The design of this paper is to diffuse among the people correct information on all interesting subjects, to inculcate just principles in religion, morals, and politics; and to cultivate a taste for sound literature.
An effort was actually for a time made to teach religious truths. In an early issue a letter was printed, probably from some cleric, combating certain atheistic views expressed by Cheetham’s American Citizen; an editorial article soon after was devoted to a discussion of the Revelation of St. John; and Coleman never tired of attacking the deism of local “illuminati.”
In its opening sentences the prospectus stated that the journal would appear in a dress worthy of the liberal patronage promised. To modern eyes the first volumes are cramped, dingy, and uninviting. Each issue consisted of a single sheet folded once, to make four pages, as continued to be the case until the middle eighties; a page measured only 14 by 19½ inches; and the conventional cuts of ships, houses, stoves, furniture, and coiffures would be disfiguring if they were not quaint. But when we compare the Evening Post with its contemporaries we see that the statement was not empty. Editor Callender remarked that “This newspaper is, beyond all comparison, the most elegant piece of workmanship that we have seen, either in Europe or America.” The Gazette of the United States commented that it was published “in a style by far superior to that of any other newspaper in the United States.” How could it afford this style? it asked. Advertisements were the secret, for out of twenty columns, fourteen or fifteen were always filled with the patronage of Federalist merchants. Few journals then had more than two full fonts of type, and some were set entirely in minion. Coleman and his printer, a young man from Hartford named Michael Burnham, had started with four full fonts of new type beautifully cut; they used a superior grade of paper; and the arrangement and use of headings had been carefully studied. Dignity was then, as always later, emphasized.
Every Saturday a weekly edition, called the Herald, was sent to distant subscribers, from Boston to Savannah, with fewer advertisements and at least twice the reading matter. Noah Webster, in conducting the Minerva, had been the first New York editor to perceive the economy and profit in publishing such a journal “for the country” without recomposition of type, and had himself used the name Herald. The New York Federalists relied principally upon the weekly for a national diffusion of their views, and with reason, for at an early date in 1802 the circulation rose above 1600, as against slightly more than 1100 for the Evening Post itself. These were respectable figures for that time.
What should the Federalist chieftains, Hamilton, Wolcott, King, Gouverneur Morris, and others, make of these two instruments? To answer this, we shall have to look first at the qualifications of “Hamilton’s editor,” as other journals called him.
The abilities of Coleman, an interesting type of the best Federalist editor, were as great as those of any other American journalist of the time. His formal training was unusually good for a day in which powerful figures like Duane, Cheetham, Binns, and Callender were comparatively uncultivated men, who wrote with vigor but without polish or even grammatical correctness. Born in Boston on Feb. 14, 1766, he was fortunate enough to be sent to Phillips Andover, the first incorporated academy in New England, soon after it opened in 1778. Though he was a poor boy, he had for fellow-pupils the sons of the best families of the region, including Josiah Quincy, the future mayor of Boston and president of Harvard; and for “preceptor” the famous Eliphalet Pearson, a master of the harsh type of Keate of Eton or Dr. Busby of Westminster. Here he gained “a certain elegance of scholarship” in Greek and Latin which, Bryant tells us, “was reckoned among his qualifications as a journalist.” He formed a taste for reading, and his editorials bear evidence of his knowledge of all the standard English authors—Shakespeare, Milton, Hume, Johnson, Fielding, Smollett, and the eighteenth-century poets and essayists. Sterne was a favorite with him, and like all other editors, he knew the “Letters of Junius” almost by heart. Most Phillips Andover boys went on to Harvard, but Coleman began the study of law in the office of Robert Treat Paine, then Attorney-General of Massachusetts, at Worcester. Nothing is known of his life there save that he became an intimate friend of the Rev. Aaron Bancroft, father of the historian George Bancroft; and that he dropped his books to serve in the winter march of the militia in 1786 against Shays.
Bryant knew Coleman only in his declining years, but he tells us that he was “of that temperament which some physiologists call the sanguine.” Hopefulness and energy were fully evinced in the decade he spent at the bar in Greenfield, Hampshire County, from 1788 to the end of 1797. He practiced across the Vermont and New Hampshire lines, made money, showed marked public spirit, and seemed destined to be more than a well-to-do squire—to be one of the dignitaries of northwest Massachusetts. The newspaper which he founded at Greenfield early in 1792, but did not edit, prospered, and under a changed name is now the third oldest surviving newspaper in the State. In the same year Coleman set on foot a subscription for the town’s first fire-engines. He was active in a movement, which many years later succeeded, to divide Hampshire County; he set out many of the fine street-elms; and in 1796 he was one incorporator of a company to pipe water into the town. He began training young men to the bar in his own office. In the Presidential campaign of 1796 he made many speeches, and his political activity was further exemplified by terms in the Massachusetts House in 1795 and 1796. He was only thirty years old when in September of the latter year he received his honorary degree at Dartmouth. When he invested his money in the Yazoo Purchase, he believed that he would make a fortune—a Greenfield contemporary says that he estimated his profits at $30,000. In the flush of this delusion, he married, and bought a spacious site in the town with a fine view of the Pocumtuck Hills and Green River Valley, where he commenced the erection of a house now regarded as one of the finest specimens of Colonial architecture in the section.
The disaster which overtook Coleman when, at the close of 1796, the Georgia Legislature annulled the Yazoo Purchase on the ground that it had been effected by corruption, he faced without flinching. It was natural for him, on settling his affairs in 1797, to seek his fortune in New York. We find it stated by a journalistic opponent that he had received promises of help from “Mr. Burr and other leading characters.” At any rate, his first partnership, which he later lamented as “the greatest error of my life,” was with Burr, who had just ended his term in the United States Senate. Coleman later wrote that his share of the office receipts “came essentially short of affording me a subsistence.” One other man destined to be a famous Federalist editor, Theodore Dwight, had previously had a similar partnership with Burr and had dissolved it. Coleman did better when he joined his fortunes first with Francis Arden, and then with John Wells. But he was still desperately poor, and his creditors pressed him. Among those whom he owed money were Gen. Stephen R. Bradley, of Westminster, Vt., later a United States Senator, and a friend of Bradley’s, Edward Houghton; these two brought suit, and on Jan. 27, 1801, obtained judgments in a New York court, the former for $691.71, the latter for $443.67.
Yet under these trying circumstances Coleman’s amiable deportment, frankness, and activity made him well-wishers among the best men of the city. He was of athletic frame, and at this time of robust appearance; with curling hair and sparkling eyes, he was a figure to attract attention anywhere. “His manners were kind and courteous,” says Bryant; “he expressed himself in conversation with fluency, energy, and decision”; and his enemy Cheetham testifies that “no man knew better how to get into the good graces of everybody better than himself.” Resolving to demonstrate to the bar the utility of accurate reports of all important cases and decisions, he spared no labor or pains upon his report of the trial of Levi Weeks; for this little volume of ninety-eight pages he collated five other notebooks with his own.
In all, Coleman was well fitted to become the leading Federalist editor of the nation. The Evening Post was expected by the party chieftains to take a prompt and vigorous stand on every great public question, and to voice an opinion which lesser journals could echo. It was a heavy responsibility. “The people of America derive their political information chiefly from newspapers,” wrote Callender in 1802. “Duane upon one side, and Coleman upon the other, dictate at this moment the sentiments of perhaps fifty thousand American citizens.” When in 1807 the first journal of the party was established at the new capital, Jonathan Findley’s Washington Federalist, its founder, after enumerating all the requisites of an editor, named Coleman as their foremost exemplar. “I cannot, in the field of controversy, vie with a Coleman.” In the summer of 1802 Coleman was nicknamed the “Field-marshal of the Federal Editors” by his opponent Callender, and the fitting appellation stuck.