For armaments at sea the Evening Post was always eloquent, but it took a different attitude toward the bustle of preparations to invade Canada. When President Madison requested the Governors to place the militia at his disposal, Coleman applauded the New England executives who refused. Conjuring up a vision of a harsh military despotism, he pronounced the President’s action one “highly dangerous to the liberties of the people, and to our republican form of government.” In editorial after editorial, moreover, he discouraged recruiting for Federal regiments. Are you willing, he asked volunteers, “to attempt foreign conquests while your wives and little ones are left exposed to an exasperated and unfeeling foe?” As autumn came on, he made the most of the reports of suffering among underclad troops. He wished no one to forget that their misery had been caused by “a wretched, incapable, mob-courting administration, less concerned to provide supplies for their army than to secure by low intrigue the places they so unworthily fill.”
It required no little courage to declare that the war was “a great national calamity,” that it was “clearly unjust,” and that the points in dispute were not worth the blood and treasure being spent. Two years previous, when the Evening Post was angrily opposing the impending conflict, a mob of Democrats had gathered at Martling’s Porter-House, and just before midnight had attacked the house of Michael Burnham, part-owner of the journal, smashing his windows, and nearly killing an infant. Just after the declaration of war occurred the memorable mob attack upon the Baltimore Federal Republican, in which Gen. James Lingan, a Revolutionary veteran defending the office, was killed, and Gen. Henry Lee crippled. Jack Binns, in the Philadelphia Democratic Press, proclaimed that it would be only natural if a body of angry men executed the same summary justice upon the traitorous editor of the Evening Post. For some time anonymous threats poured in upon Coleman. Among them was one which left him so certain that violence was actually brewing that he applied to Mayor Clinton for protection; and the city watch was doubled, special constables were held in readiness, and a party of armed friends spent the night at Coleman’s house. Nothing, however, occurred.
Coleman defiantly maintained that his right to free speech was in no way abridged by the declaration of war, and published a special series of editorials, highly legalistic in nature, denouncing the Baltimore outrage. He reminded the Democrats that in intimidating and attacking the Federalists for their opposition they had short memories. Had they forgotten their open resistance to the hostilities which the United States waged against France in 1798? This attitude, fortunately, met with powerful support. At a great peace mass-meeting in Washington Hall on Aug. 18, John Jay, Rufus King, Gouverneur Morris, Egbert Benson, and Richard Varick all assailed the war and asserted the right to outspoken criticism of it. By this date Coleman’s views had met what seemed to him the strongest possible confirmation. It had become known early in August that the British had repealed the Orders in Council, which were the great cause of the war, and for a moment hopes of peace had risen high; but Madison immediately rejected the armistice proffered by the British commander Prevost. The anger of New York and New England Federalists passed all bounds. “God of truth and mercy!” raged the Evening Post. “Our treasure is to be wasted, our immense frontiers are to be one scene of devastation, where the merciless savage is to revel in the blood of defenseless men, women, and children, because the form of the revocation is not satisfactory to our precise and critical President!”
The first news of an important military event confirmed Coleman’s gloomy apprehensions. On Aug. 31 he was able to write a long editorial upon Hull’s surrender at Detroit in that I-told-you-so spirit which is an editor’s subtlest joy. He called it disgraceful:
A nation, counting eight millions of souls, deliberating and planning for a whole winter and spring, and part of a summer, the invasion and conquest of a neighboring province, at length making that invasion; and in one month its army retiring—captured—and captured in a fortified place—captured almost without firing a gun! Miserably deficient in practical talent must be the administration which formed the plan of that invasion; or the army which has thus surrendered must be a gang of more cowardly poltroons, than ever disgraced a country....
What! March an army into a country where there were not more than seven or eight hundred soldiers to oppose them, and not make the army large enough! March them from a country, which is the granary of the world, and let them famish on the very frontiers for want of provisions! Issue a gasconading proclamation threatening to exterminate the enemy, and surrender your whole army to them! If there be judgment in this people, they will see the utter unfitness of our rulers for anything beyond management, intrigue, and electioneering.—They have talents enough to influence a misguided populace against their best friends; but they cannot protect the nation from insult and disgrace.
Similar attacks upon the Administration’s incompetence followed every other reverse. From the early defeat at Queenstown Heights to the “Bladensburg Races,” when an American force fled ignominiously before Cockburn’s invaders and exposed Washington to capture, the Evening Post missed no opportunity for harsh criticism. “Woe to that nation whose king is a child!” was a favorite quotation of Coleman’s. The journal was far from unpatriotic, and sincerely deplored the several defeats, but it held the government rigidly responsible for them.
The editor never changed his opinion that, to use his words in the last year of the war, it was “an unsuccessful war, ... a war declared without just cause and without preparation, for the continuance of which no man can assign a reason, and from the termination of which no man expects an advantage.” And patriotic though Coleman was, he rejoiced in the failure of the successive efforts to invade Canada. He thought conquest in that quarter the most shameless territory-grabbing. In these utterances we catch the first accents of the Evening Post’s century-long campaign against “imperialism.” He wrote late in 1814:
Uti Possidetis, or Keep What You’ve Got.—The Lexington paper (Kentucky) some time ago, before the British had got possession of Fort Niagara, Michilimackinac, Castine, Moose Island, etc., etc., about the time when Gen. Wilkinson was to sup “in Montreal or Heaven,” this paper then said if any ministers should make a treaty on any other basis, than each to keep what they had got, they ought to have a halter. But then it was my bull and your cow.
In sharp contrast with these editorials were the exultant comments of the journal upon the dazzling successes of the Americans at sea. The Federalists since 1801 had constantly called for a larger navy. The first-known and most famous sea-fight of 1812 was the victory on Aug. 19 of the Constitution over the Guerriere, a vessel with which a London paper had declared no American ship could cope. “We have always contended that on an equal footing Americans can be whipped by none,” cried the Evening Post. “Man for man and gun for gun, even the veteran British tars can get no advantage over the Americans.” With a shrewd appreciation of the opportunities which Perry and McDonough seized, it began to insist upon a naval force on the lakes. Naturally, it still taunted the Democrats:
Though very little present benefit is to be expected from the war, commenced as it has been and carried on as it will be, under the present administration, yet it may have one good effect; it will prove that in a contest where the freedom of the seas is the object, a naval force is much superior to an army on the land. It will prove, what the Federalists have always advocated, and what the present ruling party have always opposed, the necessity of a maritime force to a commercial people.