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.