ship Lovina, 18 days from Savannah for Philadelphia.
Then, as now, advertisements were the principal support of newspapers, though they yielded a revenue that seems pitiful by modern standards. Until some years after Coleman died in 1828, merchants paid $40 a year for the privilege of advertising, a subscription being thrown in. It was left to their sense of fairness not to present advertisements of undue length, and “display ads” were of course unknown. The monthly rate was $3.50, four insertions could be had for a dollar, and one for fifty cents. A study of the first ledger of the Evening Post, for the years 1801–1804, shows that the largest receipts from a single firm were $276.49, from Bronson and Chauncey. The publishers, T. and J. Swords, paid in eighteen months $157.55—they were destined to be good customers of the Evening Post for decades. But nearly all the accounts were for small amounts. James Roosevelt, the wealthy Pearl Street merchant, paid $57.37 between the beginning of 1802 and Nov. 16, 1803; Minturn and Barker, representing two families long prominent in business, paid $39.55 in the same period; and Robert Lenox paid $91.50. This ledger is a virtual directory of all important business and professional men of the city, in which we meet entries of payments for subscriptions by Hamilton, Burr, Rufus King, Oliver Wolcott,92 Brockholst Livingston, Morgan Lewis, and many other notables.
Ordinarily, from 1801 to 1825, of the twenty short columns all but four or five were devoted to advertisements. Shipping, auctions, wholesale stores (seldom retail), lotteries, legal notices, and the theater furnished most of the patronage, but the range of advertising was surprising. In 1802 we find such insertions as these:
ST. CROIX RUM.—50 puncheons, just arrived per the brig Harriet, from St. Croix, now landing at Schermerhorn’s Wharf. For sale by CURRIE & WHITNEY, 47 Front Street.
FOR SALE—A likely Negro Wench, 16 years old—sold for no fault. For terms, enquire of WILLIAM LEAYCROFT, 109 Liberty Street.
TAKE NOTICE
LOTTERY TICKETS to be had at the Book and Stationery Store of NAPHTALI JUDAH, No. 84 Maiden-Lane. Tickets in the Lottery No. 1, for the encouragement of Literature—$25, the highest prize—for sale in Halves, Quarters, and Eighth Parts. The Lottery will positively commence drawing in this city on the first Tuesday in February next. Owing to the great demand for Tickets, they will rise from the present price of six dollars and a half, in a few days.
Editor Coleman would have lifted his brows had he been told that within a little more than a century St. Croix rum, lotteries to encourage literature, and the sale of likely negro wenches would all be outlawed.
The circulation of the Evening Post rose only slowly, and like all the other New York newspapers of the time, until after the War of 1812 it found the struggle for existence a harsh one. At the beginning of 1804 the whole group, except the youngest and weakest, Irving’s Morning Chronicle, concerted to raise their yearly subscription price from $8 to $10; this meaning, in the instance of Coleman’s journal, the difference between $9,600 and $12,000 a year. The reason alleged was the heavy increase in the cost of labor and materials. Journeymen printers, recently paid $6 a week, were now asking93 $8; the faithfullest clerk and most dogged collector in town could once have been had for $300 a year, and now any such employee wanted $400; while paper had risen until it cost the editor $7,000 to $8,000 a year. The Gazette and the Mercantile Advertiser caused much ill-feeling when they immediately broke faith and reverted to the $8 rate, but Coleman stood by his guns. To help in holding his subscribers, he advanced his printing hour from four p. m. to two. Year after year there was a slight increase in the daily circulation, though it hardly kept pace with the growth of population; in 1815 it stood at 1,580 copies daily, and in 1820 at 1,843.
Arrears long cost New York editors the same sleepless nights which they cost the owners of some ill-managed country journals to-day. City residents paid regularly, for they could be reached through the ten-pound court if they did not; but in 1805 Coleman despairingly affirmed that “not one in a hundred” of the subscribers to the semi-weekly were prompt. In some centers, as Boston, from $500 to $1,000 was due the Post and Herald, and in Kingston, Canada, more than $60 was owed merely for postage. “The loss that arises from neglected arrearages would amount to not less than 30 per cent.,” lamented the editor. It was necessary to send a collector up through New York and New England to Upper Canada, stopping for money all along the mail routes.
When Michael Burnham took charge, on Nov. 16, 1806, business affairs were greatly systematized; a fact of which we find evidence both in the disappearance of complaints of arrears, and in the ledgers and a curious old account book, 1801–1810. These accounts throw much light on mechanical details. A frequent charge for “skins” presumably refers to the buckskins which were cut and rolled into balls, soaked in ink, and then used by the printers’ devils to pound the forms and thus ink the type. Almost daily charges appear for candles and quill pens. The journal seems to have paid many of the expenses of apprentices, for there are numerous entries for “cloathing” and for board at $3 a week. Coleman drew94 upon the till occasionally, as is shown by an item of May 25, 1809: “Boots for Mr. Coleman, $10.” But all the improvements that Burnham made in the business management did not save Coleman at times before 1810 from half-resolving to let the Evening Post die and to return to the bar again; in the year named, when he was trying to arrange his English debts, he confessed such a hesitation. When Duane of the Aurora charged that the Federalist newspapers in seaport towns were bribed “by support in the form of mercantile advertisements” to oppose all Jefferson’s measures, Coleman bitterly replied that Federalist merchants actually neglected their press. Taking up a copy of the chief Federalist organ in Philadelphia, and one of the chief neutral journal there, he found six ship advertisements in the former and forty in the latter; while “on a particular day not long since the New York Gazette had eighty-five new advertisements, the Mercantile Advertiser sixty-one, and the Evening Post nine.”
But after the Embargo and the war the skies slowly brightened, not so much because of the growing circulation as because of the more remunerative advertisements. It was not the $40-a-year advertising that paid, but the single “ads” inserted at the new rate of 75 cents a “square.” There were now many more of these. Because of the rapid growth of the city a brisk trade had sprung up in Brooklyn and Manhattan real estate, which by 1820 often engrossed from one-eighth to one-fourth the whole paper. Steamboats had come, and from Capt. Vanderbilt’s little Nautilus, which left Whitehall daily for Staten Island at 10, 3, and 6:30, charging twenty-five cents a trip, to the big Chancellor Livingston running to Albany, and the boat Franklin, which offered excursions to Sandy Hook, with a green turtle dinner, for $2, all were advertising. Competing stage-coach lines were eager to impress the public with their speedy schedules; advertising that you could leave the City Hotel at 2 p. m., packed six inside and eight outside a gaudily painted95 vehicle, and be at Judd’s Tavern in Philadelphia at 5 a. m. the next day.
Competition continued keen, for while weak newspapers died, new journals were constantly being established. The most important of these were Charles Holt’s Columbian, established in 1808 as a Clintonian sheet; the National Advocate, founded in 1813 and edited for a time by Henry Wheaton, later known as a diplomat, who supported Madison; and the American, an evening journal first published in the spring of 1819, and edited by Charles King, later president of Columbia College. But the Evening Post kept well to the front, as is shown by a table of comparative circulations in May, 1816:
Mercantile Advertiser, 2000
Daily Gazette, 1750
Evening Post, 1600
Gardiner’s Courier, 980
Columbian, 825
National Advocate, 875
Commercial Advertiser, 1200
The circulation of the Mercantile Advertiser, we are told by Thurlow Weed, who was then working on the Courier, was considered enormous. It seldom had more than one and a half or two columns of news, while Lang’s Gazette frequently carried only a half column; so that the Evening Post was clearly the leading newspaper. People in the early twenties regarded it as a well established institution. Its editor had become one of the lesser notables of the city, like Dr. Hosack and Dr. Mitchill; and we are informed by a contemporary that he “was pronounced by his advocates a field-marshal in literature, as well as politics.” Poor as the newspapers of that time seem by modern standards, the Evening Post when compared with the London Times or the London Morning Post (for which Lamb and Coleridge wrote) was not discreditable to New York; it was not so well written, but it was as large and as energetic in news-gathering and editorial utterance.