After the commencement of the War of 1812, as we should expect, much more assiduous attention was paid to news. From five columns, the space allotted rapidly rose to six, seven, and even eight. Almost always, of course, it was very late news. Word of the first disaster of the war, Hull’s surrender at Detroit, was published by the Evening Post on Aug. 31, 1812. The capitulation has occurred on the 16th, and the news came by two routes. An express rider had carried it from Sandusky to Cleveland, and thence it was brought by a postal carrier to Warren, Pa., on the 22d, so that Pittsburgh had it on the 23d, and Philadelphia on the night of the 29th. At the same time it was coming by a southern path. Hull sent a messenger direct to Washington, who arrived in the capital on the 28th, and whose dispatches were relayed northward.
Hard on the heels of this blow came cheering news. The Constitution met the Guerriere on Aug. 19, and Capt. Hull’s victory was given to the public by Boston papers of the 31st, and New York papers of Sept. 2. Thus both the defeat and the victory were known to most Northerners about a fortnight after they took place. Of “the fall of Fort Dearborn at Chicagua,” on Aug. 15, the famous massacre, New Yorkers did not learn until Sept. 24, when a brief dispatch from Buffalo was inserted in an obscure corner by Coleman. All Washington news at this time still required two full days for transmission, and often more. When Madison on Nov. 3, 1812, sent a message to Congress at high noon, the Evening Post announced that it and the Gazette had clubbed together to pay for a pony express, and that it hoped to issue an extra with the news the following afternoon. It also stated that the previous evening an express had passed through the city towards New England, reputed to be bearing the substance of the message, and to have traversed the 340 miles from Washington in nineteen hours. Next day the editor stated that the express had really come from Baltimore only, and that it had been paid for by gamblers to bear the first numbers drawn in the Susquehanna lottery in advance of the mails. These numbers had been delivered to the gamblers in New York, who went to the proper offices and took insurance to the amount of $30,000 against their coming up that day; but the offices refused payment. It was nearly thirty-six hours before Madison’s message reached New York from Washington, and it was not printed until Nov. 5.
Late in the fall occurred an interesting example of the constant conflict of that day between rumor and fact. Gen. Stephen Van Rensselaer sacrificed a force of 900 men at Queenstown Heights, just across the Niagara River, on Oct. 13. Seven days later the Evening Post in a column headed “postscript” gave the city its first intimation that a battle had occurred. Just as the paper at two o’clock was going to press, it said, the Albany boat had come in with word from Geneva that an army surgeon had arrived there from Buffalo, and had reported a great American victory—the capture of Queenstown and 1,500 prisoners. But the steamer also brought a rival report from the Canandaigua Repository of a disaster, in which hundreds had been killed and hundreds captured. The city could only wait and fear as the following day passed without news. Finally, on the afternoon of the 22d, the Albany steamboat hove in sight again, and a great crowd thronging the pier was aghast to learn that Van Rensselaer had lost a battle and a small army.
In the closing days of the war this episode was reversed, the rumor of bad news being followed by a truthful report of good. On Jan. 20, 1815, the whole city was in suspense as to the fate of New Orleans. Nothing had been heard from Louisiana for a month, and three mails were overdue, which boded ill, for every one knew that Sir Edward Pakenham and his 16,000 British veterans were ready to move upon the place. “It is generally believed here that if an attack has been made on Orleans, the city has fallen,” said the Evening Post. “But some doubt whether the British, having the perfect command of all the waters about the city, and having it in their power to command the river above, will not resort to a more bloodless, but a certain method of reducing the city.” On Jan. 23 the Evening Post published some inconclusive information received in a letter from a New Orleans judge, dated just before the preliminary and indecisive battle of Dec. 23. “We have cause of apprehension,” Coleman wrote, “that to-morrow’s mail will bring tidings of the winding up of the catastrophe.” New Yorkers were particularly concerned because city merchants owned a great part of the $3,200,000 worth of cotton stored in New Orleans. But a week, ten days, and two weeks passed while little news was procured and the tension grew steadily greater. Finally, on the morning of Feb. 6, three mails were received at once, with New Orleans letters bearing dates as late as Jan. 13, five days after Jackson had bloodily repulsed Packenham. The tidings fell upon New York with a tremendous shock of surprise and joy, and the Evening Post hastened to publish them in two columns and with its closest approach to the yet uninvented headline.
Under the stress of war the first news with conscious color, pathos, and strong human interest began to be written. The earliest account filled with human touches dealt with an incident of the privateering of which New York harbor was a busy center. The privateer Franklin, two months after hostilities began, returned from the Nova Scotia coast with a strange prize—an old, crazy, black-sided fishing schooner of thirty-eight tons, less than half the size of a good Hudson River market boat. Coleman, going aboard, found the owner a fine gray-haired woman, a widow. The little craft was her all. Wrapped in a rusty black coat as tattered as its sails, “she cried as if her heart would break” while she told the editor how she had left four children behind her and had pleaded with her captor not to be taken so far from home. It need not be said that the publicity Coleman gave to this incident helped persuade the captain of the privateer that honor obliged him to send the fisherwoman back.
Two years later occurred an incident the humorous values of which the Evening Post did not miss. Mr. Wise, part-proprietor of the Museum in New York, with a mixture of patriotic and business motives, had an extensive panorama painted of the glorious Yankee naval victories of 1812 and 1813. Having got all the New York sixpences that he could with it, he packed it up together with the lamps and other fixtures for its exhibition, and a valuable hand-organ, and set sail for Charleston to show it there. On the second day out from Sandy Hook, the British frigate Forth captured the vessel. Greatly amused, the commander promptly set the panorama up for inspection:
So valuable did the captain of the Forth consider his prize, that in the evening of the day he made his capture, he illuminated his ships with the lamps belonging to the panorama, and kept up a merry tune upon the organ. In the course of their merriment they asked Mr. Wise if it could play Yankee Doodle. Upon his answering in the affirmative, they immediately set the organ to that tune, and in a sailor step made the decks shake. The captain of the Forth said he intended to take the paintings to Halifax and make a fortune by exhibiting them.
But, remarked Coleman patriotically:
The frigate President, we understand, is preparing for a cruise now under the command of Decatur, and if they will have a little patience we will furnish another historical subject for their amusement.
As the war drew near its close, sometimes even ten columns of news were furnished, and on several occasions, as that of Gen. Hull’s trial, a one-sheet supplement was issued. The first cartoon in the Evening Post was evoked on April 18, 1812, by the act of Congress cutting off foreign trade by land. It showed two large tree-trunks in close juxtaposition, one labeled “Embargo” and the other “Non-Importation Act,” with a fat snake held immovable between them; from the snake’s mouth were issuing the words, “What’s the matter now?” and from its tail the answer, “I can’t get out!” Such wit was about equal to that of the second cartoon, on April 25, 1814, which showed a terrapin (the Embargo was often called “the terrapin policy”) flat upon its back, expiring as Madison stabbed it with a saber, but still clinging to the President with claws and teeth. Below was some doggerel expressing the determination of the terrapin to hold on until it dragged Madison down and slew him. Evidently readers were obtuse, for the next day appeared a solemn “Explanation of the emblematic figures in yesterday’s paper.” But as yet neither news nor cartoons were published on the first page, which was sacred, as in English papers of to-day, to advertisements.