birth to our ancestors, and we feel an attachment to the soil
that covers their bones; we venerate her institutions; we look
with anxiety upon the struggle in which she is now engaged for
self-preservation; we hope she will maintain her independence
uninjured, and that it will yet be long, very long, before the sun
of her glory will begin his descent to the west with diminished
luster; but we can never behold with a criminal indifference the
ill-judged, the unwarrantable attempts of an unwise ministry to
trench upon the perfect rights of other nations; especially of
one which both interest and inclination strongly unite to render
friendly to her.... We shall always stand ready to raise our feeble
voice and call upon the patriotism of our countrymen to rouse and
resist them.
Four years later occurred the encounter between the _President_ and
_Little Belt_. The former vessel had been sent out from Annapolis to
demand from the _Guerriere_ the surrender of a seaman whom the British
were said to have impressed. It encountered instead a ship which
showed no colors, and which it overtook just at nightfall. The unknown
craft refused to answer the American hail; shots were exchanged--both
captains later claimed to have been fired upon first; and at daybreak
the _President_ found that it had cut to pieces a little British
corvette of half its strength. Again the general excitement was
intense. The _Evening Post_ admitted that people were too inflamed
to listen to a cool discussion of laws and propriety. But in this
instance it inclined to the British view. Not only did Coleman maintain
that the _President_ had been sent out with indefensible orders, being
instructed to reclaim the impressed sailor by force if necessary;
he held that the _Little Belt_ had been justified in requiring the
American ship to reveal its identity first, inasmuch as the _Little
Belt_ was exposed to a surprise attack by a French cruiser.
As the leading spokesman for the commercial community in New York, the
_Evening Post_ of course bitterly opposed the embargo. This stoppage
of all foreign trade stunned the city. The day after the news came,
Coleman referred to the universal “uncertainty, apprehension, dismay,
and distress,” in which “every one is running eagerly to his neighbor
to inquire after information.” He declared that it would bankrupt the
merchants, and reduce thousands of laboring men to starvation. What!
no more ships to leave any Manhattan slips, no more barges of grain
to drop down the Hudson for foreign marts, no more droves of hogs and
herds of cattle to be driven through Westchester for slaughtering and
consignment abroad? The editor hastened to write a stinging article,
and then, after consulting leading Federalists, put it aside in favor
of an unsigned series by Rufus King.
It was pointed out that the embargo meant a direct loss of fifty
millions a year, a sum that would build a navy amply sufficient
to protect American rights at sea from France and Great Britain.
The _Evening Post_ painted a highly colored picture of the ruin of
the city’s shippers and wholesalers, the distress of shipwrights,
shopkeepers, clerks, and cartmen, and the despair of Hudson Valley
farmers. It ridiculed the notion that the embargo was a valuable
implement for negotiation with England. The British markets were well
supplied, and Britons were secretly rejoicing that the new American
policy gave them a monopoly of the world’s commerce. “Why is the
United States like a pig swimming?” asked Coleman. “Because it cuts
its own throat.” The embargo certainly had no such effect abroad
as its sponsors hoped. From France it brought only the Bayonne
decree, by which more than two hundred American ships were seized
in French-controlled waters--an outrage of which the _Evening Post_
made much; in England the shipping and farming interests were greatly
benefited. As Rufus King predicted, it not only threw whole business
communities into bankruptcy, but emptied the national treasury and
depleted the strength of the nation. When the spring election came on,
the _Post_ announced a motto for Federalists which might have been
made into the first American party platform: “No Embargo--No Foreign
Influences--No Mystery--Freedom of Debate--Freedom of Suffrage--Freedom
of Navigation and Trade--Liberty and Independence.”
Right as the _Evening Post_ and other Federalist sheets were upon the
main issue, they were not always quite fair. They consistently held
that Jefferson was keeping the object of the embargo secret,
But though this in its operation
May scatter ruin through the nation
And _starve_ the mouth of ragged labor,
Or _bankrupt_ his rich merchant-neighbor,
It must be endured without one moan,
Its _causes_ and _object_ both unknown!
while they never tired of capitalizing Thomas Paine’s indiscreet
statement in the _Public Advertiser_ that the embargo was really
preparatory to war with England. Yet it was plain to the blindest that
the measure was a desperate, almost despairing, effort to avoid war.
Again, the _Evening Post_ accused the South and Southwest of sheer
heartlessness. Jefferson cared not who starved at the North; he had
saved a fortune from his salary, and could feed his negroes herring
as well as hominy. “Who is Macon?” demanded Coleman when that leader
supported legislation for preventing violations of the embargo. “A
man who lives on the frontier of North Carolina; who can send out
his negroes to provide for him his venison and his wild turkey; who
raises his own hominy and grows his own cotton by the sweat of his
hundred slaves, and who I suppose feels just about as much sympathy
for the millions of people in the Eastern States, at whom he levels his
death-doing blow, as the Bashaw of Tripoli.” Yet the South suffered in
the long run more than the North, where manufactures speedily began to
arise, and Jefferson saw his property in Virginia alarmingly impaired.
Until the last the _Evening Post_ struggled against war with England,
but it saw clearly that it was coming. As early as 1807 its Washington
correspondent, probably one of the Federalist Congressmen from New
York, stated that a Cabinet officer had told him that the country
would have to choose between war with England or with France, and that
England would probably be selected. In 1810 the editor himself wrote
that America could not remain at peace with both belligerents, “and it
is very clear how the country will decide.” The journal opposed the
Macon bill in 1810, permitting importation and exportation only in
American bottoms, as involving certain retaliation from Great Britain.
It kept its two or three short news columns garnished with paragraphs
upon the many American seamen languishing in French prisons since the
Bayonne Decree. Thus in 1808, giving a long account of the mistreatment
of two skippers from the city, Captains Palmer and Waterman, the editor
exclaimed: “My blood boils in my veins.” The next year he reproduced
a pitiful letter from a tar confined at Arras, compelled to subsist
on a franc a day, and burst out: “Would you rest so silent and tame
under a thousandth part as much from Great Britain? You know you
would not.” He wanted an instant rupture of relations with France.
The military tyranny which Napoleon spread over unwilling nations of
Europe was attacked in fitting terms, and we find the French cruelties
in the Peninsular campaign dwelt upon at length. When in 1808 Napoleon
strengthened his alliance with the Russian Emperor, Coleman demanded:
“Shall we join the confederacy against England, the only free and
independent nation left in Europe?”
There was a fitful gleam of sunshine in 1809, when the British
Minister, Erskine, announced that the Orders in Council would be
withdrawn; but the clouds closed in again when it appeared that he
had exceeded his instructions. Coleman, examining these instructions
at length, blamed Erskine harshly for this disappointment to American
hopes, but not the British Government. Like other Federalist organs,
the _Evening Post_ regarded the dismissal of the next British envoy,
Jackson, as “frivolous and unfounded,” saying that “no public Minister
was ever so shamefully dealt with.” Helped by King and others, Coleman
bestowed great labor upon a series of articles dealing with the Jackson
episode, which he flattered himself would have more than ephemeral
value. The Secretary of State, Robert Smith, gave particular notice to
this series. Coleman rejoiced over the manner in which other Federalist
sheets caught up and echoed his points. The Boston _Repertory_, he
said, is “always ready, independent, correct, and able”; Dwight’s
_Mirror_ in Connecticut “shines preéminent”; in New Jersey the Trenton
_Federalist_ was a firm ally; in Philadelphia the _United States
Gazette_, long alone, was now supported by the _Freeman’s Journal_
and the _True American_, while the Baltimore _Federal Republican_ and
the Virginia _Patriot_ had been active. All these journals recognized
in the _Evening Post_ the voice of King, Gouverneur Morris, and Col.
Varick.
It became evident late in 1811 that the paper’s long fight was lost.
In reply to a war article by Duane, Coleman in a paragraph of deep
pessimism admitted as much:
We have not, we never had, but one opinion respecting our public
affairs with Great Britain; no differences will ever be brought
to a termination; no negotiations for that purpose will ever
be seriously entered upon, while Madison, or any other man in
Virginia, is President. All who entertain different views or
different hopes, will find themselves wofully mistaken. And if war
must come, why not the sooner the better? I am free to confess,
that I think a breeze from any quarter is better than that stagnant
and sickly atmosphere which we have breathed so long, and which
must, sooner or later, bring with it pestilence and death. It
is the violent storm, the tremendous hurricane, with hailstone,
thunder, and lightning, which cools and purifies the air,
reanimates the face of nature, and restores life to pristine vigor
and health.
There was in this statement almost the force of prophecy. The war
actually had just the benefits it foreshadowed. It cleared a sultry,
oppressive atmosphere, brought new and vital forces in national
life into play, and gave Americans a unity and self-confidence they
had not felt before. But this note was of course not struck again.
As the country moved steadily toward war in the spring of 1812, it
was with the _Evening Post_ denouncing Clay, the chief of the “war
hawks,” as a liar and demagogue; accusing the government of deliberate
misrepresentation when it said that the Napoleonic decrees were no
longer being enforced; and calling for public meetings in New York to
protest against the drift to hostilities. When in April an effort was
made to float the “Gallatin Loan,” Coleman did all that he could to
discredit it. There was no security, he said; the interest rate, six
per cent., was too low. “As it will very much depend upon the filling
up of the loan whether we shall or shall not go to war, it is evident
that no man who is averse to that calamity can ever, consistently, lend
his assistance to the government to plunge us into it.”
The great majority of men of property in the city were with the
_Evening Post_ in its opposition; so were most of the lawyers, the
faculty of Columbia College, the pastors of the leading churches,
and professional men in general. On June 15, four days before the
declaration of war, the _Evening Post_ published a memorial of protest
signed by fifty-six principal merchants, John Jacob Astor heading
the list. It is clear that the _Evening Post_ was at all times in
close touch with commercial sentiment. In April it said that the
best-informed men in town calculated the amount of American shipping
and goods within British reach abroad, and liable to confiscation, at
$100,000,000. All seaport towns, it added, were exposed to bombardment
and destruction by the British seventy-fours. Coleman but expressed
the fears of the counting rooms along lower Broadway and the rich
shopkeepers of Pearl Street when he assured New Yorkers that the State
would be undone. “This portion of the country will,” he warned, “on
account of its wealth and the easy access to it by water, become the
seat of war; and our defenseless situation will subject us, in the
case of a few years war, to a desolation which a half century cannot
restore.”
II
Twice has the _Evening Post_ opposed with passionate detestation, from
beginning to end, an American war. The two editors responsible, Coleman
and E. L. Godkin, were as far as D’Artagnan from being weak-kneed
pacifists. Both in their youth had shouldered arms; both were of
Anglo-Irish blood, with a Celtic inclination toward battle; both went
through life joyfully snuffing new frays from afar. It is well at this
point, with Coleman taking the leadership of all the anti-war journals
south of the Connecticut, to stop a moment to note what were his
personal qualities, as shown in his editorship, and what the conditions
of his work. The old-time journalist did not speak softly, and carried
a big stick. Coleman had as much need as the rest to learn the use
of dueling pistols, and to know how to graze the libel laws. “He was
naturally courageous,” says Bryant, “and having entered into a dispute,
he never sought to decline any of its consequences.”
We have noted that when Philip Hamilton was killed, the editor
condemned dueling as barbarous, and called for a rigid legislation
against it. Yet in 1803 he was himself provoked into a duel. The
previous autumn Cheetham had in an indirect, cowardly fashion charged
him with the paternity of a mulatto child in Greenfield, a charge
which Coleman had no difficulty in showing utterly false, but which
he resented by a challenge. Cheetham accepted. News of the impending
encounter got abroad, and Judge Brockholst Livingston immediately
issued a bench warrant, compelled the appearance of the two editors
before him, and allowed them to depart only after they had engaged
not to use more deadly weapons than pen and ink. Unfortunately, one
Captain Thompson, an ardent Democrat, accused Coleman of letting the
secret of the duel escape, and of having been animated by a cowardly
motive. Coleman promptly challenged the fire-eating captain, and early
in the new year the pair fought in Love Lane, a sequestered road, then
well outside the city, which followed the present line of Twenty-first
Street between Sixth and Eighth Avenues. It was dusk of a cold winter’s
day when they met, with snow falling and other circumstances uniting,
as a second quaintly observed, to make the affair “uncomfortable.”
They fired two shots at ten paces, and then, darkness coming down,
moved closer and fired two more. Thompson, exclaiming “I’ve got it!”
sank mortally wounded into the arms of his physician, Dr. McLean. He
was carried to his sister’s house in town, was laid on the doorstep,
the bell was rung, and the family found him bleeding and near death.
He refused to tell who had shot him, or to give any evidence whatever
regarding the duel, saying that everything had been honorably done--and
his antagonist must not be molested.
Coleman had repeated encounters of a less serious character. In the
_Evening Post_ of January 12, 1807, he begged the public to discredit
Cheetham’s “account of the fracas on Saturday between Dr. Walker and
myself,” as it was full of errors, but he did not offer the correct
particulars himself. In 1810 blows were struck when his vote was
challenged and he was insulted at the polls by a tavern-keeper who
said that Coleman could not be a citizen because he had published the
statement, “I had rather be a dog and bay the moon than own myself an
American.” This was a Democratic garbling of a half-sentence in one of
the _Post’s_ editorials.
Early in 1818 the editor published a narrative of the misconduct of a
certain Democrat named Henry B. Hagerman while traveling as a Judge
Advocate up-State. Hagerman stopped at a Kingston hotel, kept by an
estimable widow, and for some fancied grievance insulted her so grossly
that no newspaper of to-day would print the details which Coleman laid
before the public. On the evening of April 11 Coleman was overtaken by
Hagerman near sunset at the corner of Murray and Church Streets, and
attacked without warning from the rear. His assailant used the loaded
butt of a rawhide whip. The editor was stunned by the first blow, was
repeatedly struck and kicked as he lay prostrate, and when he staggered
to his feet, half blind with blood, was given a still more savage
beating. Public indignation against Hagerman rose so high that he was
hurried to jail for safety, and not being able to ask for a change of
venue, pleaded for postponement of his trial until it subsided. Two
years to a day after the murderous attack, Coleman was awarded $4,000
in damages, a huge sum for 1820. But it was none too large. The editor
had been prostrated for weeks, recurrent strokes of paralysis followed,
and he was never in sound health again.
The physical violence to which editors were then exposed harmonized
with a violence of temper and manner which was far too prominent in
journalism, as in politics. In noting this abusiveness it must be
remembered that the press was the product and mirror of its time.
Politics was conducted with far more scurrility and coarseness than
now, and the newspapers were largely an appendage of politics. A day of
backwoods gouging and fashionable dueling, of constant fighting between
street gangs in all the large cities, of fisticuffs on the floor of
the House of Representatives, of a low standard of manners everywhere,
was not a day for refined newspaper methods. It took time for editors
to learn that hard reasons do more execution than hard names. Editors,
moreover, were prone to set up medieval conventions; they regarded
themselves as so many knights errant, roaming the land for battle, no
sooner seeing a strange crest than they galloped to shiver lances.
It is usual to quote Coleman’s quatrain
Lie on, Duane, lie on for pay,
And Cheetham, lie thou too,
More ’gainst truth you cannot say
Than truth can say ’gainst you,
as a bold specimen of the editorial amenities of a century ago. But
Coleman went far beyond the lie direct and countercheck quarrelsome.
The American public has always refused to take at face value the
epithets which editors exchange, and doubtless in Jefferson’s time
it put a Pickwickian construction upon them. Referring to the most
prominent Democratic editor, Coleman once quoted Milton’s line, “Squat
like a toad at the ear of Eve,” adding: “I beg the devil’s pardon for
comparing him in any shape with Duane.” Of Cheetham he said that he
was so habituated to lying that given a choice of truth and mendacity
he invariably preferred the latter, and on another occasion he listed
twenty-five lies in a single article by “the President’s unlucky
toad-eater.”
Coleman thought nothing of referring to Dr. Peter Irving, head of the
_Morning Chronicle_, as a “malevolent coxcomb,” and to his partner
as “a pedant and blackguard.” Other journals fared no better. When
the _Public Advertiser_, a new Clintonian organ, libeled the _Evening
Post_, Coleman denounced its “villainy” and challenged the “vile
reptiles” editing it to produce their evidence. The conductor of the
Long Island _Star_ also fell afoul of the _Evening Post_. “This Kirk
I have always despised as a flippant, conceited, shallow fellow,”
wrote Coleman, “but I did not take him for so great a fool as his
nonsense shows him to be, nor think him so black-hearted and malignant
a calumniator.” In 1806 he termed Samuel H. Smith of the Washington
_National Intelligencer_, the so-called “court journal” of Jefferson,
“the little monkey.” Nine years later, when the era of good feeling
was commencing, he prided himself upon his repression in speaking of
the same able newspaper, in the columns of which Clay had been glad to
appear: “I shall take no other notice of the charge in that profligate
paper than to say I have long observed there is no misrepresentation
too base, no violation of truth too palpable, not to be gladly adopted
and circulated by that infamous organ.”
Be it said to Coleman’s credit that these examples are the worst to
be selected from the files for fifteen years, during which the issues
of the _Aurora_ and _American Citizen_ teemed with such expressions.
Moreover, there was some justification for them. Cheetham, and to a
less extent Duane, were unabashed liars; Peter Irving was so much
of a coxcomb that even his friends called him “sissie Irving”; and
Kirk certainly was a calumniator. Most creditable of all to Coleman,
he refrained from dastardly slanders upon the private life of his
contemporaries, whereas they gave him no such consideration. In 1807
he declared his conviction that Duane was in receipt of French gold,
and many years later accused M. M. Noah, the famous Jewish journalist,
of avowing himself open to a money bribe from the Clintonian faction,
but he said nothing of the conduct of any such man apart from his
editorial office. Yet his own enemies fabricated a story that he had
been dismissed from the Vermont bar because he had bored a hole in
a courthouse ceiling to overhear rival counsel, and accused him of
illegally converting the funds of Greenfield neighbors to his own uses.
It is not strange that when the press was filled with this sort of
utterance, libel suits were numerous. Cheetham at the beginning of 1804
had fourteen actions pending against him, and in 1807 admitted that
the total damages which he had been compelled to pay reached almost
$4,000. Aaron Burr had brought one of these suits, while ex-Mayor
Varick in 1803 had obtained a judgment of $200. It is evidence of the
comparatively moderate tone of the _Evening Post_ that no suit against
it ever succeeded, though a number were begun. One of these actions was
brought by Robert Macomb, clerk of the Sessions Court, whom Coleman
had accused of taking illegal fees, and another by a politician named
Arcularius.
III
When war was actually declared in June, 1812, this belligerent editor,
like most New York merchants, like four men in five throughout New
England, believed that it meant the bootless ruin of trade and
agriculture. It had come with such final suddenness, he said, that
American ships in European waters would almost all be taken by British
cruisers. It was professedly a war for freedom of the sea; in reality
the shipping States believed, as Coleman put it, that it grew out of
“the Southern anti-commercial spirit.”
De Witt Clinton, the ambitious mayor, who was courting the help of
King, John Wells, and the _Evening Post_ in his aspirations for the
Federalist nomination against Madison that summer, told Coleman that
he believed ninety-nine men in every hundred in the city really were
opposed to the war. The editor was highly sarcastic in his references
to the local Democrats as “fellow subjects of our loving Emperor
Napoleon,” and in those to “Monsieurs Gallatin and Madison.” For a
few weeks, while an alliance with France was thought a possibility,
the _Evening Post_ steadily declaimed against it. A war with Great
Britain, fought single-handed, “will be neither a predatory war nor a
bloody war,” it said; but if France sends her squadrons to the American
coast, British fleets will follow, and the seaport towns will suffer.
When Daniel Webster, a young man of thirty almost unknown outside
New Hampshire, delivered a Fourth of July oration denouncing any
coöperation with France, he was fervently praised.
New Yorkers were fearful of two perils: a British invasion across
the St. Lawrence or Niagara Rivers, and bombardments by sea. “We are
fighting the world’s greatest Power,” protested Coleman, “without the
means of annoyance or even defense.” He told his readers, incorrectly,
that the frigate _Constitution_ was sent from Norfolk to Boston with
only two rounds of cannonballs; and correctly, that Fort Niagara, on an
“exposed and utterly defenseless frontier,” had scarcely powder enough
for a Fourth of July salute.