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.
III
When war was actually declared in June, 1812, this belligerent editor, like most New York merchants, like four men in five throughout New England, believed that it meant the bootless ruin of trade and agriculture. It had come with such final suddenness, he said, that American ships in European waters would almost all be taken by British cruisers. It was professedly a war for freedom of the sea; in reality the shipping States believed, as Coleman put it, that it grew out of “the Southern anti-commercial spirit.”
De Witt Clinton, the ambitious mayor, who was courting the help of King, John Wells, and the Evening Post in his aspirations for the Federalist nomination against Madison that summer, told Coleman that he believed ninety-nine men in every hundred in the city really were opposed to the war. The editor was highly sarcastic in his references to the local Democrats as “fellow subjects of our loving Emperor Napoleon,” and in those to “Monsieurs Gallatin and Madison.” For a few weeks, while an alliance with France was thought a possibility, the Evening Post steadily declaimed against it. A war with Great Britain, fought single-handed, “will be neither a predatory war nor a bloody war,” it said; but if France sends her squadrons to the American coast, British fleets will follow, and the seaport towns will suffer. When Daniel Webster, a young man of thirty almost unknown outside New Hampshire, delivered a Fourth of July oration denouncing any coöperation with France, he was fervently praised.
New Yorkers were fearful of two perils: a British invasion across the St. Lawrence or Niagara Rivers, and bombardments by sea. “We are fighting the world’s greatest Power,” protested Coleman, “without the means of annoyance or even defense.” He told his readers, incorrectly, that the frigate Constitution was sent from Norfolk to Boston with only two rounds of cannonballs; and correctly, that Fort Niagara, on an “exposed and utterly defenseless frontier,” had scarcely powder enough for a Fourth of July salute.