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.