II
Twice has the Evening Post opposed with passionate detestation, from beginning to end, an American war. The two editors responsible, Coleman and E. L. Godkin, were as far as D’Artagnan from being weak-kneed pacifists. Both in their youth had shouldered arms; both were of Anglo-Irish blood, with a Celtic inclination toward battle; both went through life joyfully snuffing new frays from afar. It is well at this point, with Coleman taking the leadership of all the anti-war journals south of the Connecticut, to stop a moment to note what were his personal qualities, as shown in his editorship, and what the conditions of his work. The old-time journalist did not speak softly, and carried a big stick. Coleman had as much need as the rest to learn the use of dueling pistols, and to know how to graze the libel laws. “He was naturally courageous,” says Bryant, “and having entered into a dispute, he never sought to decline any of its consequences.”
We have noted that when Philip Hamilton was killed, the editor condemned dueling as barbarous, and called for a rigid legislation against it. Yet in 1803 he was himself provoked into a duel. The previous autumn Cheetham had in an indirect, cowardly fashion charged him with the paternity of a mulatto child in Greenfield, a charge which Coleman had no difficulty in showing utterly false, but which he resented by a challenge. Cheetham accepted. News of the impending encounter got abroad, and Judge Brockholst Livingston immediately issued a bench warrant, compelled the appearance of the two editors before him, and allowed them to depart only after they had engaged not to use more deadly weapons than pen and ink. Unfortunately, one Captain Thompson, an ardent Democrat, accused Coleman of letting the secret of the duel escape, and of having been animated by a cowardly motive. Coleman promptly challenged the fire-eating captain, and early in the new year the pair fought in Love Lane, a sequestered road, then well outside the city, which followed the present line of Twenty-first Street between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. It was dusk of a cold winter’s day when they met, with snow falling and other circumstances uniting, as a second quaintly observed, to make the affair “uncomfortable.” They fired two shots at ten paces, and then, darkness coming down, moved closer and fired two more. Thompson, exclaiming “I’ve got it!” sank mortally wounded into the arms of his physician, Dr. McLean. He was carried to his sister’s house in town, was laid on the doorstep, the bell was rung, and the family found him bleeding and near death. He refused to tell who had shot him, or to give any evidence whatever regarding the duel, saying that everything had been honorably done—and his antagonist must not be molested.
Coleman had repeated encounters of a less serious character. In the Evening Post of January 12, 1807, he begged the public to discredit Cheetham’s “account of the fracas on Saturday between Dr. Walker and myself,” as it was full of errors, but he did not offer the correct particulars himself. In 1810 blows were struck when his vote was challenged and he was insulted at the polls by a tavern-keeper who said that Coleman could not be a citizen because he had published the statement, “I had rather be a dog and bay the moon than own myself an American.” This was a Democratic garbling of a half-sentence in one of the Post’s editorials.
Early in 1818 the editor published a narrative of the misconduct of a certain Democrat named Henry B. Hagerman while traveling as a Judge Advocate up-State. Hagerman stopped at a Kingston hotel, kept by an estimable widow, and for some fancied grievance insulted her so grossly that no newspaper of to-day would print the details which Coleman laid before the public. On the evening of April 11 Coleman was overtaken by Hagerman near sunset at the corner of Murray and Church Streets, and attacked without warning from the rear. His assailant used the loaded butt of a rawhide whip. The editor was stunned by the first blow, was repeatedly struck and kicked as he lay prostrate, and when he staggered to his feet, half blind with blood, was given a still more savage beating. Public indignation against Hagerman rose so high that he was hurried to jail for safety, and not being able to ask for a change of venue, pleaded for postponement of his trial until it subsided. Two years to a day after the murderous attack, Coleman was awarded $4,000 in damages, a huge sum for 1820. But it was none too large. The editor had been prostrated for weeks, recurrent strokes of paralysis followed, and he was never in sound health again.
The physical violence to which editors were then exposed harmonized with a violence of temper and manner which was far too prominent in journalism, as in politics. In noting this abusiveness it must be remembered that the press was the product and mirror of its time. Politics was conducted with far more scurrility and coarseness than now, and the newspapers were largely an appendage of politics. A day of backwoods gouging and fashionable dueling, of constant fighting between street gangs in all the large cities, of fisticuffs on the floor of the House of Representatives, of a low standard of manners everywhere, was not a day for refined newspaper methods. It took time for editors to learn that hard reasons do more execution than hard names. Editors, moreover, were prone to set up medieval conventions; they regarded themselves as so many knights errant, roaming the land for battle, no sooner seeing a strange crest than they galloped to shiver lances.
It is usual to quote Coleman’s quatrain
Lie on, Duane, lie on for pay,
And Cheetham, lie thou too,
More ’gainst truth you cannot say
Than truth can say ’gainst you,
as a bold specimen of the editorial amenities of a century ago. But Coleman went far beyond the lie direct and countercheck quarrelsome. The American public has always refused to take at face value the epithets which editors exchange, and doubtless in Jefferson’s time it put a Pickwickian construction upon them. Referring to the most prominent Democratic editor, Coleman once quoted Milton’s line, “Squat like a toad at the ear of Eve,” adding: “I beg the devil’s pardon for comparing him in any shape with Duane.” Of Cheetham he said that he was so habituated to lying that given a choice of truth and mendacity he invariably preferred the latter, and on another occasion he listed twenty-five lies in a single article by “the President’s unlucky toad-eater.”
Coleman thought nothing of referring to Dr. Peter Irving, head of the Morning Chronicle, as a “malevolent coxcomb,” and to his partner as “a pedant and blackguard.” Other journals fared no better. When the Public Advertiser, a new Clintonian organ, libeled the Evening Post, Coleman denounced its “villainy” and challenged the “vile reptiles” editing it to produce their evidence. The conductor of the Long Island Star also fell afoul of the Evening Post. “This Kirk I have always despised as a flippant, conceited, shallow fellow,” wrote Coleman, “but I did not take him for so great a fool as his nonsense shows him to be, nor think him so black-hearted and malignant a calumniator.” In 1806 he termed Samuel H. Smith of the Washington National Intelligencer, the so-called “court journal” of Jefferson, “the little monkey.” Nine years later, when the era of good feeling was commencing, he prided himself upon his repression in speaking of the same able newspaper, in the columns of which Clay had been glad to appear: “I shall take no other notice of the charge in that profligate paper than to say I have long observed there is no misrepresentation too base, no violation of truth too palpable, not to be gladly adopted and circulated by that infamous organ.”
Be it said to Coleman’s credit that these examples are the worst to be selected from the files for fifteen years, during which the issues of the Aurora and American Citizen teemed with such expressions. Moreover, there was some justification for them. Cheetham, and to a less extent Duane, were unabashed liars; Peter Irving was so much of a coxcomb that even his friends called him “sissie Irving”; and Kirk certainly was a calumniator. Most creditable of all to Coleman, he refrained from dastardly slanders upon the private life of his contemporaries, whereas they gave him no such consideration. In 1807 he declared his conviction that Duane was in receipt of French gold, and many years later accused M. M. Noah, the famous Jewish journalist, of avowing himself open to a money bribe from the Clintonian faction, but he said nothing of the conduct of any such man apart from his editorial office. Yet his own enemies fabricated a story that he had been dismissed from the Vermont bar because he had bored a hole in a courthouse ceiling to overhear rival counsel, and accused him of illegally converting the funds of Greenfield neighbors to his own uses.
It is not strange that when the press was filled with this sort of utterance, libel suits were numerous. Cheetham at the beginning of 1804 had fourteen actions pending against him, and in 1807 admitted that the total damages which he had been compelled to pay reached almost $4,000. Aaron Burr had brought one of these suits, while ex-Mayor Varick in 1803 had obtained a judgment of $200. It is evidence of the comparatively moderate tone of the Evening Post that no suit against it ever succeeded, though a number were begun. One of these actions was brought by Robert Macomb, clerk of the Sessions Court, whom Coleman had accused of taking illegal fees, and another by a politician named Arcularius.