But the disintegration of the Federalist party of course robbed the Evening Post of a great part of its influence. It was no longer a sounding board for the best leadership of that party; men no longer recognized in its utterance the voices of Hamilton’s ablest and most energetic successors, King, Troup, Jay, Kent, and Morris. It became merely one of a half dozen journals recognized to have editors of brains and principle; and in 1816 it was destined to wait just a decade until it began to receive distinction from a man of something more than brains—a man of genius.
CHAPTER THREE
THE CITY AND THE “EVENING POST’S” PLACE IN IT
The first carrier boys of the Evening Post had a city of 60,000, a little larger than Mount Vernon and a little smaller than Passaic of to-day, to traverse. From the pleasant park at the Battery it was a distance of only about a mile north to the outskirts of the town. Just beyond its fringes, partly surrounded by woods, lay the Collect or Fresh Water Pond, from which water was piped to the city, and in which, despite the ordinances, neighboring housewives occasionally washed the family garments. There were seven wards, designated, since the names Out-Ward, Dock-Ward, and so on had been lost, by numbers. The northern part of the town was the plain, plebeian part, with much more actual wretchedness and want in severe winters than New York should have tolerated. It was also the stronghold of Democracy, and the fastest-growing section.
Every one who had any pretensions to gentility managed to crowd south of Reade and Chatham Streets, and the nearer a merchant or lawyer approached the Battery the greater were likely to be his claims to social eminence. The mansions that faced Bowling Green, or that, like Archibald Gracie’s, looked from State Street over the bay, many of them graceful with porticoes and pillars, were called “Quality Row”; and the neighboring streets shone in their reflected luster. Many rich citizens, of course, had suburban seats along the Hudson and East Rivers. The aristocracy prided itself upon substantial virtues and substantial possessions—solid mahogany, thick cut glass, heavy solid silver sets, old and pure wines, and old customs. It was made up of almost indistinguishable elements of Dutch, English, New England, and Huguenot blood. The members took no shame from their general absorption in mercantile pursuits; and Alexander Stewart would himself show you over his ship-goods establishment at 68 Wall, Robert Lenox would talk of the 35,000 acres of Genesee Valley land which he had in hand for sale, one of the Swords brothers would offer you his newest publication in his Pearl Street bookshop, and a scion of the De Peyster family, which had been in business since 1650, would himself sell you one of his hogsheads of sherry at Murray’s Wharf.
Twenty years later the Evening Post declared that “there is not a city in the world which, in all respects, has advanced with greater rapidity than the city of New York.” The population had leaped up to 130,000. “Whichever way we turn, new buildings present themselves to our notice. In the upper wards particularly entire streets of elegant brick buildings have been formed on sites which only a few years ago were either covered with marshes, or occupied by a few straggling frame huts of little or no value.” On Canal Street “almost a city of itself” had sprung up where recently there had been a stagnant marsh. In Greenwich Village and along the Bowery two other veritable cities were assuming shape. Large fortunes had been made by the sale of real estate, and the prospective opening of the Erie Canal was accentuating the boom. A visitor from Boston, whose impressions were published in the Evening Post, praised some of the Broadway stores as showing “more splendor and magnificence than any I have ever seen,” commended the paving of the north-and-south streets, and showed his interest in the city’s three show-places, the Museum, Trinity Church, and the new City Hall, with its rich Turkey carpets, crimson silk curtains, and eighteen imposing portraits of warriors and statesmen. In 1823 a new building was erected at the corner of Pearl and Flymarket Streets. The Evening Post listed the objects placed in the cornerstone—a paper by a local pundit on the supposed Northmen’s tower at Newport, a copy of the Plough-Boy, a life of Dr. Samuel L. Mitchill, the seventh report of the Bible Society, and some coins. But the journal’s chief interest lay in the amazing cost of the site—$20,500 for a plot 25 by 40 feet. This, it said, was as striking evidence of the city’s growth as the “twenty elegant ships” which now plied regularly to Liverpool.
What part had the Evening Post tried to play in this transformation of a provincial town into a metropolis? William Cullen Bryant states that when he joined the journal in 1826, it was “much occupied with matters of local interest, the sanitary condition of the city, the state of its streets, its police, its regulations of various kinds.” That had always been true. No other New York editor of the time took an interest in civic improvements that approached Coleman’s.
For the paper’s first fifteen years it might have been questioned whether it viewed with greater dismay the errors of the Democrats at Washington or the running at large of great numbers of hogs within the city limits. New Yorkers of to-day think of the toleration of swine as characteristic only of the backward Southern towns described by Mark Twain; but our great-grandfathers saw them rooting in City Hall Park and basking in Broadway and Wall Street. As Coleman told his readers in 1803, they were “a multitude.” Some men made a business of raising them. One householder of the Fifth Ward in 1803 had sixty at large; fifteen years later Coleman knew a colored man who had more than forty. Whenever, from a diet of dead cats and other gutter dainties, they threatened to become diseased, they were hurried to the butcher; with the result that fastidious people ate no pork. Every one admitted that they were unsightly, malodorous, and kept the walks filthy, while every few months a carriage upset over one. But the poor demanded them, and it was argued they were scavengers. The one restriction, ill-enforced, was that their noses be ringed to protect the turf.
As late as 1828 Coleman complained that pigs were met everywhere in the lower part of the city. In his campaign against them he gave full space to the accidents they caused. A not untypical mishap occurred in 1819. An alarm of fire in Maiden Lane brought the firemen and the usual crowd of boys racing down Broadway with ropes hauling a fire-engine. As they were at top speed a large hog darted into their path, the whole line went down, and the heavy engine passed over several. The corporation had already passed an ordinance (effective Jan. 1, 1818) making it illegal to let hogs go unpenned, but it was flagrantly violated. “Although every street in the city is thronged with hogs, yet none could be found who were individual owners,” said the paper soon afterward. When efforts were made to send “hog-carts” along the Bowery and other infested streets, angry owners gathered and overset the wagons. In the spring of 1829 three thieves were actually arrested for driving into the city, collecting fourteen fat shoats from the streets, and starting for the country; they intended to bring them back as prime corn-fed country pork. How long, asked the Evening Post, would the shameful indifference to the ordinance endure?
It was necessary to keep up an incessant fire of complaint against the wretched street-repair and street-cleaning systems of the time. As early as 1803 the Evening Post declared that the streets should in part be flushed, and that it would hence be well “if the waterworks were the property of the public, as was originally intended; and not of a private company, who are attentive only to their individual interest.” In the summer of 1807 Coleman, who was fond of a horse and gig, wrote that the Broadway road was in “such a state of neglect and ruin that no one could drive through it after dark but at the hazard of limbs and life,” that after a heavy rain horses sank up to their girths, and that serious accidents had occurred, one rider breaking his thigh and another his shoulder-bone. The ways were then crossed at intervals by open gutters, sometimes so deep as to be a serious impediment to traffic; even in front of St. Paul’s, in the heart of the city, Broadway when the Evening Post was founded was traversed by one almost impassable. A campaign had to be begun by the press for covered sewers.