II

Contemporary writers from 1801 to 1904, however, seldom spoke of the Evening Post as Coleman’s newspaper; it was usually “Hamilton’s journal” or “Hamilton’s gazette.” Just so had Freneau’s National Gazette a decade before been called “Jefferson’s journal,” so Cheetham’s American Citizen was now sometimes called “Clinton’s journal,” and there was even “Levi Lincoln’s journal,” the Worcester National Aegis, which Attorney-General Lincoln helped support. During 1801 Burr and his partisans were much dissatisfied with Cheetham’s newspaper, and this dissatisfaction came to a head after the spring elections the following year. A group which included Burr, John Swartwout, W. P. Van Ness, Col. William S. Smith, and John Sanford established a paper called the New York Morning Chronicle, and after offering the editorship to Charles Holt, who refused, gave it to Washington Irving’s brother, Dr. Peter Irving, known for his tea-table talents and effeminate manners as “Miss Irving.” The Chronicle was of course for several years called “Burr’s journal.” Just how close was Hamilton’s connection, never openly avowed, with the Evening Post?

The most direct evidence on the subject outside of newspaper files of the period is furnished by the autobiography of Jeremiah Mason, a native of Connecticut, who practiced law in Vermont and New Hampshire alongside Coleman, and became a United States Senator from the latter State. He writes of Coleman:

As a lawyer he was respectable, but his chief excellence consisted in a critical knowledge of the English language, and the adroit management of political discussion. His paper for several years gave the leading tone to the press of the Federal party. His acquaintances were often surprised by the ability of some of his editorial articles, which were supposed to be beyond his depth. Having a convenient opportunity, I asked him who wrote, or aided in writing, those articles. He frankly answered that he made no secret of it; that his paper was set up under the auspices of General Hamilton, and that he assisted him. I then asked, “Does he write in your paper?”—“Never a word.”—“How, then, does he assist?”—His answer was, “Whenever anything occurs on which I feel the want of information I state matters to him, sometimes a note; he appoints a time when I may see him, usually a late hour in the evening. He always keeps himself minutely informed on all political matters. As soon as I see him, he begins in a deliberate manner to dictate and I to note down in shorthand; when he stops, my article is completed.”

There is ample corroboratory proof that Hamilton contributed much to the opinions and expression of the Evening Post, and there is every reason to believe that this is the way he frequently did it. Coleman could readily have taken the dictation in shorthand. Seldom in the thirty-two months between the founding of the Evening Post and the death of Hamilton could the General have found time for deliberate writing. He had one of the largest law practices in the country, and he was the leader of a great party, regarded by a majority of Federalists as the dashing strategist who would yet perhaps make them as powerful as in the days of Washington. Yet that energetic fighter could not be kept out of the columns.

“Those only who were his intimate friends,” wrote Coleman in 1816, “know with what readiness he could apply the faculties of his illuminated mind.” No doubt Coleman resorted for guidance on many nights to Hamilton’s home at 26 Broadway—the editor’s house was a few blocks distant, at 61 Hudson Street—and on not a few week-ends to his country residence, called “The Grange” after the ancestral Hamilton estate in Scotland, which stood on Kingsbridge Road at what is now the corner of 142d Street and Tenth Avenue.

Alexander Hamilton

Chief Founder of the Evening Post.

(The Hamilton College Statue)

From 1801 to 1804 only a single bit of signed writing from Hamilton’s pen appeared in the Evening Post. This was a communication denying the hoary legend, originally circulated in derogation of Washington and Lafayette, that at Yorktown Lafayette had ordered Hamilton to put to death all British prisoners in the redoubt which he was sent forward to capture, and that he had declined to obey the inhumane command. But a much more important contribution was hardly concealed. This was a series of articles upon President Jefferson’s first annual message, written under the signature “Lucius Crassus,” and published irregularly from Dec. 17, 1801, till April 8, 1802. They were eighteen in all, and not equal to Hamilton’s best work. At one time the series was interrupted by a trip of Hamilton’s to Albany, but the editor explained the delay by saying that he was waiting to let the distant journals copying the series catch up with back installments. Before their publication was quite completed in the Evening Post, Coleman issued them in a neat pamphlet of 127 pages, with an introduction by himself, for 50 cents.

All other contributions must be sought for upon internal evidence, and such evidence can never be conclusive. No one is yet certain who wrote some of the essays of “The Federalist,” and it is impossible to point to unsigned papers in the Evening Post and say, “These are Hamilton’s.” The style might be that of almost any other cultivated man of legal training; the content might be that of such other able contributors as Gouverneur Morris or Oliver Wolcott. It is possible that a long, well-written article of March 12, 1802, upon Representative Giles’s speech for the repeal of the Judiciary Act is Hamilton’s; it contains a good deal of information upon the proposals which Hamilton made for indirect taxation when he was Secretary of the Treasury. It is possible that Hamilton dictated part or all of the attack of April 19, 1803, upon the Manhattan Bank founded by De Witt Clinton’s faction, for it contains much sound disquisition upon the principles of public finance. It is quite possible that he furnished at least an outline for the article of July 9, 1803, upon neutrality, which deals in considerable part with the rôle he, Knox, and Jefferson played in the Genet affair; and that he assisted later the same month in an article upon the funding system, land tax, and national debt. But it is bootless to pile up such conjectures. The editorials upon the diplomatic aspects of the Louisiana treaty, the Chase impeachment, and the navigation of the Mississippi certainly represented Hamilton’s views.

There is abundant evidence that Coleman wished to do Hamilton personal as well as political service in the Evening Post. His first opportunity to do this occurred less than ten days after the founding of the journal, when on Nov. 24, 1801, it announced the death of Philip, Hamilton’s eldest and most promising son—“murdered,” said the editor, “in a duel.” The attendant circumstances were obscure, and Coleman spared no labor to inquire into them and set them forth accurately and tactfully, correcting the accounts in the Democratic press. It appeared that Philip Hamilton, a youth of twenty, was sitting with another young man in a box at a performance of Cumberland’s “The West Indian,” and that they exchanged some jocose remarks upon a Fourth of July oration made the previous summer by one George I. Eacker, a Democrat. Eacker overheard them, called them into the lobby, said that he would not be “insulted by a set of rascals,” and scuffled with them. The two excitable boys challenged him. Young Hamilton’s companion fought first, Sunday morning on the Weehawken dueling-ground, and no one was injured. On Monday afternoon the second duel occurred. “Hamilton received a shot through the body at the first discharge,” reported the Evening Post, “and fell without firing. He was brought across the ferry to his father’s house, where he languished of the wound until this morning [Tuesday], when he expired.” Coleman took occasion to utter a shrewd warning against dueling. “Reflections on this horrid custom must occur to every friend of humanity; but the voice of an individual or the press must be ineffectual without additional, strong, and pointed legislative interference. Fashion has placed it upon a footing which nothing short of this can control.” The truth of this statement had a melancholy illustration within three years.

Coleman also contradicted in detail, using information which Hamilton alone could have furnished, a spiteful story to the effect that President Washington, when Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury, used to send him public papers with the request, “Dear Hamilton, put this into style for me,” and that Hamilton boasted of the service. Again, Coleman assured his readers, using more information from Hamilton, that the letters which Jefferson wrote as Secretary of State to the British Minister, George Hammond, upon the debts owed to the British, were given their finishing touches by Hamilton.

When Cheetham and other Clintonians charged Hamilton with having procured Burr a large loan at the Manhattan Bank—some Democrats were always sniffing a coalition between the Federalists and the Burrites—Coleman placed the story in the ridiculous light it deserved. However, he steadily refused to dignify the many grosser slanders uttered against Hamilton by any notice. After the statesman’s death, the editor repeatedly delivered utterances which he said he had “from Hamilton’s own lips,” some of them upon matters of great importance; for example, upon the rôle which Madison played in the Federal Convention. Coleman in his later years also professed to be an authority upon the authorship of the “Federalist.” It appears from the Evening Post files that Senator Lodge, the editor of Hamilton’s works, is mistaken in believing Coleman the editor of the 1802 edition of that volume—that John Wells edited it; but Coleman took a keen interest in its publication.

“It is hardly necessary to say that Mr. Coleman, in difficult cases, consults with Mr. Hamilton,” Cheetham observed in 1802. “Editors must consult superior minds; it is their business to draw information from the purest and correctest sources.” Coleman never denied such statements. In the summer of 1802 the Baltimore American remarked that the Evening Post was “said to be directly under the control of Alexander Hamilton.” The editor rejoined that it was “unnecessary to answer him whether the Evening Post is so much honoured as to be under the influence of General Hamilton or not,” and went on to imply distinctly that it was. Callender referred to Coleman as “Hamilton’s typographer.” It is worth noting that when Charles Pinckney, leader of the South Carolina Federalists, found that the weekly Herald was not being regularly received by the Charleston subscribers, he wrote in expostulation not to Coleman but to Hamilton, asking him to speak to the editor.

Upon the Evening Post, as upon the Federalist party, the tragic death of Hamilton fell as a stunning blow. Announcing the calamity on June 13, 1804, Coleman added that “as soon as our feelings will permit, we shall deem it a duty to present a sketch of the character of our ever-to-be lamented patron and best friend.” The press of the nation looked to him. The best report, said the Fredericktown (Md.) Herald, a Federalist sheet, “is expected in the Evening Post of Mr. Coleman, than whom no man perhaps out of the weeping and bereft family of his illustrious friend can more fervently bewail the loss.” On the day of the funeral the Evening Post was suspended, the only time in its history that it missed an issue because of a death, and for a week all its news columns carried heavy black borders. Unfortunately, the editor did not redeem his promise of a character sketch, professing himself too deeply grieved. After devoting a month to discussion of the duel and its causes, he turned from “the most awful and afflicting subject that ever occupied my mind and weighed down my heart”; he could write no more “of him whom I can never cease to mourn as the best of friends, and the greatest and most virtuous of men.”

Hamilton’s family and associates wished a volume compiled from the various tributes to his memory, and by Mrs. Hamilton’s express wish, the task was entrusted to Coleman. Before the end of the year he published it with the title of “Facts and Documents Relative to the Death of Major-General Hamilton”; a careful and tasteful work which not many years ago was reissued in expensive form. There was some talk then and later of a more ambitious commission. Thus in 1809 the Providence American, deploring the fact that no biography of Hamilton had yet appeared, suggested that Coleman was “the only person qualified.” The editor, however, responded that a gentleman of more leisure, by whom he meant the Rev. John M. Mason, had already accepted the undertaking.

Yet the death of its great patron and mentor detracted less from the vigor of the Evening Post in controversy than might have been supposed. Coleman from the beginning had been assisted not only by Hamilton but by a half-dozen of the ablest New Yorkers of Hamiltonian views. Gouverneur Morris was in the United States Senate until 1803, but Duane of the Aurora declares that he found time to contribute to the new journal. It is not unlikely that three admirably written articles upon the peace of Amiens, in the last month of 1801, were by him; the first gave a survey of European affairs, the second considered the effects of the peace upon American business, and the third dealt with its effect upon American parties. In 1807 he was still writing, for Coleman later revealed the authorship of two articles he then sent in upon the Beaumarchais claims. Oliver Wolcott was a Federal judge when the Evening Post was established, and later entered business in New York. He also contributed from time to time, though after Hamilton’s death he was gradually converted from Federalism to Democracy. In 1807 he offered Coleman a long editorial article signed “Camillus.” As Coleman ruefully said later, he was “a man of whose political as well as personal rectitude I then entertained so little suspicion that I should have delivered any article by him directly to the compositor without even reading it”; and the editor had it published without carefully examining it. Its views were so heretical to Federalists that in 1814 the Democrats were still tauntingly reprinting it, and Coleman was still speaking of the episode with pain.

According to Cheetham, the able merchant, W. W. Woolsey, whose grandson, Theodore Winthrop, lives in our literature, appeared now and then in the columns of the newspaper he had helped found. Ebenezer Foote, the former State Senator and member of the Council of Appointment, who had helped Coleman obtain his clerkship of the Circuit Court, contributed signed articles. Rufus King, when he finished his service as Minister to England in 1803, lent a valuable hand, and as late as 1819 we find him advising Coleman as to the proper editorial treatment of the Florida question. The editor came to know him sufficiently well to give an intimate character sketch of him in Delaplaine’s Repository, a magazine of the day. Almost indispensable help was lent by Coleman’s old partner, John Wells, who at times acted as virtual associate editor, and took charge of the journal during occasional absences of Coleman. Wells had a taste for literature and the drama as well as politics, but, says Coleman, “he dealt chiefly in the didactic and the severe.”

Of the counsel and assistance of these prominent Federalists Coleman was proud, but he keenly resented any imputation that he was their mere tool and mouthpiece. This accusation was made by Cheetham when the Evening Post was not a year old:

Mr. Coleman says that to pay a man for writing against the late Administration was a crime. He will allow that the application of the rule will be just when applied to the present Administration. We then say that Mr. Coleman receives the wages of sin; for he is in every sense of the word paid for writing against the present Administration. The establishment at the head of which he is, is said not to be his own; it is said to belong to a company, of which General Hamilton is one. The paper was commenced for the avowed purpose of opposing the Administration. Mr. Coleman, it is believed, receives a yearly salary for writing for it, and for his wages he is bound to write against the Administration, whether the sentiments he pens accord with his own or not. He runs no risk, he has no responsibility upon his shoulders. He may, in fact, be called a mere hireling.

Coleman replied:

Cheetham says that the establishment of the Evening Post does not belong to the editor, but to a company, of which General Hamilton is one; and that the editor receives a yearly salary for writing for it. Now, though we do not perceive that this is of much consequence in any way but to the editor’s pocket ... we shall not permit it to pass uncontradicted. We therefore declare that not one word of it is true. The establishment of the Evening Post is, and always since its commencement has been, the sole property of the editor: it does not, nor did it ever, belong to a company, or to General Hamilton, or to any one else but the editor; and lastly, the editor is not a hireling, nor has he at any period of his life received wages for writing.

Not at all discomfited, the Jeffersonian organ remarked—and hit near the truth—that the journal had probably been given to Coleman by the men who were known to have raised large sums to found it. Certainly Coleman until after 1804 was hardly a free agent. The distinction and prosperity of his newspaper depended largely upon Hamilton’s good will. He gladly served the statesman whom he called “my best earthly friend, my ablest adviser, and my most generous and disinterested patron,” but he had no real alternative.

Hamilton bequeathed to the Evening Post certain principles which guided it for years to come. The Federalist party in the nation at large gradually crumbled away, but fortunately for the Evening Post, it remained powerful in New York city until near 1820. Until the close of the second war with England, a majority of the people of the city held Hamiltonian views. The primary object of Hamilton was to establish a strong national sovereignty, victorious over all forms of disintegration. His financial policy, which embraced insistence upon sound money, and adequate revenues without dependence either upon the States or Europe, was made effective while he was head of the treasury. The commercial policy which he favored was one which would develop manufacturing, by a judicious protective tariff, to a parity with agriculture, and make the nation self-sufficient. In foreign affairs, he wished the United States to steer clear of European intrigue, and as he feared French influence more than British, he tended to be more sympathetic toward England. The Evening Post hence steadfastly opposed extreme State Rights ideas, even when some New England Federalists asserted them in the War of 1812. It never ceased quoting Hamilton on financial questions, and its recollection of his tariff views delayed a firm opposition to protection until Bryant took the helm. It opposed the identification of America with either party in the Napoleonic struggle, but for a variety of reasons it supported Great Britain.

CHAPTER TWO
THE EVENING POST AS LEADER OF THE FEDERALIST PRESS

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 frequent 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 merchant 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 largely 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. By 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 merchantmen 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 that 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 laws 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. From 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 hundred 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?”

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 and 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. 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.”