Little criticism was given the watch or the firemen, though neither fully protected the city. In 1812 the journal very properly attacked the “snug watch-boxes” in which the police were wont to sit, and demanded that the men be warmly dressed and kept constantly on patrol. During 1818 its complaints of the insufficiency of the police redoubled, and in 1823, when the total annual expense to the city was $56,000, Coleman asserted that for almost the whole ward surrounding Coenties Slip, with many valuable warehouses, there was but one watchman. The editor, using the adjectives “noisome,” “beastly,” “filthy,” spoke of the jail and bridewell in 1812 as standing reproaches to New York. He also condemned “the abominable practises of the marshals, constables, low attornies, and a number of other wretches” who hung about the courts and bridewell to prey upon arrested men. The Evening Post at intervals till 1820 complained of a lack of inspection in public markets; while with almost equal regularity it scored the neglect of the Battery, whose only caretakers were too often the hogs.
The one reform of the time which the paper opposed was the aldermanic decree in the spring of 1820 that no more interments should take place south of Canal, Sullivan, and Grand Streets. This was good sense; but Coleman, as a spokesman for the wealthy merchant families, objected because it rendered many family burial plots or vaults worthless, and because the nearest available cemeteries were three and a half miles from the city.
II
We have already named the daily newspapers which existed when Hamilton and his associates established the Evening Post. The oldest of the five was the Daily Gazette, which had been founded as a weekly in 1725; the Post made six, Dr. Irving’s Morning Chronicle, patronized by Burr, seven, and the Public Advertiser eight. In 1807 the whole list of city publications was as follows:
Federalist:—Evening Post; Commercial Advertiser; Daily Gazette; Weekly Inspector; and People’s Friend.
Clintonian:—American Citizen; Public Advertiser; and Bowery Republican.
Lewisite (Morgan Lewis was the inheritor of Burr’s mantle):—Morning Chronicle.
Neutral:—Mercantile Advertiser; New York Spy; Price Current.
Literary:—Monthly Register; Ladies’ Weekly Miscellany; Weekly Museum.
Of the dailies, the Evening Post was the most important; its scope was the widest, its editorials were the best-written, and its commercial news was as good as that obtained by Lang or Belden. Yet even it had, at the beginning of its second year, but 1,104 subscribers for the daily edition, and 1,632, chiefly out-of-town, for the weekly. New Yorkers then regarded newspapers as a luxury, not a necessity. Since a year’s subscription cost $8, or ten days’ wages for a workingman, the poor simply could not afford it. Thrifty householders exchanged sheets, and at the taverns they were read to wide circles. The journal was never sold on the streets, and if Coleman had caught an urchin peddling it he would have boxed his ears for a fool; whenever a visitor at the City Hotel, or a merchant particularly pleased by some long editorial, wished a copy, he not only had to pay the heavy price of 12½ cents, but had to go to the printer’s room for it. Coleman no more thought of his circulation as variable from day to day than does the editor of a country weekly at the present time.
We must remember that the dailies of old New York not only had small and fixed circulations, but that it was not their editors’ intention to make them purveyors of news in anything like the modern sense. Coleman in his prospectus made no promise of enterprise in supplying intelligence. An editor was glad to give a completer notification of new auctions or cargoes than any rival, or to be first to strike the party note upon a political event; but a news “beat” was unknown.
It was said of the Commercial Advertiser that wars might be fought and won, dynasties rise and fall, quakes and floods ravage the earth, and it would never mention them; but that if it failed to list a single ship arrival or sailing, the editor would meditate blowing out his brains. Several New York newspapers of 1800–1820 were principally vehicles of political opinion; several were principally organs for commercial information and advertisements; and some were a mingling of the two. A modicum of news was thrown in to add variety, and though it tended to grow greater, even by 1825 it was only a modicum. One great difficulty was that there was no machinery for news-gathering. Coleman was his own reporter for local events, and had no money to hire an assistant; while almost all news from outside was taken from exchanges, or from private letters whose contents were communicated to him by friends. The mails were slow and irregular. A still larger difficulty was that the news sense had been developed neither by editors nor by the public to whose demands the editors catered.
Illustrations of what would now seem an incredible blindness to important events might be multiplied indefinitely. A New Yorker who wishes to find in old files a real account of the first trial of Fulton’s Clermont will search in vain. No report worthy of the name was written, the brief newspaper references being meager and unsatisfactory. Yet there was much interest in Fulton, and the Evening Post of July 22, sixteen days before the experiment with the steamboat, did give a good account of his successful effort in the harbor to use torpedoes. More than twenty years later the Evening Post carried an advance notice of the opening of the Baltimore and Ohio Railway, the real beginning of American railroad traffic; but, like most other papers, it gave no report of the actual occurrence.
Sometimes news was deliberately rejected. In 1805 Coleman published a long series of articles discussing Jefferson’s second inaugural address, but the address itself he never printed; it being assumed that interested men could find it in the Democratic press. Again, when in the autumn of 1812 a gang of robbers entered eight of the largest stores of the city in succession, during a few days, and took goods valued at $3,000, the editor made no effort to place the particulars before his readers; could they not ask the neighborhood gossips? He contented himself with a warning to the public and to the watch. On Jan. 10, 1803, early in the evening, the house of a well-to-do tallow chandler named Willis, in Roosevelt Street, was robbed. Next day the paper made only a casual allusion to it, naïvely adding: “For particulars see the advertisement in this evening’s Post.” The obliging Mr. Willis, in advertising a reward, had stated the details of his loss, which came to $2,500 or $2,600 in cash.