Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/eveningpostcentuOOnevirich THE EVENING POST * * > s > c c c c c c c c, c c c t William Cullen Bryant Associate Editor, 1826-1829, Editor-in-Chief, 1829-1878 (Two hitherto unpublished portraits) > 1 , ■» , ■) THE EVENING POST A Century of Journalism ALLAN NEVINS The journalists are now the true kings and clergy; henceforth historians, unless they are fools, must write not of Bourbon dynas- ties, and Tudors, and Hapsburgs; but of stamped, broadsheet dynasties, and quite new successive names, according as this or the other able editor, or combination of able editors, gains tiie world's ear. — Sartor Resartus, BONI AND LIVERIGHT Publishers : New York TO MY MOTHER Copyright, 1922, by BONI AND LiVERIGHT, InC. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PREFACE This volume took its origin in the writer's belief that a history of the Evening Post would be interesting not merely as that of one of the world's greatest newspapers, but as throwing light on the whole course of metropolitan journalism in America since 1800, and upon some im- portant parts of local and national history. In a book of this kind it is necessary to steer between Scylla and Charybdis. If the volume were confined to mere office- history, it would interest few; while a review of all the newspaper's editorial opinions and all the interesting news it has printed would be a review of the greater part of what has happened in the nineteenth century and since. The problem has been to avoid narrowness on the one hand, padding on the other. The author has tried to select the most important, interesting, and illuminating aspects and episodes of the newspaper's history, and to treat them with a careful regard for perspective. The decision to include no footnote references to authorities in a volume of this character probably requires no defense. In a great majority of instances the text itself indicates the authority. When an utterance of the Eve- ning Post on the Dred Scott decision is quoted, it would assuredly be impertinent to quote the exact date. The author wishes to say that he has been at pains to ascribe no bit of writing to a particular editor without making sure that he actually wrote it. When he names Bryant as the writer of a certain passage, he does so on the authority of the Bryant papers, or the Parke Godwin papers, or one of the lives of Bryant, or of indisputable internal evidence. After 188 1 a careful record of the writers of the most important Evening Post editorials was kept in the files of the Nation. The author wishes to thank the heirs of William CuUen Bryant, Parke Godwin, John Bigelow, Carl Schurz, VI PREFACE Horace White, Henry Villard, and E. L. Godkin for giving him access to a wealth of family papers. Im- portant manuscript material bearing upon William Cole- man was furnished by James Melvin Lee and Mary P. Wells Smith. He is under a heavy debt to Mr. Robert Bridges, editor of Scribner^s; Mr. Norman Hapgood, editor of Hearst^s International Magazine; Mr. H. J. Wright, editor of the Globe; Mr. Rollo Ogden, associate editor of the New York Times; Mr. O. G. Villard, editor of the Nation; Mr. Watson R. Sperry, of the Hartford Courant; Mr. Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Mr. Lincoln Stef- fens, Mr. R. R. Bowker, and Mr. Frederic Bancroft; the heirs of Charles Nordhoff and Charlton M. Lewis; and Mr. J. Ranken Towse, Mr. William Hazen, and Mr. Henry T. Finck of the Evening Post, for informa- tion and assistance. He is similarly obliged to the Library of Congress for aid in examining the papers of Alexander Hamilton and Carl Schurz. Portions of the manuscript were kindly read by Mr. Edwin F. Gay, presi- dent of the Evening Post, who has given constant advice and encouragement, Mr. Rollo Ogden, and Mr. Simeon Strunsky; and part of the proofs by Mr. Donald Scott, Mr. O. G. Villard, and Mr. H. J. Wright. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Hamilton and the Founding of the "Evening Post" 9 II. The "Evening Post" as Leader of THE Federalist Press .... 35 III. The City and the "Evening Post's" Place in It 63 IV. Literature and Drama in the Early "Evening Post" 96 V. Bryant Becomes Editor . . . . 121 VI. William Leggett Acting Editor : De- pression, Rivalry, and Threat- ened Ruin 139 VII. The Rise of the Slavery Question: THE Mexican War 166 VIII. New York Becomes a Metropolis: Central Park 192 ""IX. Literary Aspects of Bryant's News- paper, 1 830-1 855 207 X. John Bigelow as an Editor of the "Evening Post" 228 XI. Heated Politics Before the Civil War 242 vii viii CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE XII. The New York Press and Southern Secession 267 XIII. The Critical Days of the Civil War 284 XIV. Reconstruction and Impeachment . 326 XV. Bryant at the Height of His Fame as Editor 338 XVI. Apartment Houses Rise and Tweed Falls 364 XVII. Independence in Politics : the Elec- tions of '72 and '76 389 XVIII. Two Rebel Literary Editors . . . 406 XIX. Warfare Within the Office : Parke Godwin's Editorship .... 420 XX. The Villard Purchase : Carl Schurz Editor-in-Chief 438 XXI. GoDKiN, THE Mugwump Movement, AND Grover Cleveland's Career . 458 XXII. Godkin's War Without Quarter Upon Tammany 476 XXIII. Opposing the Spanish War and Sil- ver Craze ....... 496 XXIV. Characteristics of a Fighting Edi- tor: E. L. Godkin 519 XXV. News, Literature, Music, and Drama 18 80- 1900 .... 546 XXVI. Horace White, Rollo Ogden, and THE "Evening Post" Since 1900 . 568 Index 581 ILLUSTRATIONS William CuUen Bryant Frontispiece Associate Editor^ 1 826-1 829, Editor-in-Chief j 1829-1878 FACING PAGE Alexander Hamilton 26 Chief Founder of the "Evening Post'' William Coleman 102 Editor-in-Chief, 1 801 -1 829 John Bigelow 264 Associate Editor, 1 849-1 860 Parke Godwin 440 Editor-in-Chief, 1878- 1 88 1 Henry Villard 440 Owner, 1881-1900 . Carl Schurz 440 Editor-in-Chief, 1 881 -1883 Horace White 440 Associate Editor, 188 1 -1 899, Editor-in-Chief, 1900-1903 E. L. Godkin 494 Associate Editor, 1 881- 1883, Editor-in-Chief, 1883-1899 Rollo Ogden 548 Editor-in-Chief, 1903- 1 920 Editorial Council, 1922 570 CHAPTER ONE HAMILTON AND THE FOUNDING OF THE "EVENING POST" / Of all the newspapers established as party organs in the time when Federalists and Democrats were struggling for control of the government of the infant republic, but one important journal survives. It is the oldest daily in the larger American cities which has kept its name intact. The Aurora, the Centinel, the American Citizen, Porcupine^s Gazette, whose pages the generation of Washington and Adams, Jefferson and Burr, scanned so carefully, are mere historical shades; but the Evening Post, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton and a group of intimate political lieutenants, for the expression of Hamilton's views, remains a living link between that day of national beginnings and our own. ^ The spring of 1801, when plans were laid for issuing the Evening Post, was the blackest season the Federalists of New York had yet known. Jefferson was inaugurated as President on March 4, and the upper as well as the lower branch of Congress had now become Democratic. In April the State election was held, and the ticket headed by gouty old George Clinton won a sweeping victory over the Federalists, so that at Albany the Democrats took complete control; the Governorship, Legislature, and Council of Appointment were theirs. Many Federal- ists sincerely believed that the nation and State had been put upon the road to ruin. They were convinced that the party of Washington, Hamilton, and Adams, which had built up a vigorous republic out of a ramshackle Confederation, was the only party of construction; and that Democracy meant ruin to the public credit, aggres- sions by the States upon a weak central government, and national disintegration. Hamilton wrote Gouverneur 9 12 THE EVENING POST Clerkship of the Circuit Court whose jurisdiction covered the city was taken from William Coleman and given to John McKesson. A majority of the people of the city were Federalists, and they watched all these transfers with pain. "^ The local leaders, and especially Hamilton, had for some time been aware that they lacked an adequate newspaper organ. Three city journals, the Daily Adver- tiser, and the Daily Gazette, both morning publications, and the Commercial Advertiser, an evening paper, were Federalist in sympathy. But Snowden's Daily Advertiser, and Lang's Gazette were almost exclusively given up to commercial news; and while E. Belden's Commercial Advertiser, which still lives as the Globe, devoted some attention to politics, it lacked an able editor to write controversial articles. As the chief Democratic sheet remarked, "it is too drowsy to be of service in any cause; it is a powerful opiate." This Democratic sheet was the American Citizen, edited by the then noted English refugee and radical, James Cheetham. He was a slashing and fearless advocate of Jeffersonian principles, who daily filled from one to two columns with matter that set all the grocery and hotel knots talking. Some one as vigorous, but of better education and taste — Cheetham had once been a hatter — was needed to expound Hamiltonian doctrines. It was hoped that this new editor and journal could give leadership and tone to the whole Federalist press, ^or a sad lack of vigor was evident from Maine to I Charleston. The leading Federalist newspapers of the I time, Benjamin Russell's Columbian Centinel in Boston, the Courant in Hartford, the Gazette of the United States in Philadelphia, and the Baltimore Federal Gazette, did not fully meet the wishes of energetic ^federalists. Their conductors did not compare with the chief Democratic editors : James T. Callender, whom Adams had thrown into jail; Thomas Paine; B. F. Bache, Franklin's grandson ; Philip Freneau, and William Duane. Some agency was needed to rouse them. They should FOUNDING THE EVENING POST 13 be helped with purse and pen, wrote John Nicholas, a leading Virginia Federalist, to Hamilton. "They seldom republish from each other, while on the other hand their antagonists never get hold of anything, however trivial in reality, but they make it ring through all their papers from one end of the continent to the other." In the summer of 1 800 Hamilton called Oliver Wolcott's atten- tion to libels printed by the Philadelphia Aurora upon prominent Federalists, and asked if these outrageous assaults could not be counteracted. "We may regret but we can not now prevent the mischief which these false- hoods produce," replied Wolcott. The establishment of journals for party purposes had become, in the dozen years since the Constitution was ratified, a frequent occurrence, and no political leader knew more of the process than Hamilton. He had won his college education in New York by a striking article in a St. Kitts newspaper. No one needs to be reminded how in the Revolutionary crisis, when a stripling in Kings College, he had attracted notice by anonymous contri- butions to Holt's Journal, nor how in the equally important crisis of 1787-88 he published his immortal "Federalist" essays in the Independent Journal. Samuel Loudon, head of the Independent Journal, used to wait in Hamilton's study for the sheets as they came from his pen. To support Washington's Administration, Hamil- ton in 1789 encouraged John Fenno, a Boston school- master of literary inclinations, to establish the Gazette of the United States at the seat of government; and in 1793, when Fenno appealed to Hamilton for $2,000 to save the journal from ruin, the latter took steps to raise the sum, making himself responsible for half of it. Hamil- ton also financially assisted William Cobbett, the best journalist of his time in England or America, to initiate his newspaper campaign against the Democratic haters of England. He, Rufus King, and others in New York helped provide the capital with which Noah Webster founded the Minerva in that city In 1793, and he and King together wrote for it a series of papers, signed 14 THE EVENING POST "Camillus," upon Jay's Treaty. If Hamilton's unsigned contributions to the Federalist press from 1790 to 1800 could be Identified, they would form an Important addition to his works. It is evident from the published and unpublished papers of Hamilton that at an early date in 1801, when he was devoting all his spare time to the hopeless State campaign, he was giving thought to the problem of improving the party press. He wrote Senator Bayard of Delaware a letter upon party policy, to be presented at the Federalist caucus In Washington on April 20. In it he gave a prominent place to the necessity for "the diffusion of Information," both by newspapers and by pamphlets. He added that "to do this a fund must be raised," and proposed forming an extensive associa- tion, each member who could afford it pledging himself to contribute $5 annually for eight years for publicity. Hamilton's fingers whenever he was in a tight place always itched for the pen. Noah Webster had withdrawn from the Minerva three years previous, while Fenno had died about the same time, leaving the Gazette of the United States to a son ; so that Hamilton could no longer feel at "home In these journals. But if a Hamiltonlan organ were started, who should be editor ? Fortunately, this question was easily answered. To the party motives which Hamilton, Troup, Wolcott, and other leading Federalists had In setting up such a journal, at this juncture there was added a motive of friendship toward an aspirant for an editorial position. In 1798, there had been admitted to the New York bar a penniless lawyer of thirty-two from Greenfield, Massa- chusetts, named WiUIam Coleman. He had come with a record of two years' service in the Massachusetts House, an honorary degree from Dartmouth College, and warm recommendations from Robert Treat Paine, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who at this time was a judge of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. After a brief and unprofitable partnership with Aaron Burr, a FOUNDING THE EVENING POST 15 misstep which he later declared he should regret to his dying day, Coleman formed a partnership with John Wells, a brilliant young Federalist attorney. Wells was just the man to draw Coleman into intimacy with the Federalist leaders. He was a graduate of Princeton, a profound student of the law, was rated by good judges one of the three or four best speakers of the city, and was a member of the "Friendly Club," an important literary society. Governor John Jay offered him a Justiceship of the Peace, and Hamilton trusted him so much that. In 1802, he selected him to edit the first careful edition of The Federalist, for which Hamilton himself critically examined and revised the papers. Through Wells, in 1798-99 Coleman came to know the members of the "Friendly Club," including W. W. Woolsey, the novelist Charles Brockden Brown, the dramatist William Dunlap, Anthony Bleecker, and James Kent, later Chancellor. He had already met Hamilton, on the latter's trip into New England in 1796, and now he fell completely under the great man's spell. In his later life he dated everything from the beginning of their friendship. The two had much In common besides their political views, for Coleman possessed a dashing temper, a quick mind, and a ready bonhomie. In the spring of 1800, there took place in New York the famous trial of Levi Weeks, charged with murdering Gulielma Sands, a young girl, and throwing her body into one of the Manhattan Company's wells; a trial in which Hamilton and Burr appeared together for the defense, and saved Weeks from conviction by a mass of circumstantial evidence. Coleman, a master of short- hand. Immediately published a praiseworthy report of the trial. One of his political enemies admitted that "it Is everywhere admired for Its arrangement, perspicuity, and the soundness of judgment it displays." Coleman was encouraged to plan a volume of reports of decisions In the State Supreme Court. At that moment the Clerkship of the Circuit Court fell vacant. Hamilton at once wrote 1 6 THE EVENING POST Governor John Jay and also Ebenezer Foote, a member of the Council of Appointment, requesting that the place, which paid $3,000 a year, be given his friend Coleman. There was another candidate with a really superior claim, but he was passed by. Governor Jay announced the result in the following hitherto unpublished letter to Hamilton : Mr. Coleman, who was yesterday appointed Clerk of the New York Circuit, will be the bearer of this. Mr. Skinner was first nominated — for where character and qualifications for office are admitted, the candidate whose age, standing, and prior public service is highest should, I think, take the lead; unless perhaps in cases peculiarly circumstanced. — Mr. Skinner did not succeed. Mr. Coleman was then nominated, and the Council, expecting much from his reports, and considering the office as necessary to enable him to accomplish that work, advised his appointment. Mr. Coleman's embarrassments, and whatever appeared to me necessary to observe respecting the candidates, were mentioned antecedent to the nomination. My feelings were in Coleman's favor, and had my judgment been equally so, he would have suffered less anxiously than he has. I mentioned your opinion in his favor ; and I wish the appointment may be generally approved. Ten or eleven of the members recommended Mr. Skinner — some of them will not be pleased. I hope Mr. Coleman will be attentive to the reports. Much expectation has been excited, and disappointment would produce disgust. It is, I think, essential to him that the work be prosecuted with diligence, but not with haste; and that they may be such as they already hope. But in the general overturn of 1801, Coleman — who had duly commenced the compilation of the Supreme Court Law Reports, beginning with 1794, and whose labors later bore fruit in what is called Coleman and Caines's Reports — lost his post. He could have resumed practice with Wells, who also lost his justiceship in the ten-pound court. But the bar was overcrowded, having about a hundred members in a city of 60,000, and Cole- man had starved at it before. While a lawyer in Greenfield, he had established the first newspaper there, the Impartial Intelligencer, and had written for it, and FOUNDING THE EVENING POST 17 he had then half formed an ambition to conduct a news- paper in New York. Far from having any money of his own, he had been left deep in debt by his participation in the unfortunate Yazoo speculation in Georgia lands. But he knew that the party leaders were thinking of the need for a better Federalist newspaper, and he stepped forward to offer his assistance in establishing one. During the spring Coleman was busy campaigning for Stephen Van Rensselaer, Fcderahst candidate for Gov- ernor, who happened to be Hamilton's brother-in-law, and for the Assembly ticket. The American Citizen repeatedly commented on his activity; on April 22, it predicted that this "seller of two-pence halfpenny pamphlets, this sycophantic messenger of Gen. Hamilton . . . will at one time or another receive a due reward." During probably May and June, in consultations among Hamilton, Wells, Mayor Varick, Troup, Woolsey, a Commissioner of Bankruptcy named Caleb S. Riggs, and Coleman, the plan of the Evening Post was drafted. Woolsey had married a sister of Theodore Dwight, the editor of the Connecticut Courant at Hartford, and wished Dwight placed in charge, but he finally acquiesced in entrusting the new enterprise to Coleman. A founders' list was secretly circulated among trusty Federalists, and signers were expected to contribute a minimum of $100. The initial capital required was probably not much in excess of $10,000. A Baltimore newspaper, the Anti-Democrat, was established at this time by Judge Samuel Chase, Robert Goodloe Harper, and other Federalists, for $8,000. Hamilton's adherents, who included almost the whole commercial group of New York, were wealthy; and Hamilton himself, liberal to a fault with his large income, probably offered not less than $1,000. Besides the names already listed, we know of some other men who contributed, as the merchant, Samuel Boyd, and the dismissed Collector, Joshua Sands. Coleman told the poet Bryant, his successor, that Archi- bald Gracie, one of the richest and most dignified merchants, had assisted, and a tradition in the family 1 8 THE EVENING POST has it that the Evening Post was founded at a meeting in the Gracie home. The American Citizen of the time declares that a certain auctioneer — perhaps Leonard Bleecker, perhaps the elder Philip Hone, perhaps James Byrne — "contributed largely." These men did not present the money outright, but vested the property in Coleman, who gav6 his notes in return; unfortunately, he was never able to meet them, and before 1810 all his American creditors, as one of his friends states in a letter of that year, "signed his discharge without receiving anything." The project was rapidly matured. "In a moment thousands of dollars were raised," wrote Cheetham. During the summer of 1801 a fine brick office was made ready on Pine Street, and about the beginning of November would-be readers were asked to enter their subscriptions. The initial subscribers numbered about 600, and among the names entered in the journal's first account book, which was unfortunately lost years ago, were the following : Daniel D. Tompkins, i Wall Street John Jacob Astor, 71 Liberty Street Garrett H. Striker, 181 Broadway Henry Doyer, Bowery Lane Anthony Lispenard, 19 Park Street Strong Sturges, 13 Oliver Street Anthony Bleecker, 25 Water Street Joel and Jonathan Post, Wall and William Streets Isaac Haviland, 186 Water Street John McKesson, 82 Broadway Matthew Clarkson, 26 Pearl Street Nathaniel L. Sturges, 47 Wall Street Philip Livingston, Yonkers Philip Hone, 56 Dey Street R. Belden, 153 Broadway Col. Barclay, 142 Greenwich Street John Cruger, 30 Greenwich Street Anthony Dey, 19 Cedar Street Robert Morris, 33 Water Street Robert Thorne, 2 Coenties slip FOUNDING THE EVENING POST 19 Isaac Ledyard, 2 Pearl Street James Carter, 195 Greenwich Street Cornelius Bogert, 24 Pine Street Grant Thorburn, 22 Nassau Street Philip L. Jones, 74 Broadway Robert Swarthout, 62 Water Street In the first Issue, Nov. 16, 1801, appeared a pro- spectus which may have been written by Coleman alone, but is more likely the product of his collaboration with Hamilton. Every reader looked first to see what was said of party affairs. The editor promised to support Federalism, but without dogmatism or intolerance; he^ declared his belief "that honest and virtuous men are to \ be found In each party'*; and he made It clear that the I columns would always be open to communications from / Democrats. Merchants were assured that special atten- tion would be paid to whatever affected them, and that the earliest commercial Information, which In those days meant chiefly arrivals and sailings of ships, would be obtained. Newspaper exchanges, and current pamphlets, magazines, and reviews would be searched for whatever was most Informing and entertaining. Letter-writers were asked not to enclose their names, a bad rule which Coleman soon found it expedient to abrogate. Prominent In the prospectus was the paragraph still carried at the head of the Evening Post's editorial columns: The design of this paper is to diffuse among the people correct^ information on all interesting subjects, to inculcate just principles I in religion, morals, and politics; and to cultivate a taste for sound ] literature. An effort \yas actually for a time made to tcich religious truths. In an early Issue a letter was printed, probably from some cleric, combating certain atheistic views ex- pressed by Cheetham's American Citizen; an editorial ar- ticle soon after was devoted to a discussion of the Revela- tion of St. John; and Coleman never tired of attacking the deism of local "Illumlnatl." In Its opening sentences the prospectus stated that the 10 THE EVENING POST 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 k)]/^ 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 compari- son, 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 col- umns, fourteen or fifteen were always filled with the pat- ronage of Federalist merchants. Few journals then had more than two full fonts of type, and some were set en- tirely 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 prin- cipally 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 . 1 100 for the Evening Post itself. These were respectable figures for that time. FOUNDING THE EVENING POST 21 AVhat should the Federalist chieftains, Hamilton, Wol- cott, 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 com- paratively 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 Pear- son, a master of the harsh type of Keate of Eton or Dr. Busby of Westminster. Here he gained "a certain ele- gance 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 decHning years, but he tells us that he was "of that temperament which some 22 THE EVENING POST 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 Massa- chusetts. 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 news- paper 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 train- ing young men to the bar in his own office. In the Presi- dential 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 contempo- rary says that he estimated his profits at $30,000. In the flush of this delusion, he married, and bought a spa- cious 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 FOUNDING THE EVENING POST 23 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 essen- tially 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 Brad- ley's, Edward Houghton; these two brought suit, and on Jan. 27, 1 80 1, obtained judgments in a New York court, the former for $691.71, the latter for $443.67. Yet under these trying circumstances Coleman's ami- able 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 util- ity of accurate reports of all important cases and deci- sions, 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 newspa- pers," wrote Callender in 1802. "Duane upon one side, and Coleman upon the other, dictate at this moment the 24 THE EVENING POST sentiments of perhaps fifty thousand American citizens." When In 1807 the first journal of the party was estab- lished at the new capital, Jonathan Findley's Washington Federalist, its founder, after enumerating all the requi- sites of an editor, named Coleman as their foremost ex- emplar. "I cannot, In the field of controversy, vie with a Coleman." In the summer of 1802 Coleman was nick- named the "Field-marshal of the Federal Editors" by his opponent Callender, and the fitting appellation stuck. Wielding a ready pen, Coleman was apt in literary allusions. His knowledge of law enabled him to write with authority upon legislation, constitutional questions, and practical politics. Unlike his successor Bryant, he mingled freely with men in places of public resort, and kept his ear to the ground. He took an interest In letters and the drama which was quite unknown to other "political editors." Some pretensions to being an author- ity upon style he always asserted, and he never tired of correcting the errors of Democratic scribblers. Against certain expressions he made a stubborn battle — for exam- ple, against "averse from" instead of "averse to," and against "over a signature" Instead of "under" it; In 18 14 he offered $100 for every instance of the last-named phrase In a good author since Clarendon. He was ex- cessively generous, always ready to lend his ear to a piti- ful story; Dr. John W. Francis relates that his eyes would moisten over the woes of one of the paper-boys. This kindliness made the columns of the Evening Post always open to charitable or reformative projects. Cole- man's chief faults were three. His style, like Hamilton's, was diffuse; he sometimes forgot taste and decency in assailing his opponents; and he was a wretched business man. A few years after the journal was founded its money affairs fell Into such embarrassment that friends Intervened, and an arrangement was made by which Michael Burnham, the printer, became half owner, with entire control of the finances. FOUNDING THE EVENING POST 25 II Contemporary writers from 1801 to 1904, however, seldom spoke of the Evening Post as Coleman's news- paper; It was usually ''Hamilton's journal" or "Hamil- ton's gazette." Just so had Freneau's National Gazette 2i decade before been called "Jefferson's journal," so Cheetham's American Citizen was now sometimes called "Clinton's journal," and there was even "Levi Lincoln's journal," the Worcester National Aegis, which Attorney- General Lincoln helped support. During 1801 Burr and his partisans were much dissatisfied with Cheetham's newspaper, and this dissatisfaction came to a head after the spring elections the following year. A group which included Burr, John Swartwout, W. P. Van Ness, Col. William S. Smith, and John Sanford established a paper called the New York Morning Chronicle, and after of- fering the editorship to Charles Holt, who refused, gave It to Washington Irving's brother, Dr. Peter Irving, known for his tea-table talents and effeminate manners as "Miss Irving." The Chronicle was of course for several years called "Burr's journal." Just how close was Hamilton's connection, never openly avowed, with the Evening Post? The most direct evidence on the subject outside of newspaper files of the period is furnished by the auto- biography of Jeremiah Mason, a native of Connecticut, who practiced law in Vermont and New Hampshire alongside Coleman, and became a United States Senator from the latter State. He writes of Coleman: As a lawyer he was respectable, but his chief excellence con- sisted in a critical knowledge of the English language, and the adroit management of political discussion. His paper for several years gave the leading tone to the press of the Federal party. His acquaintances were often surprised by the ability of some of his editorial articles, which were supposed to be beyond his depth. Having a convenient opportunity, I asked him who wrote, or aided in writing, those articles. He frankly answered that he made no secret of it; that his paper was set up under the auspices of 26 THE EVENING POST General Hamilton, and that he assisted him. I then asked, "Does he write in your paper?" — "Never a word." — "How, then, does he assist?" — His answer was, "Whenever anything occurs on which I feel the want of information I state matters to him, some- times a note; he appoints a time when I may see him, usually a late hour in the evening. He always keeps himself minutely informed on all political matters. As soon as I see him, he begins in a deliberate manner to dictate and I to note down in short- hand; when he stops, my article is completed." ( "There Is ample corroboratory proof that Hamilton contributed much to the opinions and expression of the Evening Post, and there is every reason to believe that this is the way he frequently did it. Coleman could read- Jly have taken the dictation in shorthand. Seldom in the thirty-two months between the founding of the Evening! Post and the death of Hamilton could the General have found time for deliberate writing. He had one of the largest law practices in the country, and he was the leader of a great party, regarded by a majority of Federalists as the dashing strategist who would yet perhaps make them as powerful as in the days of Washington. Yet .that energetic fighter could not be kept out of the columns. ' "Those only who were his Intimate friends,'* wrote Coleman in 1816, "know with what readiness he could apply the faculties of his illuminated mind." No doubt Coleman resorted for guidance on many nights to Hamil- ton's home at 26 Broadway — the editor's house was a few blocks distant, at 61 Hudson Street — and on not a few week-ends to his country residence, called "The Grange" after the ancestral Hamilton estate In Scotland, which stood on Kingsbridge Road at what Is now the cor- ner of I42d Street and Tenth Avenue. From 1 80 1 to 1804 only a single bit of signed writing from Hamilton's pen appeared in the Evening Post. This was a communication denying the hoary legend, origi- nally circulated in derogation of Washington and Lafay- ette, that at Yorktown Lafayette had ordered Hamilton to put to death all British prisoners In the redoubt which he was sent forward to capture, and that he had declined Alexander Hamilton Chief Founder of the Evening Post. (The Hamilton College Statue) y FOUNDING THE EVENING POST 27 to obey the Inhumane command. But a much more Im- portant contribution was hardly concealed. This was a series of articles upon President Jefferson's first annual message, written under the signature "Lucius Crassus," and published irregularly from Dec. 17, 1801, till April 8, 1802. They were eighteen in all, and not equal to Hamilton's best work. At one time the series was inter- rupted by a trip of Hamilton's to Albany, but the editor explained the delay by saying that he was waiting to let the distant journals copying the series catch up with back installments. Before their publication was quite com- pleted in the Evening Post, Coleman issued them in a neat pamphlet of 127 pages, with an Introduction by him- self, for 50 cents. All other contributions must be sought for upon Inter- nal evidence, and such evidence can never be conclusive. No one Is yet certain who wrote some of the essays of ''The Federalist," and it Is impossible to point to unsigned papers in the Evening Tost and say, "These are Hamil- ton's." The style might be that of almost any other cultivated man of legal training; the content might be that of such other able contributors as Gouverneur Morris or Oliver Wolcott. It is possible that a long, well-written article of March 12, 1802, upon Representative Giles's speech for the repeal of the Judiciary Act Is Hamilton's; it contains a good deal of information upon the pro- posals which Hamilton made for indirect taxation when he was Secretary of the Treasury. It Is possible that Hamilton dictated part or all of the attack of April 19, 1803, upon the Manhattan Bank founded by De Witt Clinton's faction, for it contains much sound disquisition upon the principles of public finance. It is quite possible that he furnished at least an outline for the article of July 9, 1803, upon neutrality, which deals in considerable part with the role he, Knox, and Jefferson played in the Genet affair; and that he assisted later the same month in an article upon the funding system, land tax, and national debt. But it is bootless to pile up such conjectures. The editorials upon the diplomatic aspects of the Louisiana 28 THE EVENING POST treaty, the Chase Impeachment, and the navigation of the Mississippi certainly represented Hamilton's views. There is abundant evidence that Coleman wished to do Hamilton personal as well as political service in the Evening Post. His first opportunity to do this occurred less than ten days after the founding of the journal, when on Nov. 24, 1 80 1, it announced the death of Philip, Hamilton's eldest and most promising son — "murdered," said the editor, "in a duel." The attendant circumstances were obscure, and Coleman spared no labor to inquire into them and set them forth accurately and tactfully, correcting the accounts in the Democratic press. It ap- peared that Philip Hamilton, a youth of twenty, was sitting with another young man in a box at a performance of Cumberland's "The West Indian," and that they ex- changed some jocose remarks upon a Fourth of July oration made the previous summer by one George I. Eacker, a Democrat. Eacker overheard them, called them into the lobby, said that he would not be "insulted by a set of rascals," and scuffled with them. The two excitable boys challenged him. Young Hamilton's com- panion fought first, Sunday morning on the Weehawken dueling-ground, and no one was injured. On Monday afternoon the second duel occurred. "Hamilton received a shot through the body at the first discharge," reported the Evening Post, "and fell without firing. He was brought across the ferry to his father's house, where he languished of the wound until this morning [Tuesday], when he expired." Coleman took occasion to utter a shrewd warning against dueling. "Reflections on this horrid custom must occur to every friend of humanity; but the voice of an individual or the press must be Inef- fectual without additional, strong, and pointed legislative interference. Fashion has placed It upon a footing which nothing short of this can control." The truth of this statement had a melancholy illustration within three years. Coleman also contradicted In detail, using informa- tion which Hamilton alone could have furnished, a spite- ful story to the effect that President Washington, when FOUNDING THE EVENING POST 29 Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury, used to send him public papers with the request, ''Dear Hamilton, put this into style for me," and that Hamilton boasted of the service. Again, Coleman assured his readers, using more information from Hamilton, that the letters which Jefferson wrote as Secretary of State to the British Min- ister, George Hammond, upon the debts owed to the British, were given their finishing touches by Hamilton. When Cheetham and other Clintonians charged Ham- ilton with having procured Burr a large loan at the Manhattan Bank — some Democrats were always snif- fing a coalition between the Federalists and the Burrites — Coleman placed the story in the ridiculous light it de- served. However, he steadily refused to dignify the many grosser slanders uttered against Hamilton by any notice. After the statesman's death, the editor repeatedly delivered utterances which he said he had "from Hamil- ton's own lips," some of them upon matters of great im- portance; for example, upon the role which Madison played in the Federal Convention. Coleman in his later years also professed to be an authority upon the author- ship of the "Federalist." It appears from the Evening Post files that Senator Lodge, the editor of Hamilton's works, is mistaken in believing Coleman the editor of the 1802 edition of that volume — that John Wells edited it; but Coleman took a keen interest in its publication. "It is hardly necessary to say that Mr. Coleman, in difficult cases, consults with Mr. Hamilton," Cheetham observed in 1802. "Editors must consult superior minds; it is their business to draw information from the purest and correctest sources." Coleman never denied such statements. In the summer of 1802 the Baltimore American remarked that the Evening Post was "said to be directly under the controul of Alexander Hamilton." The editor rejoined that it was "unnecessary to answer him whether the Evening Post is so much honoured as to be under the influence of General Hamilton or not," and went on to imply distinctly that It was. Callender re- ferred to Coleman as "Hamilton's typographer." It 30 THE EVENING POST is worth noting that when Charles Pinckney, leader of the South Carolina Federalists, found that the weekly Herald was not being regularly received by the Charles- ton subscribers, he wrote in expostulation not to Coleman but to Hamilton, asking him to speak to the editor. Upon the Evening Post, as upon the Federalist party, the tragic death of Hamilton fell as a stunning blow. Announcing the calamity on June 13, 1804, Coleman added that "as soon as our feelings will permit, we shall deem it a duty to present a sketch of the character of our ever-to-be lamented patron and best friend." The press of the nation looked to him. The best report, said the Fredericktown (Md.) Herald, a Federalist sheet, "is expected in the Evening Post of Mr. Coleman, than whom no man perhaps out of the weeping and bereft family of his illustrious friend can more fervently bewail the loss." On the day of the funeral the Evening Post was suspended, the only time in its history that it missed an issue because of a death, and for a week all its news columns carried heavy black borders. Unfortunately, the editor did not redeem his promise of a character sketch, professing himself too deeply grieved. After devoting a month to discussion of the duel and its causes, he turned from "the most awful and afflicting subject that ever occupied my mind and weighed down my heart" ; he could write no more "of him whom I can never cease to mourn as the best of friends, and the greatest and most virtuous of men." , Hamilton's family and associates wished a volume com- p*iled from the various tributes to his memory, and by Mrs. Hamilton's express wish, the task was entrusted to Coleman. Before the end of the year he published it with the title of "Facts and Documents Relative to the Death of Major-General Hamilton"; a careful and taste- ful work which not many years ago was reissued in ex- pensive form. There was some talk then and later of a more ambitious commission. Thus in 1809 the Provi- dence American, deploring the fact that no biography of Hamilton had yet appeared, suggested that Coleman was FOUNDING THE EVENING POST 31 "the only person qualified." The editor, however, re- sponded that a gentleman of more leisure, by whom he meant the Rev. John M. Mason, had already accepted the undertaking. Yet the death of its great patron and mentor detracted less from the vigor of the Evening Post in controversy than might have been supposed. Coleman from the be- ginning had been assisted not only by Hamilton but by a half-dozen of the ablest New Yorkers of Hamiltonian views. Gouverneur Morris was in the United States Senate until 1803, but Duane of the Aurora declares that he found time to contribute to the new journal. It is not unlikely that three admirably written articles upon the peace of Amiens, in the last month of 1801, were by him; the first gave a survey of European affairs, the second considered the effects of the peace upon American busi- ness, and the third dealt with its effect upon American parties. In 1807 he was still writing, for Coleman later revealed the authorship of two articles he then sent in upon the Beaumarchais claims. Oliver Wolcott was a Federal judge when the Evening Post was established, and later entered business in New York. He also con- tributed from time to time, though after Hamilton's death he was gradually converted from Federalism to Democ- racy. In 1807 he offered Coleman a long editorial article signed "Camillus." As Coleman ruefully said later, he was "a man of whose political as well as personal recti- tude I then entertained so little suspicion that I should have delivered any article by him directly to the com- positor without even reading it"; and the editor had it published without carefully examining it. Its views were so heretical to Federalists that in 18 14 the Democrats were still tauntingly reprinting it, and Coleman was still speaking of the episode with pain. According to Cheetham, the able merchant, W. W. Woolsey, whose grandson, Theodore Winthrop, lives in our literature, appeared now and then in the columns of the newspaper he had helped found. Ebenezer Foote, the former State Senator and member of the Council of 32 THE EVENING POST Appointment, who had helped Coleman obtain his clerk- ship of the Circuit Court, contributed signed articles. Rufus King, when he finished his service as Minister to England In 1803, lent a valuable hand, and as late as 1 8 19 we find him advising Coleman as to the proper edi- torial treatment of the Florida question. The editor came to know him sufficiently well to give an intimate char- acter sketch of him in Delaplaine's Repository, a maga- zine of the day. Almost Indispensable help was lent by Coleman's old partner, John Wells, who at times acted as virtual associate editor, and took charge of the journal during occasional absences of Coleman. Wells had a taste for literature and the drama as well as politics, but, says Coleman, ''he dealt chiefly in the didactic and the severe." Of the counsel and assistance of these prominent Fed- eralists Coleman was proud, but he keenly resented any imputation that he was their mere tool and mouthpiece.. This accusation was made by Cheetham when the Eve- ning Post was not a year old: Mr. Coleman says that to pay a man for writing against the late Administration was a crime. He will allow that the applica- tion of the rule will be just when applied to the present Adminis- tration. We then say that Mr. Coleman receives the wages of sin; for he is in every sense of the word paid for writing against the present Administration. The establishment at the head of which he is, is said not to be his own; it is said to belong to a com- pany, of which General Hamilton is one. The paper was com- menced for the avowed purpose of opposing the Administration. Mr. Coleman, it is believed, receives a yearly salary for writing for it, and for his wages he is bound to write against the Adminis- tration, whether the sentiments he pens accord with his own or not. He runs no risk, he has no responsibility upon his shoulders. He may, in fact, be called a mere hireling. Coleman replied : Cheetham says that the establishment of the Evening Post does not belong to the editor, but to a company, of which General Hamilton is one; and that the editor receives a yearly salary for writing for it. Now, though we do not perceive that this is of FOUNDING THE EVENING POST 33 much consequence in any way but to the editor's pocket ... we shall not permit it to pass uncontradicted. We therefore declare that not one word of it is true. The establishment of the Evening Post is, and always since its commencement has been, the sole property of the editor: it does not, nor did it ever, belong to a company, or to General Hamilton, or to any one else but the editor; and lastly, the editor is not a hireling, nor has he at any period of his life received wages for writing. Not at all discomfited, the Jeffersonlan organ remarked — and hit near the truth — that the journal had probably been given to Coleman by the men who were known to have raised large sums to found it. Certainly Coleman until after 1804 was hardly a free agent. The distinction and prosperity of his newspaper depended largely upon Hamilton's good will. He gladly served the statesman whom he called "my best earthly friend, my ablest ad- viser, and my most generous and disinterested patron," but he had no real alternative. Hamilton bequeathed to the Evening Post certain prin^ ciples which guided it for years to come. The Federalist party In the nation at large gradually crumbled away, \ but fortunately for the Evening Post, It remained power- ful In New York city until near 1820. Until the close of the second war with England, a majority of the people of the city held Hamlltonlan views. The primary object of Hamilton was to establish a strong national sover- eignty, victorious over all forms of disintegration. His financial policy, which embraced insistence upon sound money, and adequate revenues without dependence either upon the States or Europe, was made effective while he was head of the treasury. The commercial policy which he favored was one which would develop manufacturing, by a judicious protective tariff, to a parity with agricul- ture, and make the nation self-sufficient. In foreign af- fairs, he wished the United States to steer clear of Euro- pean intrigue, and as he feared French influence more than British, he tended to be more sympathetic toward England. The Evening Post hence steadfastly opposed extreme State Rights ideas, even when some New Eng- 34 THE EVENING POST land Federalists asserted them in the War of 1 8 12. It never ceased quoting Hamilton on financial questions, and its recollection of his tariff views delayed a firm op- position to protection until Bryant took the helm. It opposed the identification of America with either party tin the Napoleonic struggle, but for a variety of reasons \X supported Great Britain. CHAPTER TWO THE EVENING POST AS LEADER OF THE FEDERALIST PRESS Editorial pages of a century ago bore no resemblance to those of to-day. Sometimes no editorial at all would be printed; sometimes only a few scrappy paragraphs; some- times two thousand words at once. Coleman was no less addicted than others to those series of numbered edi- torials which, dragging their slow length along from day to day, disappeared with Henry Watterson. This was the hey-day of the pamphlet, and it did not occur to most newspaper conductors that they could state an opinion on an important national event in fewer than several issues. Thus just after the Evening Post was founded, while Hamilton's eighteen articles upon Jefferson's message were being slowly run off, six other long editorial articles were sandwiched upon the repeal of certain discriminatory duties. The public had hardly finished digesting them when there ensued six upon the Georgia cession to the United States. They were followed by a series of twelve upon Jefferson and Callender. Frequently no effort was made to give unity to the single Instalment, which began and ended abruptly. A good many of these long and ponderous editorials of Jeffersonlan days would have been soporific had they not made up in shrillness what they lacked in liveliness. Our third President and the Evening Post stepped upon the stage almost simultaneously. "Hamilton's gazette," said travelers from the South, was to be seen at Monticello ; while the Evening Post followed Jefferson with steady hostility as he came forward to play his part, In the words of a description In its meager news columns : Dressed in long boots, with tops turned down about the ankles, like a Virginian buck; overalls of corduroy, faded by frequent 35 36 THE EVENING POST immersions in soapsuds from a yellow to a dull white; a red, single-breasted waistcoat; a light brown coat with brass buttons, both coat and waistcoat quite threadbare; linen very considerably soiled ; hair uncombed and beard unshaven. Coleman's most unjustifiable display of party animos- ity occurred when his promise of fairness in the Evening Post's prospectus was still fresh in men's minds. In the summer of 1802 he reprinted from the Richmond Re- corder the treacherous Callender's attack upon the per- sonal morals of the President, arousing a storm of protest. Much of this storm fell upon the head of Hamilton, and on Sept. 29 Coleman published a statement that Hamilton had not seen the attack before it appeared. Indeed, wrote Coleman, Hamilton had been consulted upon only one of the twelve Jefferson-Callender articles, that one Involving constitutional questions. When the statesman saw the accusations, he had expressed regret, for "he declared his sentiments to be averse to all personalities, not Immediately connected with public considerations." But the editor did not take his lesson to heart. From time to time he Indulged In outbursts against Jefferson of a character which we can comprehend only when we recall how outrageously even Washington had been vili- fied by the opposition press. Coleman was not content with harping upon Jefferson's actual humiliations and errors, as his flight before Tarleton in 178 1 and his oppo- sition to the Constitution In 1788. He accused him of trying to cheat a friend out of a debt, and repeated the tale of a black harem. In 1805 he wrote: "There is a point of profligacy in the line of human impudence, at which the most disguised heart seems to lose all sensi- bility to shame; and we congratulate- the American public that our chief magistrate has so completely arrived at this enviable point." However, in most editorials upon national affairs the Evening Post displayed a breadth and coolness reflecting the sagacity of the Federalist leaders who helped shape its policy. From the outset it pressed the FederaHst con- tention that everything should be done to develop a mer- THE FEDERALIST PRESS 37 chant marine and a strong navy; the aggressions of the Barbary pirates being frequently cited to prove the ne- cessity for the latter. The Gallophile craze of Democratic circles was attacked week in and week out. When the claims of the sufferers by French spoliations were sur- rendered by the Administration, the indignation of the journal was outspoken. The destruction of most of the internal revenue system which Hamilton had laboriously built up was a cause of much beating of the breast. Not merely did it weaken the Federal Government, said the Evening Post; the nabob Virginia planter was given his carriage untaxed, and the Western backwoodsman his whisky, while the poor Eastern artisan still had to pay taxes upon his sugar, coffee, and salt. The pretensions of Gallatin to rival Hamilton as a master of finance were ridiculed. The repeal of the judiciary act passed under Adams was opposed as both unconstitutional and inex- pedient. But the primary achievement of Jefferson's administra- tion, the Louisiana purchase, was treated in a tone so unlike that of other Federalist journals that it is clear Hamilton guided Coleman's pen. That noisy, artificial denunciation which went up from most Federalists was thoroughly discreditable. The Evening Post admitted that "it is an important acquisition" ; that it was "essen- tial to the peace and prosperity of our western country" ; that it opened up "a free and valuable market to our commercial states" ; and that "it will doubtless give eclat to Jefferson's Administration." Of course it did its best to spit into the Democratic soup. It asserted that Jef- ferson merited little credit for the purchase, since the fruit was knocked into his lap by the great losses of the French in the Dominican insurrection, and by the constant threat of the British to seize Louisiana. This was true, for Jefferson had set out only to buy an island for a dock- yard, and had been momentarily bewildered when Napo- leon offered the whole western domain. No one at that time understood the real value of the purchase, for Loui- siana was an untraversed land, believed to be largely 38 THE EVENING POST desert. Hence it is not surprising to find the Evening Post asserting that the region was worth nothing for imme- diate settlement, especially since not one sixteenth the original area of the republic was yet occupied; and that its chief use might well be as something to barter for the Floridas, "obviously of far greater value to us than all the immensej undefined region west of the river." The Evening Post could not miss the opportunity to ridicule Jefferson's characteristic exuberance. The Presi- dent, in his enthusiastic message to Congress, told of a tribe of giant Indians, of river bluffs carved into antique towers, of prairie lands too rich to produce trees, and, one thousand miles up the Missouri, of a vast saline mountain, "said to be i8o miles long and 45 in width, composed of solid rock salt." Coleman descended upon this last assertion: Lest, however, the imagination of his friends in Congress might take a flight to the mountain and find salt trees there, and salt birds and beasts too, he with the most amiable and infantine simplicity, adds that there are no trees or even shrubs upon it. La, who would have thought it? Methinks such a great, huge mountain of solid, shining salt must make a dreadful glare in a clear sunshiny day, especially just after a rain. The President tells them too that "the salt works are pretty numerous," and that salt is as low as $1.50 a bushel, which is about twice as high as it can be bought in New York, where we have no salt mountain at all. . . . We think it would have been no more than fair in the traveler who informed Mr. Jefferson of this territory of solid salt, to have added that some leagues to the westward of it there was an immense lake of molasses, and that between this lake and the mountain of salt, there was an extensive vale of hasty pudding, stretching as far as the eye could reach, and kept in a state of comfortable eatability by the sun's rays, into which the natives, being all Patagonians, waded knee deep, whenever they were hungry, and helped themselves to salt with one hand to season their pudding, and molasses with the other to give it a relish. . . . Nothing seems wanting this affair in genuine style but for the House to "decree it with applause." During Jefferson's second administration the Evening Post concentrated its fire upon his foreign policy. By THE FEDERALIST PRESS 39 the begini;Ing of 1807, when Coleman published a long series of articles reviewing the international situation, the great struggle raging in Europe was plainly threatening to involve America. He accused the government of stud- ied unfriendliness toward Great Britain. He held that Jefferson had made any agreement with England impos- sible, first, by dispatching the mediocre Monroe as Min- ister to London, and second, by causing the passage in the spring of 1806 of a non-importation measure aimed di- rectly at the British. Why had the Administration been so tame toward the Spaniards, who had actually invaded American soil in the West, and tried to bribe the leading Kentuckians to be traitors? "Instead of framing a spir- ited remonstrance to Spain, demanding satisfaction for the repeated injuries she has done us, Jefferson has been able to go quietly into his study and amuse himself with pleasing reveries about the prairie dogs and horned frogs of the Missouri." Above all, why had the government been so compliant toward Napoleon? Napoleon, by the Berlin Decree of November, 1806, had declared that no ship which touched at an Enghsh port should be admitted to a port of France or her allies; the British, by an Order in Council of January, 1807, had tried to close all French ports to neutrals. Coleman regarded both acts as outrageous, but centered his attack upon the Berlin decree. Napoleon, as he said, was the primary aggressor, and the British step could be palliated as one of mere retaliation. "Our administration . . . were bound in duty to their constituents to have imme- diately sent a spirited remonstrance to Paris against the Berlin Decree, as being not only a violation of the known and established law of nations, but a direct and flagrant breach of the existing treaty between the two countries. And if such remonstrance failed in obtaining from the French Government an explicit exception of the United States from the operation of the Decree, the course that was formerly adopted by the Federalist administration, in 1798, should have been again adopted — ships of war should have been Immediately equipped, and our mer- 40 THE EVENING POST chantmen permitted to arm for the protection of our trade." This position Coleman maintained throughout 1807. When the Administration tried to make the Order in Council more odious by declaring that the French had not put the Berlin Decree Into effect before the British acted, the editor flatly contradicted It. He supported his contradiction by evidence from John B. Murray, a Federalist merchant who did an Immense ship- ping business from the foot of Beekman Street, and others who had suffered from the French seizures. But worse foreign encroachments were to come. Late in 1807 news arrived that a fresh British Order in Council had been issued, requiring all neutral vessels trading at ports closed to the British to stop at an English port and pay a duty, and to repeat this stop on the return voyage ; while from Paris came word that Napoleon had told our Minister "there should no longer be any such thing as a neutral nation." Napoleon answered the new British Order by his Milan Decree, declaring that any ship which paid a tax in a British port might at any time thereafter be seized In French waters. It was difficult for an Amer- ican to say a word for either combatant. Coleman ad- mitted that the British action "carries something on the face of it humiliating to our national pride." But he continued so far as possible to defend the English, and attacked the French with increasing zeal. This policy did not cause him to condone the attack of the Leopard upon the Chesapeake^ which stirred even Federalist New York as nothing since the surrender of Cornwallis. It will be recalled that the British Minister requested the surrender of three men who had deserted from an English warship Into the Chesapeake; that Jef- ferson refused; and that the Leopard followed the Chesa- peake from Hampton Roads out to sea, poured a heavy fire Into her, compelled her to strike colors, and took the three men by force. The Evening Post flared up In com- mon with all other patriotic organs. It condemned the attack as an indefensible outrage. It demanded prompt and drastic action, and the editor's one fear was that THE FEDERALIST PRESS 41 Jefferson would not resent the Injury with proper vigor. It would be a mistake, wrote Coleman, simply to call upon the British Government for disavowal of the dastardly assault, and for trial of the offenders. The British would grant the disavowal, summon a court martial, and acquit the guilty naval officers. No, Congress must be convened, intercourse suspended, an embargo laid, and then, if Eng- land wished to negotiate, she could humbly send her envoys to us. In the meantime, the coast should be forti- fied, and steps should be taken to give the nation frigates instead of Jefferson's useless gunboats. For weeks Cole- man harped upon this string: We entertain respect for Great Britain ; it is the land that gave 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 unin- jured, 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 night- fall. 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 Presi- dent found that it had cut to pieces a little British cor- vette 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 42 THE EVENING POST 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 justi- fied 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 com- munity 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, apprehen- sion, 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 con- signment abroad? The editor hastened to write a sting- ing 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 jfarmers. 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 THE FEDERALIST PRESS 43 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 Fed- eralists which might have been made into the first Amer- ican party platform: "No Embargo — No Foreign In- fluences — No Mystery — Freedom of Debate — Freedom of Suffrage — Freedom of Navigation and Trade — Lib- erty 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 Palne's In- discreet statement In the Public Advertiser that the em- bargo was really preparatory to war with England. Yet it was plain to the blindest that the measure was a des- perate, 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 sup- ported legislation for preventing violations of the em- bargo. "A man who lives on the frontier of North Caro- lina ; 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 44 THE EVENING POST slaves, and who I suppose feels just about as much sym- pathy 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 alarm- ingly 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 W^ashington 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 1 8 10 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 18 10, permitting importation and ex- portation 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 re- produced 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, Cole- man demanded: "Shall we join the confederacy against England, the only free and independent nation left in Europe?" THE FEDERALIST PRESS 45 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 instruc- tions. Coleman, examining these instructions at length, blamed Erskine harshly for this disappointment to Ameri- can hopes, but not the British Government. Like other Federahst organs, the Evening Post regarded the dis- missal 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 him- self would have more than ephemeral value. The Secre- tai^y 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 preeminent"; in New Jersey the Trenton Fed- eralist 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 181 1 that the paper's long fight was lost. In reply to a war article by Duane, Cole- man in a paragraph of deep pessimism admitted as much: We have not, we never had, but one opinion respecting our public ffairs 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 46 THE EVENING POST 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 fore- shadowed. 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 declara- tion of war, the Evening Post published a memorial of I protest signed by fifty-six principal merchants, John Jacob I Astor heading the list. It Is clear that the Evening Post 1 wa s at all times In close touch with commercial sentiment. ' In April It said that the best-informed men in town cal- culated 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- THE FEDERALIST PRESS 47 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 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 pacif- ists. 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 con- sequences." 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 48 THE EVENING POST bench warrant, compelled the appearance of the two edi- tors 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 out- side 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 com- ing 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 18 10 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 18 18 the editor published a narrative of the misconduct of a certain Democrat named Henry B. Ha- german while travehng as a Judge Advocate up-State. THE FEDERALIST PRESS 49 Hagerman stopped at a Kingston hotel, kept by an esti- mable 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 1 1 Coleman was overtaken by Hager- man 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 stag- gered to his feet, half blind with blood, was given a still more savage beating. Public indignation against Hager- man 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 ex- posed 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 every- where, 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 gal- loped to shiver lances. It is usual to quote Coleman's quatrain 50 THE EVENING POST 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 cen- tury 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," add- ing: "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 an- other 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 black- guard." Other journals fared no better. When the Public Advertiser, a new Clintonian organ, libeled the Evening Post, Coleman denounced Its "villainy" and chal- lenged the "vile reptiles" editing it to produce their evi- dence. 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 THE FEDERALIST PRESS 51 than to say I have long observed there is no misrepresenta- tion 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 Citi- zen 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 be- cause he had bored a hole in a courthouse ceiling to over- hear rival counsel, and accused him of illegally convert- ing 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. Cheet- ham at the beginning of 1804 had fourteen actions pend- ing 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. 52 THE EVENING POST 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 Ameri- can ships in European waters would almost all be taken by British cruisers. It was professedly a war for free- dom 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 court- ing 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 "Mon- sieurs Gallatin and Madison." For a few weeks, while an alliance with France was thought a possibility, the £1;^- ning 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 ora- tion denouncing any cooperation 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, in- correctly, 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 THE FEDERALIST PRESS 53 utterly defenseless frontier," had scarcely powder enough for a Fourth of July salute. For armaments at sea the Evening Post was always elo- quent, but it took a different attitude toward the bustle of preparations to invade Canada. When President Madison requested the Governors to place the militia at his disposal, Coleman applauded the New England execu- tives who refused. Conjuring up a vision of a harsh mili- tary despotism, he pronounced the President's action one '^highly dangerous to the liberties of the people, and to our republican form of government." In editorial after editorial, moreover, he discouraged recruiting for Fed- eral regiments. Are you willing, he asked volunteers, "to attempt foreign conquests while your wives and little ones are left exposed to an exasperated and unfeeling foe?" As autumn came on, he made the most of the reports of suffering among underclad troops. He wished no one to forget that their misery had been caused by "a wretched, incapable, mob-courting administration, less concerned to provide supplies for their army than to se- cure by low intrigue the places they so unworthily fill." It required no little courage to declare that the war was "a great national calamity," that it was "clearly un- just," and that the points in dispute were not worth the blood and treasure being spent. Two years previous, when the Evening Post was angrily opposing the impend- ing conflict, a mob of Democrats had gathered at Mart- ling's Porter-House, and just before midnight had at- tacked the house of Michael Burnham, part-owner of the journal, smashing his windows, and nearly killing an in- fant. Just after the declaration of war occurred the memorable mob attack upon the Baltimore Federal Re- publican, in which Gen. James Lingan, a Revolutionary veteran defending the office, was killed, and Gen. Henry Lee crippled. Jack Binns, in the Philadelphia Demo- cratic Press, proclaimed that it would be only natural if a body of angry men executed the same summary justice upon the traitorous editor of the Evening Post. For some time anonymous threats poured in upon Coleman. 54 THE EVENING POST Among them was one which left him so certain that vio- lence was actually brewing that he applied to Mayor Clin- ton for protection; and the city watch was doubled, special constables were held in readiness, and a party of armed friends spent the night at Coleman's house. Noth- ing, however, occurred. Coleman defiantly maintained that his right to free speech was in no way abridged by the declaration of war, and published a special series of editorials, highly legal- istic in nature, denouncing the Baltimore outrage. He reminded the Democrats that in intimidating and attack- ing the Federalists for their opposition they had short memories. Had they forgotten their open resistance to the hostilities which the United States waged against France in 1798? This attitude, fortunately, met with powerful support. At a great peace mass-meeting in Washington Hall on Aug. 18, John Jay, Rufus King, Gouverneur Morris, Egbert Benson, and Richard Varick all assailed the war and asserted the right to outspoken criticism of it. By this date Coleman's views had met what seemed to him the strongest possible confirmation. It had become known early in August that the British had repealed the Orders in Council, which were the great cause of the war, and for a moment hopes of peace had risen high; but Madison immediately rejected the armis- tice proffered by the British commander Prevost. The anger of New York and New England Federalists passed all bounds. "God of truth and mercy I" raged the Eve- ning Post. "Our treasure is to be wasted, our immense frontiers are to be one scene of devastation, where the merciless savage is to revel in the blood of defenseless men, women, and children, because the form of the revocation is not satisfactory to our precise and critical President!" The first news of an important military event confirmed Coleman's gloomy apprehensions. On Aug. 31 he was able to write a long editorial upon Hull's surrender at Detroit in that I-told-you-so spirit which is an editor's subtlest joy. He called it disgraceful: THE FEDERALIST PRESS 55 A nation, counting eight millions of souls, deliberating and planning for a whole winter and spring, and part of a summer, the invasion and conquest of a neighboring province, at length making that invasion; and in one month its army retiring — cap- tured — and captured in a fortified place — captured almost without firing a gun! Miserably deficient in practical talent must be the administration which formed the plan of that invasion; or the army which has thus surrendered must be a gang of more cow- ardly poltroons, than ever disgraced a country. . . . What! March an army into a country where there were not more than seven or eight hundred soldiers to oppose them, and not make the army large enough! March them from a country, which is the granary of the world, and let them famish on the very frontiers for want of provisions! Issue a gasconading proc- lamation threatening to exterminate the enemy, and surrender your whole army to them! If there be judgment in this people, they will see the utter unfitness of our rulers for anything beyond man- agement, intrigue, and electioneering. — They have talents enough to influence a misguided populace against their best friends; but they cannot protect the nation from insult and disgrace. Similar attacks upon the Administration's incompe- tence followed every other reverse. From the early de- feat at Queenstown Heights to the "Bladensburg Races," when an American force fled ignominiously before Cock- burn's invaders and exposed Washington to capture, the Evening Post missed no opportunity for harsh criticism. '*Woe to that nation whose king is a child!" was a favor- ite quotation of Coleman's. The journal was far from unpatriotic, and sincerely deplored the several defeats, but it held the government rigidly responsible for them. The editor never changed his opinion that, to use his words in the last year of the war, it was "an unsuccessful war, ... a war declared without just cause and without preparation, for the continuance of which no man can assign a reason, and from the termination of which no man expects an advantage." And patriotic though Coleman was, he rejoiced In the failure of the successive efforts to Invade Canada. He thought conquest In that quarter the most shameless territory-grabbing. In these utterances 56 THE EVENING POST we catch the first accents of the Evening! Post's century- long campaign against "Imperialism." He wrote late in 1814: Uti Possidetis, or Keep What You've Got. — The Lexington paper (Kentucky) some time ago, before the British had got pos- session of Fort Niagara, Michilimackinac, Castine, Moose Island, etc., etc., about the time when Gen. Wilkinson was to sup **in Montreal or Heaven," this paper then said if any ministers should make a treaty on any other basis, than each to keep what they had got, they ought to have a halter. But then it was my bull and your cow. In sharp contrast with these editorials were the exultant comments of the journal upon the dazzling successes of the Americans at sea. The Federalists since 1801 had constantly called for a larger navy. The first-known and most famous sea-flight of 18 12 was the victory on Aug. 19 of the Constitution over the Guerriere, a vessel with which a London paper had declared no American ship could cope. 'We have always contended that on an equal footing Americans can be whipped by none," cried the Evening Post. "Man for man and gun for gun, even the veteran British tars can get no advantage over the Amer- icans." With a shrewd appreciation of the opportunities which Perry and McDonough seized. It began to insist upon a naval force on the lakes. Naturally, It still taunted the Democrats: Though very little present benefit is to be expected from the war, commenced as it has been and carried on as it will be, under the present administration, yet it may have one good effect; it will prove that in a contest where the freedom of the seas is the object, a naval force is much superior to an army on the land. It will prove, what the Federalists have always advocated, and what the present ruling party have always opposed, the necessity of a maritime force to a commercial people. News came soon after of the capture of the British sloop Alert by the American frigate Essex, and on Dec. 7 it was known that the United States, commanded by De- THE FEDERALIST PRESS 57 catur, had taken the Macedonian. "This is the third vic- tory which has crowned our little naval force with laurels — may they bloom perennial!" exclaimed Coleman. He rather ill-naturedly accused the Administration of be- grudging the seamen, who were mostly Yankees, their victories. ''Our language is," he concluded, ''give us commerce and let us alone to protect it. We have ships and we have men; nor will we go to France for either, though your Jeffersons may recommend it ever so warmly." Nor did the Evening Post fail to take a vigorously patriotic attitude upon the questions raised by the Hart- ford Convention. The year 18 14 drew to a close with the entire coast tightly blockaded by the British, the inva- sions of Canada all failures, the capitol at Washington in ashes, the British in possession of northern Maine, and their hands at last free in Europe. Mr. Madison's war had ceased to be an offensive war, and had become defen- sive. The national government, almost without an army, almost without money, seemed on the point of collapse. On Dec. 15 there met at Hartford a convention of delegates from all the New England States, who for three weeks deliberated in secret; some believed that they were laying plans to declare all New England — as Nantucket had already declared herself — neutral, and to throw open its ports to the British, while others said that they were plotting secession, and the erection of a Yankee republic. Coleman at the time had been called to Middletown, Conn., on business, and proceeded to Hartford to see some friends. Theodore Dwight, the secretary of the convention, later stated that the editor tried to gain in- formal entrance, but this Coleman denied. He never, even when years afterward the Hartford Convention had become an object of deep reproach, condemned it. But upon returning to New York he did express a deprecatory opinion of it. He commenced by declaring that the up- roar of the Southerners over this "treasonable" gathering was as hypocritical as it was groundless. Who were these canting Virginians who inveighed against separatism and 58 THE EVENING POST State Rights? The North had not forgotten that when Jay's treaty arrived, the newspapers of Virginia unani- mously began to discuss secession. It had not forgotten that Senator Giles, author of the detestable Conscription bill which had just failed, had then openly advocated a dissolution of the Union. Had not Madison maintained, Lj^n the Virginia Assembly, the abstract right of secession? But Coleman then proceeded to speak a word of reas- surance, and another of warning: What precisely the Convention will do, it would be presump- tion in any one to predict. . . . But from our personal knowledge of the gentlemen composing the Convention, it will not be diffi- cult to pronounce with certainty what they will not do. They have been selected from the most respectable men in New Eng- land, distinguished for their prudence, for their wisdom, for their firmness. . . . We may be justified in saying this respectable body, with such a president [George Cabot] at their head, will not do anything rash or precipitate or violent; they will not take any step but what every man of sound principles, every friend to social order throughout the Union, will approve. . . . While they are bent on preserving the rights that are reserved to the States or the people, from usurpation and abuse, they will take care not to trench upon those powers which are delegated to the United States by the Constitution. The vessel at present wears well, and while there is room to believe that she will go safe about, and there is sea-room enough to do it in, why should they attempt to throw her in stays? The vessel did come safe about. When six weeks later the news of the treaty of Ghent reached New York late at night, the city was thrown into such jubilation by the mere ending of the conflict that no one stopped to inquire the terms. But Coleman and the other local Federalist leaders, as they watched the crowds surging up and down Broadway crying — "A peace! A peace!" knew that the Democrats had nothing to boast. After a calm Sunday, the editor presented his views on Monday morning. He would stake his reputation that when the terms became known, "it will be found that the government have not by the negotiation obtained one single avowed object, THE FEDERALIST PRESS 59 for which they involved the country in this bloody and expensive war." He enumerated these objects — the stop- page of impressments, the conquest of Canada, and the abolition of commercial restrictions. He catalogued the loss of life, the suffering on every frontier, and the waste of $150,000,000 in treasure. The one gain that Mr. Madison had obtained was a second term at $25,000 a year in a marble executive mansion, gorgeously refur- nished. But, he concluded, "let the nation rejoice — we have escaped ruin." A part of Coleman's disloyalty in the war, as oppo- sition journals called it, lay in his vindictive pleasure over every disaster that befell French arms. Editorials on foreign affairs were rare, and usually ill-informed. But three months after war was declared the Evening Post based upon Wellington's victories in Spain the sound pre- diction that the French forces would soon be compelled to evacuate the Peninsula altogether. "Bonaparte will never be emperor of the world," wrote Coleman, with an eye also upon Russia's hostility; "it will require all his talents to maintain himself even on the throne of France." On Dec. 12, 18 12, when news had just reached New York of the burning of Moscow (Sept. 16-20), leaving Napo- leon stranded on an ashheap, a really shrewd statement of his peril appeared: We have conversed with an intelligent gentleman who resided a long time in Russia, and about seven years of the time in the city of Moscow. He informs us that the weather in that country is generally pleasant till after the first of October, when the frost sets in, and excessive storms of rain and sleet are experienced, and continue with very little intermission until about the middle of December. All the time the roads are so overwhelmed with water and ice, that traveling is extremely uncomfortable, and many times quite impracticable. After the middle of December the snows begin to fall in such quantities that all traveling is entirely at an end; and the usual communication from town to town is interrupted for several weeks, the snows sometimes falling to the depth of eight or ten feet. He thinks, if Bonaparte did not com- mence his retreat from Moscow by the middle of October, that 6o THE EVENING POST he will be obliged to winter there; for after that time it will be impossible for him to get out of Russia. ... If he is obliged to winter there, the Russians have nothing to do but to cut off his supplies until about the middle of December, after which time all travel ceases until spring, and the great army of the north will be annihilated. Indeed, it is plain from all the accounts we can collect from . . . the French papers . . . that the Russians have nothing to do but to hold out this winter, and their country will be relieved from its invaders. That they are determined to persevere appears to be certain ; the destruction of such a city as Moscow is a proof of that determination, and a sure pledge that they will never sur- render while they can hold a foot of ground. Although the defeat of Napoleon at Leipsic meant that England would thenceforth be able to turn Wellington's veteran armies against us, Federalist editors rejoiced as if it had been an American victory. They forgot for the moment the implications of the event for the war on this side ; they thought only of the triumph of freedom over a military despot. "It is the morning dawn of lib- erty in Europe after a long, a dark, and a dismal night," wrote Coleman. "This is the first ray of light which has visited the eyes of an oppressed people for many years past. For while Bonaparte remained in power even hope was dead — nothing but tyranny and oppression could be expected. And so firm had he fixed himself in his usurped seat, that it appeared almost out of the power of human exertions to shake him. . . . New prospects are opening up on the thinking mind; humanity appears to be near the end of her sufferings." The wars in Europe and America over, the old rancors forgotten, Coleman gladly accepted the era of good feel- ing. In the spring of 1816 the Evening Post supported Rufus King in his losing fight for the Governorship. But from the beginning of the year it had made up its mind that the Democrats, headed by Monroe, would gain the Presidency that fall, and it went through the motions of sustaining King for the higher office — he received only 34 electoral votes against Monroe's 183 — listlessly. Mon- THE FEDERALIST PRESS 6i roe's success made of the Federalist party a mere corpse^ over which factions in State politics fought hke hyenas. Coleman showed no reluctance in admitting the demise, though he conventionally explained it as resulting from the Democratic adoption of Federalist principles. When in 1 8 19 the Aurora attacked Monroe, the Evening Post actually flew out in the President's defense. It was satis- fied, wrote the editor, "that, take it all in all, the adminis- tration of James Monroe is, at this day, more generally acceptable to all classes of society in the United States, than that of any other man has ever been, since the days of Washington/^ Coleman was entertained in 18 19 by Vice-President Tompkins at the latter's Staten Island home, and confessed later that he fell quite under the sway of Tompkins's "great affability" and "his winning and familiar manner." In short, by 1820 no one would have been surprised if some prophet had foretold that the journal of the "Federalist Field-Marshal" would shortly become the leading Democratic organ in the city. But while it became half-Democratic, the Evening Post never ceased to be the spokesman of the best commercial ! sentiment in the city. As such, it opposed, with a bitter \ show of sectional feeling, the Missouri Compromise In \ 1820. The question at issue, said Coleman, was nothing \ more or less than "whether they shall or shall not be allowed to establish a new market for the sale of human I flesh." When the Virginia Legislature made a veiled / threat of secession unless Missouri were admitted. Cole- / man rated the South angrily. They were hypocrites to / talk about the Hartford Convention; they had been / cowards when Washington was burned; on John Ran- I dolph's own statement, they were in constant fear of a I slave insurrection — these and other "bitter taunts," as / the Richmond Enquirer called them, proved the force of / Jefferson's statement that the Missouri controversy was / like a firebell in the dark. / 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 62 THE EVENING POST of that party; men no longer recognized In its utterance the voices of Hamilton's ablest and most energetic suc- cessors, 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 des- tined to wait just a decade until it began to receive dis- tinction 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 tol- erated. It was also the stronghold of Democracy, and the fastest-growing section. Every one who had any pretensions to gentility man- aged 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 emi- nence. The mansions that faced Bowling Green, or that, like Archibald Grade'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 indistinguish- able elements of Dutch, English, New England, and Huguenot blood. The members took no shame from 63 64 THE EVENING POST their general absorption in mercantile pursuits; and Al- exander 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 book- shop, 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 them- selves 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 ac- centuating 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, Trin- ity Church, and the new City Hall, with Its rich Turkey carpets, crimson silk curtains, and eighteen imposing por- traits 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 corner- stone — a paper by a local pundit on the supposed North- men'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 THE CITY AND THE POST 6s interest lay In the amazing cost of the site — $20,500 for a plot 25 by 40 feet. This, It said, was as striking evi- dence 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 Broad- way and Wall Street. As Coleman told his readers in 1803, they were "a multitude." Some men made a busi- ness 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 scaven- gers. 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 18 19. 66 THE EVENING POST 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. I, 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 after- ward. 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 com- plaint against the wretched street-repair and street-clean- ing 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 Broad- way 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. THE CITY AND THE POST 67 In 1 8 17 the streets were described as dirtier than at any other time since "the year of filth," when the British had evacuated the city after the Revolution. In a sudden access of energy the next year the authorities set gangs of twenty to fifty men once a week to attacking the streets with brooms. A fearful dust was raised, and yet the roadways were still imperfectly cleaned. Coleman pointed out that more frequent sweeping by smaller forces would be better, and that In Boston much of the work was done at night. In 1823 there came new grumblings over the filth and garbage. "Notwithstanding the great extent of the city of London," wrote Coleman, "we have seldom seen cleaner streets than those of the British capital. With those of New York the comparison would be odious." What was chiefly needed he thought to be plenty of water, and common sewers connecting with every house. He waxed satirical : To the Curious: — The collection of filth and manure now lying in heaps, or which has been heaped in Wall, Pearl, Water, and Front Streets, near the Coffee-House, and left there, will astonish those who are fond of the wonderful, and pay them for the trouble of a walk there. Sanitary ordinances were few, and apparently hon- ored rather in the breach than In the observance. The city was full of unleashed dogs, and whenever in hot weather a hydrophobia panic occurred — which was every two or three years — they were slain by the scores. Dur- ing one season they were dumped by cartloads into a vacant lot at Broadway and Bleecker Street, and buried so shallowly that neighboring residents had to keep their windows shut against the pestilential air. Slaughter- houses were tolerated In the midst of residential blocks, and the Evening Post early In the twenties began to call for their restriction. A correspondent related in 1825 how one butcher had recently purchased a small plot, and threatened to erect a shambles there unless the owners of valuable Improvements near by paid him a large bonus — which they did ; and how when another butcher wished 68 . THE EVENING POST a piece of property, he put up a slaughterhouse adjoin- ing it to compel the owner to sell at a low price. The ordinance against the summer sale of oysters was long a dead letter. "You can scarcely pass through any one street in the city," grumbled Coleman, "without running against a greasy table, with plates of sickly oysters dis- played, well peppered with dust, and swarms of flies feed- ing upon them." "The city of feasts and fevers" a visitor called New i^ork — "feasts" in reference to the frequent banquets on turtle, venison, and Madeira, "fevers" in reference to the epidemics of yellow fever. There was one such epi- demic in 1803. So great was the exodus that in Septem- ber the population, which had been above 60,000, was found to be barely 38,000. "It is notorious," declared a writer in the Evening Post at this stage, "that notwith- standing the prevalence of a malignant disease, and when great exertions are made to check its destroying progress, the streets of this city are in a most noxious state; and will continue to increase in putridity, unless we are fa- vored with some refreshing rains to clear them." The Evening Post removed its business office to an address on the outskirts of the city, and Coleman as far as possi- ble edited it from the country. For a time, as he said, in most of the town there was "no business, no society, no means of subsistence even." New Yorkers could only set their teeth and wait for the frosts. With Noah Webster during 1803 the Evening Post conducted a long-winded debate upon yellow fever ; Cole- man maintaining that it was always imported by some ship or immigrant, and Webster that it was spontaneously generated at home. Coleman was right, though of course absolutely ignorant of the reasons why he was right; and while the articles, which abound in mutual complaints of discourtesy, became very tiresome, Coleman's argument tended to a sound conclusion. He argued that the epi- demics could be avoided by rigidly quarantining the city. It was always held contrary to public policy by many merchants and officials to breathe a word about yellow THE CITY AND THE POST 69 fever till the last possible moment; for that drove trade to Boston or Philadelphia. But Coleman never failed to play the Dr. Stockmarr role courageously. In 1809, for example, the paper braved the anger of business men by asserting on July 24 that, despite all denials, several deaths from the fever had just occurred in Brooklyn. Though an epidemic was raging in Cuba, ships from Havana had been allowed to come up from quarantine within four days of arrival, and had not been unloaded and cleansed according to the law. On July 28, by diligent scouting among doctors, Coleman was enabled to report a death from fever in Cherry Street and another In Beekman Street. He renewed his charge of mal- feasance and neglect by the Health Officer at quarantine, a political appointee who pocketed $15 ,000 a year. Why, he demanded, were the laws as to the removal of the sick and the reporting of new cases not enforced? Four days later Mayor De Witt Clinton by proclamation forbade intercourse with the village of Brooklyn. At last I ex- claimed the editor. But why not look to conditions within Manhattan Itself, and make the ordinary physician obey the law? "If he does, one of the learned faculty will set a young cub of a student upon him to tear him In pieces for alarming the old women; and then there is another set who declare him a public enemy." Just ten years later, remarking that "it has hereto- fore been the practice to stifle, as long as possible, the intelligence that the yellow fever existed In the city," Coleman served notice that if It broke out, as it did in August, he would advertise the fact. In 1822 there was a severe pestilence. The first case occurred on July 1 1 in a house on Rector Street, and was Immediately made known to the Board of Health and to the officer deputed by law to give the first notice of its appearance. Yet it was concealed from the public for nearly a month, deaths occurring all the while, but no precautionary meas- ures being taken; and before the epidemic ended, late in October, 388 persons died. The flight of the population toward the open parts of the island was unprecedented. 70 THE EVENING POST An immediate agitation was begun by the Evening Post for a different organization of the Board of Health. By an act two years previous, it consisted of such persons as the Common Council should appoint, a phrase which the Council always construed to mean that it should itself act as the Board. The members were quite untrained, while they were too numerous, and too busy with politics. Cole- man suggested a Board of from five to seven qualified men, to be nominated by the Mayor and confirmed by the Council, and a reform actually did soon follow. An irritant of the time, akin to automobile speedsters of to-day, lay in the Irish cartmen, who loved a race even more than a fight, and whom Coleman denounced the more vigorously because they were Democrats to a man. The bakers' boys were called "flying Mercuries"; to ex- cite terror, said the Evening Post in 1805, they partic- ularly delighted in crashing round a narrow street cor- ner at a dead gallop, splashing those whom they did not graze. The journal in 18 17 felt it proper to attack the practice of riding fast horses home from the blacksmith's without a bridle. Among the annoyances showing a lack of due city regulations was the appearance in 1820 of an ingenious mode of kite-flying. As flown in daytime, kites had always been admirably calculated to scare horses. Now they were being sent up at night by hordes of urchins, said the Evening Post, with a parachute and a little car affixed, the car containing lighted candles, and the whole so constructed that it could be separated from the kite at pleasure. They were miraculously adapted for setting roofs afire. Most residential streets must have been fairly quiet; but they were not sufficiently so to suit the harassed edi- tor. We find him In 1803 declaiming In order against the varied noises: "The measured ditty of the young sweep at daybreak, upon the chimney top ; the tremendous nasal yell of 'Ye rusk!'; the sonorous horn that gives dreadful note of 'gingerbread !' ; and the echoing sound of 'HoboyI' at midnight, accompanied with Its never-failing appeal to more senses than one." These "hoboy gentle- THE CITY AND THE POST 71 men," whose profession was connected with Mrs. War- ren's, were still an abomination in 18 16, "bellowing out their filthy ditties" for two hours after eleven. As late as 1 8 19, at the flush of dawn every morning, a stage traversed the whole length of Broadway northward, the guard merrily blowing his horn as it went and all the dogs barking. Hucksters, like beggars, seem at all times to have been troublesome. At any rate, Coleman in August, 1823, fulminated against them as to be found on every street and almost at every door, and as offering ^'almost everything that can be named, from a lady's leghorn hat to a shoestring, from a saddle to a cowskin, from a gold ring to a jewsharp." Busy householders and ordinary rent-paying tradesmen held them in equal dislike. There was little of the moral censor or the preacher in the early Evening Post. Yet it did not neglect the city's manners. Temperance sentiment was then weak, but the journal lamented the excessive number of corner grogger- ies; for in New York licenses cost but 40 shillings, and liquor-selling was more extensive than in Boston or Phila- delphia. In 1 8 10 the Mayor and Excise Commissioners granted 3,500 licenses, and it was estimated that of the city's 14,000 families, no less than 2,000 gained a live- lihood through the drink trade. Their little shops, many of them in cellars, were reported to exhibit perpetual scenes of riot and disorder. Six years later a writer in the Evening Post computed that there were more than 1,500 retail establishments for liquor, and added that it were better to let loose in the streets 1,500 hungry lions and tigers. The editor favored a heavy Federal tax to abate the evil. The journal had the courage in 18 18 to take a stand against lotteries, then resorted to not only for private gain, but to raise capital for bridges, canals, turnpikes, colleges, and churches. Their abolition would mean a sacrifice to the Evening Post, for in some periods of pre- vious years they had furnished one-fifteenth or one-twen- tieth the whole advertising. But Coleman's heart was touched by the losses of the poor. "Look at the crowd 72 THE EVENING POST of poor, ragged wretches that beset the office-keeper's doors the morning after the day's drawing is over, waiting with their little slips in their hands, to hear their fate, and the yesterday's earnings ready to be given to the harpies that stand gaping for the pittance." He thought there were two palliatives short of abolition: first, to price the tickets so high that only people of means would gamble; and second, as in England, to compel managers to finish the drawings in a week or ten days, so as to end the pernicious practice of insuring the fate of tickets. Three years later, in 1821, an act passed providing that no new lotteries should be authorized. The Evening Post said nothing against public execu- tions, which during the first quarter of the century drew crowds of thousands; but it did cease at an early date, on principle, to publish long accounts of them. In June> 1 8 19, it barely mentioned the fact that a great concourse gathered for the execution in Potter's Field, now Wash- ington Square, of a negress named Rose Butler for at- tempted arson, and that the disappointment was keen when she was respited. Next month her actual hanging was recorded in five lines. Imprisonment for debt was repeatedly attacked by the editor. Little was said by Coleman or any one else against cock-fighting and other inhuman amusements of the time. In 1807, however, the Evening Post opened its columns to a writer who described with indignant reprobation a bull-baiting which he had just attended. The bull was worried by dogs until, with one horn broken off, his ears in shreds, his tongue almost torn out, and his eyes filled with blood, he stopped fighting and had to be driven away to save his life. In other cities about 18 15, notably Philadelphia, a great deal was being said against the employment of chimney sweeps, a set of dirty, underfed, uneducated urchins, who suffered from harsh masters and a dangerous calling. Coleman joined the chorus, and printed extended accounts of British inventions for the mechanical cleaning of flues. It is interesting to note that in 1805 the Evening Post was as willing to give up its THE CITY AND THE POST 73 revenue from patent medicines as later that from lotteries. The editor, rendered angry by the death of a little girl who had taken a worthless nostrum, denounced "the quack medicines and quack advertisements which . . . so much distinguish and disgrace the city." Some dally papers were filled with advertisements of Restoratives, Essences, Balsams, Lozenges, and Purifiers warranted to cure all human ills ; and the vendors had begun to publish in Maiden Lane a weekly organ, the Remembrancer, of which they distributed five hundred copies free. Upon the contributions steadily made by invention and private enterprise to the comfort of the city many com- ments may be found in the Evening Post. Some of the most interesting relate to the old sailboat ferries, which were both slow and dangerous. Repeated accidents oc- curred early In the century. Following the capsizing of a Brooklyn ferry one bitter December day In 1803, with six passengers aboard, Coleman remarked that It was a notorious fact that such craft were placed In charge of fellows who were oftener half drunk than sober, and who, unable themselves to steer, committed the helm to any one who volunteered. He quoted the opinion of a competent sailor that in build these boats were the most dangerous ferries, especially in rough weather, of all he had seen throughout the world. The Paulus Hook (Jer- sey City) ferries, when contending against head winds and strong tides, required three hours to make a passage, and It was virtually impossible to get a horse and carriage across the North River. On summer Sundays, when many wished to go to Hoboken for picnics, and during the autumn racing on Long Island, prodigious queues would form at the piers. But on July 18, 18 12, a steam ferry was set In motion between Manhattan and Paulus Hook by Robert Fulton. Surpassing all expectations, it proved able to accommodate six carriages and horses — driven easily aboard by a floating bridge — and 300 passengers at one time, and to cross during a calm in fourteen min- utes, or against the tide In twenty. On July 27 some 1,500 people were ferried across and back; "a proud ex- 74 THE EVENING POST ample of the genius of our country," said Coleman. When in the summer of 1807 Fulton's steamboat, the Clermont, began her regular service between New York and Albany, the Evening Post was jubilant; he had made only a few trips before it wanted the mail service trans- ferred to him. It proudly recorded each new reduction in the time, until one trip from Albany down was made in 28 hours. Even in October great crowds gathered to watch the boat start: Among the thousands who viewed the scene [wrote "New York" on Oct. 2] permit a spectator to express his gratification at the sight, this morning, of the steamboat proceeding on her trip to Albany in a wind and swell of tide which appeared to bid defi- ance to every attempt to perform the voyage. The Steam Boat ap- peared to glide as easily and rapidly as though it were calm, and the machinery was not in the least impeded by the waves of the Hudson, the wheels moving with their usual velocity and effect. The experiment of this day removes every doubt of the prac- ticability of the Steam Boat being able to work in rough weather. Unfortunately, this particular trip was actually disas- trous. Leaving the city at 10 a.m., the boat was forced by the gale and tide to tie up to the bank at noon, staying there overnight. Next morning, before reaching Tarry- town, she ran into a small sloop, and one of her paddle- wheels was torn away. It was 10 o'clock on the morning of Oct. 4 before she set her stiff and hungry passengers ashore in Albany. She was immediately withdrawn, and during the winter was almost completely rebuilt. The journal appreciatively noticed the opening of steamship navigation on the Raritan and Delaware Rivers in 1809, as a means of shortening the trip between New York and Philadelphia. In March, 18 15, it gave an account of the first trip through Hell Gate and the Sound to New Haven. The steamship Fulton left New York shortly after 5 a. m., and, the weather being bad and the wood for fuel poor, did not reach her destination till 4:30 that afternoon. Eight or nine hours would ordi- narily be sufficient. The ease with which Hell Gate, theretofore thought impassable by steam, was navigated, THE CITY AND THE POST 75 amazed every one. No less than $90,000 had been spent on the boat. ''We believe It may with truth be affirmed that there is not in the world such accommodations afloat," wrote a correspondent. "Indeed, it is hardly possible to conceive that anything of the kind can exceed the Fulton in elegance and convenience." By the beginning of 18 16 the Evening Post was giving much space to the possibilities of coal gas as an illumi- nant. A schoolmaster named Griscom lectured the eve- ning of Jan. 26 on the light, the audience including the Mayor, Recorder, many aldermen, and prominent busi- ness men. He demonstrated the use of gas, argued that it would cost only half as much as lamps or candles, and showed that it gave a superior brilliancy without smoke or odor. At this time, as Coleman emphasized, Lon- doners had extensively employed coal gas for four or five years. During the summer of 18 16 a successful trial was made in Baltimore. At last, seven years later, the Evening Post was able editorially to direct attention to the advertisement of the New York Gas Company, which was just issuing $200,000 worth of stock, and which the city government had given a franchise for lighting all the town south of Grand Street for the next thirty years. But the use of old-fashioned illuminants involved no such hardships as did the city's exclusive dependence, when Hamilton's journal began its career, upon wood for fuel. As regularly as the Hudson froze and snowdrifts blocked the roads, prices soared. In January, 1806, for example, hickory rose from the normal price of $3.50 a load (three loads made a cord) to $7, and some spec- ulators even tried to get $8. In 1821, after a severe snowstorm, $5 was charged for a load of oak, and $7.50 for better woods. It was with unusual satisfaction, there- fore, that In the summer of 1823 the journal said that it "congratulated the public on the near prospect of this city being supplied with coal, dug from that immense range" of potential mines lately discovered in Pennsyl- vania. The new Schuylkill Coal Company and the Lehigh Coal and Navigation Company were making preparations 76 THE EVENING POST to ship the anthracite; and Coleman hoped that the city's fuel bill of $700,000 or $800,000 would be cut in half. Little criticism was given the watch or the fire- men, though neither fully protected the city. In 18 12 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 po- lice redoubled, and in 1823, when the total annual ex- pense 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 18 12 as stand- ing 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, Sul- livan, and Grand Streets. This was good sense; but Coleman, as a spokesman for the wealthy merchant fam- ilies, objected because it rendered many family burial plots or vaults worthless, and because the nearest avail- able 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, patron- ized by Burr, seven, and the Public Advertiser eight. In 1807 the whole list of city publications was as follows: THE CITY AND THE POST 77 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 impor- tant; 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 iiYz 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 nrospectus made no promise of enterprise in supplying mtelligence. 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 pohtical event; but a news "beat" was unknown. 78 THE EVENING POST 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 1 800-1 820 were prin- cipally vehicles of political opinion; several were princi- pally organs for commercial information and advertise- ments ; 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 indefi- nitely. 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 writ- ten, 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 Jef- ferson's second inaugural address, but the address itself he never printed; it being assumed that iii^«rested men THE CITY AND THE POST 79 could find it in the Democratic press. Again, when in the autumn of 18 12 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, naively adding: "For particulars see the advertisement in this evening's Post/' The obliging Mr. Willis, in advertising a reward, had stated the de- tails of his loss, which came to $2,500 or $2,600 in cash. But on other occasions the editor made an earnest but unavailing effort to procure the news. A single issue of 1826 affords two examples: private letters in town had brought hints of a duel between Randolph and Clay, but it proved impossible to verify the reports, while of a fire that morning in Chambers Street no accurate facts were ascertainable. In September, 1809, the Common Council dismissed William Mooney, a Tammany leader, from the superintendency of the almshouse, and men surmised that the grounds were corruption. A few days later Coleman published the following notice : Information Wanted: — I have been waiting some days in hopes that some person would furnish me with facts which led to the disaster which on Monday last befell the Grand Sachem, who lately presided over the almshouse. Surely the citizens have a right to be Informed of such things. Will any person, acquainted with the circumstances, communicate them to the editor? Unfortunately, no informed person came forward. During the last days of the War of 18 12, commercial firms constantly tried to obtain private news of the prog- ress of the peace negotiations. There is a pathetic note of frustration in the Evening Post's item of Nov. 29, 1 8 14: "Considering the public entitled to all the infor- mation in our power, we barely mention that there is a go THE EVENING POST London paper of the 28th ult. in town, which Is kept from the public eye at present. We will not conjecture what the contents are, but merely venture to say that it is probably something of moment." Nor was the news, collected under such great disad- vantages, quite as accurate as news is now required to be. In August, 1805, the evening papers caused much stir and conjecture in the little city by announcing that Jefferson had called the Senate together upon important foreign business. Next day they explained that this false report had originated with a mischievous young man who had arrived from Philadelphia in the mail stage, and whose name they would like to learn. Coleman was somewhat embarrassed two years later to have to state : We are requested by Mr. Wright to contradict the account published yesterday of his being lost in crossing the North River. When in 18 10 the town was on tiptoe to learn the President's January message to Congress, or as Coleman called it, "the great War-Whoop," two conflicting sum- maries reached the evening papers at once; one communi- cated by a gentleman who arrived direct from Washing- ton, and one obtained through the Philadelphia Aurora from a commercial express rider. While waiting fuller news, they could only print both and let readers take their choice. During the spring of 18 12, with war impending, the press was replete with mere gossip and rumor, some- times well founded, more often baseless. As late as 1826 there occurred a striking illustration of the inaccuracy of much that passed for foreign news, and of the difficulty which truth experienced in overtaking error. The Greek revolution had broken out in 1821, and the massacres of Chios and Constantinople, the victory of Marco Boz- zaris, and the death of Byron had kindled a flame of phil-hellenism throughout America. On April 26, 1826, the Greek stronghold of Missolonghi was captured. De- spite this, late in May there reached New York a cir- cumstantial account of the relief of Missolonghi, the slaughter of the Turks, the death of their hated com- THE CITY AND THE POST 8i mander Ibrahim, and the brightening prospect of Greek liberty, all of which the newspapers spread forth under such captions as "Glorious News From Greece." Early In June this was contradicted by the true news. Never- theless, wrote Coleman on July 20, "on taking up a late Tennessee newspaper we find that the 'Glorious News' has just reached our western neighbors and that they are now only beginning to rejoice at the deliverance of Missolonghl." We can most vividly appreciate just how far the early newspapers succeeded — for the Evening Post was typical of the best sheets — and how far they failed as purveyors of current Information, by listing the materials presented in a single week chosen at random. In the seven days May 9-14 inclusive, 1803, Coleman published the fol- lowing Intelligence : FOREIGN DOMESTIC War Rumored Between Britain and Fire in Troy, N. Y. France Editor Duane Apologizes for Monroe Arrives at Havre Libel French Hunt Haitians With Blood- Cheetham Fined $200 for Libel hounds Column on Harlem Races Two Columns on British Penal Re- Paine Publishes Letter from Jef- form ferson French Prefect Reaches New Or- Grainger's Record as Postmaster- leans General British Give South Africa to Dutch Fire in New York Coach Factory Demands of Dey of Algiers on Two Benefits at Local Theatre Powers Election Dispute in Ulster County More Rumors of Anglo-French Election Incident at Pawling War Advance Sale of Marshall's Agrarian Violence in Ireland "Washington" London Stock-Market Fluctuations XYZ Affair Reviewed European Trade Rivalries in Levant French Troops Concentrate in Holland This was absolutely all, and many of these subjects were treated In only a few lines, and with obvious haziness and Inexactitude. It is plain that the week's budget did carry much illumination to the public mind; but it is also plain that only a tiny part of the world's activities were being covered, that city news was appallingly neglected, 82 THE EVENING POST and that a modern journal treating each day hundreds of subjects would then have been inconceivable. Yet the press could boast of occasional feats of news presentation which would do credit to journalism even now. The political meetings of each party were almost always well reported by its own party organs. In 1807 Burr's trial was covered for the Evening Post by a special correspondent whose reports were dry — there was no description of scene or personages, no attention to empha- sis, and little direct quotation of counsel or witnesses — but were also expert, comprehensive, and minute. It is well known that the greatest of American earthquakes occurred in 1 8 1 1 In the Missouri and Arkansas country just west of the Mississippi. The Evening Post was for- tunate enough to obtain a three-column account of it, vivid, intelligent, and thrilling, from the pen of an ob- server who witnessed it from a point near New Madrid. The special Albany letters were fair ; for years the Eve- ning Post derived occasional bits of Inside information from Federalist Congressmen, and made good use of them; and its London correspondence, which began in 1 8 19 with an account of the Holkham sheep-shearing, was on a level with much London correspondence of to-day. One of the most extravagant items in the Evening Post's first account book is $50 for getting President Madison's annual message of 1809 to New York by "pony express." An attempt was made to use carrier pigeons when the House in 1824 elected J. Q. Adams President, but it proved a failure. After the commencement of the War of 18 12, 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, 18 12. The capitulation has occurred on the i6th, 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 car- THE CITY AND THE POST 83 rier to Warren, Pa., on the 2 2d, 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, 18 12, 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 trav- ersed 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 Sus- quehanna 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 84 THE EVENING POST 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 Rens- selaer had lost a battle and a small army. In the closing days of the war this episode was re- versed, the rumor of bad news being followed by a truthful report of good. On Jan. 20, 18 15, 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 pub- lished some inconclusive information received in a letter from a New Orleans judge, dated just before the pre- liminary and indecisive battle of Dec. 23. "We have cause of apprehension," Coleman wrote, "that to-mor- row'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, THE CITY AND THE POST 85 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. Cole- man, 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 ex- tensive panorama painted of the glorious Yankee naval victories of 18 12 and 18 13. 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 exhibi- tion, and a valuable hand-organ, and set sail for Charles- ton to show It there. On the second day out from Sandy Hook, the British frigate Forth captured -the vessel. 86 THE EVENING POST Greatly amused, the commander promptly set the pano- rama 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 i8, 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, 1 8 14, 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 dog- gerel expressing the determination of the terrapin to hold on until it dragged Madison down and slew him. Evi- dently readers were obtuse, for the next day appeared a solemn "Explanation of the emblematic figures in yester- day's paper." But as yet neither news nor cartoons were THE CITY AND THE POST 87 published on the first page, which was sacred, as in Eng- lish papers of to-day, to advertisements. Except for one advance intimation, the news of peace might have been as unexpected as that of the victory of New Orleans. This intimation came on Feb. 9, in a curiously roundabout manner. A privateer cruising in British waters captured a prize which bore London news- papers dating to Nov. 28, and carried them to Salem, Mass., whence their contents were reprinted all over the North. They contained the speech of the Prince Regent on Nov. II, and the proceedings of the Commons imme- diately afterwards, holding out hope for a prompt ending of the war. The news of peace itself electrified the city two days later, reaching it by the British sloop Favorite, which bore one of the secretaries of the American legation in London, at eight o'clock on Saturday evening. No jour- nal was so indecorous as to issue a special Sunday edition, but on Monday the Evening Post contained a full account of the delirium of rejoicing with which the intelligence was greeted. Nearly every window in the principal streets was illuminated, and Broadway was filled with laughing, huzzaing, exalted people, carrying torches or candles, and jamming the way for two hours. On Tuesday the Even- ing Post recorded that sugar had fallen from $26 a hun- dred-weight to $12.50, tea from $2.25 a pound to $1, and tin from $80 a box to $25, while specie, which had been at 22 per cent, premium, was now only at 2 per cent., and six per cent. Government stock had risen from 76 to 86. The wharves were an animated scene, ship advertisements were pouring In, and "it is really wonderful to see the change produced in a few hours in the City of New York." And what of the Napoleonic wars? All European news was then obtained from files of foreign papers, some of which came to New York journals direct, and some of which were supplied by merchants and shippers. It was usual, whenever a packet arrived with a fresh batch, to cut the domestic news to a few paragraphs, stop any series of editorial articles in hand, and for several days 88 THE EVENING POST fill the columns with extracts and summaries. Though In 1812 a ship came from Belfast in the remarkable time of twenty-two days, forty days was the average from London or Liverpool, and European news was hence from one to two months late. Sometimes a traveler, and frequently a ship-captain, brought news by word of mouth. A detailed account from the London prints of Napo- leon's marriage at Vienna was not published by the Evening Post till ten weeks after the event. Wellington stormed Badajos on April 7, 18 12, and the Evening Post announced the fact on June 1 1, or more than two months later; while the battle of Salamanca that summer, where Wellington ''beat forty thousand In forty minutes," was not known for sixty-six days, the news coming in part through a traveler who arrived from Cadiz at Salem, and was interviewed by a correspondent there. It was the middle of October when the armies of Napoleon and the Allies took position for the battle of Leipsic, and Coleman was not able to publish his three-column sum- mary from a London paper till just after New Year's. When the description of the battle of Toulouse came in, there occurred an office tragedy: Here ought to follow an account of a great battle between Lord Wellington and Soult [explained Coleman after an abrupt break in the news], and other selections amounting to about two col- umns, but It being necessary to get it set up abroad, the boy in bringing it home blundered down in the street, and threw the types into irretrievable confusion. It will be given to-morrow. After that wily and selfish old invalid Bourbon, Louis XVIII, given his crown by the Allies, visited London In state, a spectator sent a vivid account of his triumphal passage up Piccadilly to the Evening Post. Louis had passed so near that this tourist could have touched him. "He is very corpulent, with a round face, dark eyes, prominent features, the character of countenance much like that of the portraits of the other Louises; a pleasant face; his eyes were suffused with tears." Then came the Hundred Days; and the greatest European news of all was thus introduced on Aug. 2, 1815 : THE CITY AND THE POST 89 IMPORTANT We received from our correspondent at Boston, by this morn- ing's mail, the following important news, which we hasten to lay before our readers: From Our Correspondent, Office of the Boston Daily Advertiser, July3i, 1815. A gentleman has just arrived in town from a vessel which he left in the harbor, bringing London dates from June 24. The principal article is an official dispatch of Lord Wellington's, dated Waterloo, June 19, giving a detailed account of a general engage- ment. There followed Wellington's succinct dispatch. Its modesty of tone misled many New York supporters of Napoleon, who made heavy bets that Wellington had really been drubbed, and who when fuller news came had to pay them. Even In the third decade of the century news of every kind was unconscionably slow. The Evening Post of June 20, 1825, came out late because the presses had been held till the last minute In the vain hope of giving par- ticulars of the dedication of the Bunker Hill monument on the 17th; the steamboat from New London having arrived without any Intelligence. Only on the next day was a narrative carried, and though It filled four columns, it contained no extracts from Webster's oration. One year later one of the most Impressive coincidences in our history afforded a striking illustration of the long wait forced upon each section of the United States for Information from outside Its borders. The fiftieth anni- versary of the Declaration of Independence was cele- brated with fervor In every hamlet and city, though In New York a storm of wind and rain Interfered with the ceremonies. Every American thought of the two aged ex- Presldents, one the author of the Declaration, the other the radical patriot who had done most to forward It in Congress. At i o'clock In the afternoon Jefferson died at Montlcello. At 6 o'clock John Adams, after remark- 90 THE EVENING POST ing that every report of the celebratory cannon had added five minutes to his life, passed away at Quincy. Which news would reach New York first? The Evening Post published the death of Adams on the seventh, and the demise of Jefferson on the eighth. Then began to come evidence that the two circles of intelligence were more and more overlapping each other, and, on the tenth, Cole- man commented : The newspapers of the North and East are filled with remarks upon the death of John Adams, while those from the South are equally filled with the obsequies of Jefferson, neither section having yet heard of the loss sustained by the other. How much is the surprise at each extremity of the country destined to be increased by the information which is now traveling from the South to the North, and from the North to the South! Last evening, in all probability, President Adams heard of the death of his father; at about the same moment news of the decease of Jefferson must have reached Quincy. To a large proportion of subscribers — the wholesalers, retailers, auctioneers, shippers, and manufacturers — the most interesting news was generally to be found in the column headed "Evening Post Marine List," and in the advertisements. The shipping news was at this time collected with the utmost attention to accuracy and completeness, for it was as much one of the journal's grounds for claiming a superior position as its financial news became after the Civil War. A special employee obtained it from the custom house, counting rooms, and wharves, and regularly gathered some dozens or even scores of such items as the following: CLEARED, Brig Caroline, Lee, TenerifFe, by N. L. and G. Griswold; schrs. Miranda, Sayre, St. Augustine, by the captains, Linnet, Paterson, Shelburne, by do. ARRIVED, The schr. Red-Bird, Walker, in 12 days from Washington, N. C, with 447 bbl. of naval stores, 700 bushels of corn, for Mr. Gardiner, of Rhode Island. Spoke, five leagues from the capes of Virginia, the schr. Farmer's Daughter, 24 days from Port Morant for Marblehead, the captain informed that he saw a large ship under jury masts, standing in for Havanna; THE CITY AND THE POST 91 being about two leagues distant; supposed to be English. At the same time, a brig to leeward, with her main-top-masts gone and both pumps agoing; she had black sides and supposed to be an eastern brig, & was making for Havanna. Sloop Harriet, Lynds, 60 days from Jamaica, with rum, to George Pratt. Captain L. has experienced the most distressing weather, and his crew would have starved had it not been for supplies received from 3 vessels which he fell in with. On the 5th of Nov. he met with the schr. Goliath, Pinkham (arrived at this port), then out 35 days; and though Captain P. was then short, and on allowance, he humanely divided, as it were, his last mouthful with Captain Lynds. Nov. 10, in lat. 33, fell in with the bark Calliope, 46 days from Kingston for Norfolk — gave her some water, and received some bread and beef. Nov. 14, in lat. 36, got some bread from the ship Lovina, 18 days from Savannah for Philadelphia. Then, as now, advertisements were the principal sup- port of newspapers, though they yielded a revenue that seems pitiful by modern standards. Until some years after Coleman died in 1828, merchants paid $40 a year for the privilege of advertising, a subscription being thrown in. It was left to their sense of fairness not to present advertisements of undue length, and ^'display ads" were of course unknown. The monthly rate was $3.50, four Insertions could be had for a dollar, and one for fifty cents. A study of the first ledger of the Evening Post, for the years 1 801-1804, shows that the largest receipts from a single firm were $276.49, from Bronson and Chauncey. The publishers, T. and J. Swords, paid in eighteen months $157.55 — they were destined to be good customers of the Evening Post for decades. But nearly all the accounts were for small amounts. James Roosevelt, the wealthy Pearl Street merchant, paid $57.37 between the beginning of 1802 and Nov. 16, 1803; Minturn and Barker, representing two families long prominent in business, paid $39.55 In the same period; and Robert Lenox paid $91.50. This ledger is a virtual directory of all important business and professional men of the city, in which we meet entries of payments for sub- scriptions by Hamilton, Burr, Rufus King, Oliver Wol- 92 THE EVENING POST cott, Brockholst Livingston, Morgan Lewis, and many other notables. Ordinarily, from 1801 to 1825, of the twenty short columns all but four or five were devoted to advertise- ments. Shipping, auctions, wholesale^ stores (seldom re- tail), lotteries, legal notices, and the theater furnished most of the patronage, but the range of advertising was surprising. In 1802 we find such insertions as these: ST. CROIX RUM. — 50 puncheons, just arrived per the brig Harriet, from St. Croix, now landing at Schermerhorn's Wharf. For sale by CURRIE & WHITNEY, 47 Front Street. FOR SALE.— A likely Negro Wench, 16 years old— sold for no fault. For terms, enquire of WILLIAM LEAYCROFT, 109 Liberty Street. TAKE NOTICE LOTTERY TICKETS to be had at the Book and Stationery Store of NAPHTALI JUDAH, No. 84 Maiden-Lane. Tick- ets in the Lottery No. i, for the encouragement of Literature — $25, the highest prize — for sale in Halves, Quarters, and Eighth Parts. The Lottery will positively commence drawing in this city on the first Tuesday in February next. Owing to the great demand for Tickets, they will rise from the present price of six dollars and a half, in a few days. Editor Coleman would have lifted his brows had he been told that within a little more than a century St. Croix rum, lotteries to encourage literature, and the sale of likely negro wenches would all be outlawed. The circulation of the Evening Post rose only slowly, and like all the other New York newspapers of the time, until after the War of 18 12 it found the struggle for existence a harsh one. At the beginning of 1804 the whole group, except the youngest and weakest, Irving's Morning Chronicle, concerted to raise their yearly sub- scription price from $8 to $10; this meaning, in the in- stance of Coleman's journal, the difference between $9,600 and $12,000 a year. The reason alleged was the heavy increase in the cost of labor and materials. Jour- neymen printers, recently paid $6 a week, were now ask- THE CITY AND THE POST 93 Ing $8; the falthfuUest clerk and most dogged collector In town could once have been had for $300 a year, and now any such employee wanted $400; while paper had risen until it cost the editor $7,000 to $8,000 a year. The Gazette and the Mercantile Advertiser caused much ill- feeling when they immediately broke faith and reverted to the $8 rate, but Coleman stood by his guns. To help in holding his subscribers, he advanced his printing hour from four p. m. to two. Year after year there was a slight increase in the daily circulation, though it hardly kept pace with the growth of population; in 18 15 it stood at 1,580 copies daily, and in 1820 at 1,843. Arrears long cost New York editors thp same sleepless nights which they cost the owners of some ill-managed country journals to-day. City residents paid regularly, for they could be reached through the ten-pound court if they did not; but in 1805 Coleman despairingly af- firmed that "not one In a hundred" of the subscribers to the semi-weekly were prompt. In some centers, as Bos- ton, from $500 to $1,000 was due the Post and Herald, and in Kingston, Canada, more than $60 was owed merely for postage. "The loss that arises from neglected arrearages would amount to not less than 30 per cent.," lamented the editor. It was necessary to send a col- lector up through New York and New England to Upper Canada, stopping for money all along the mail routes. When Michael Burnham took charge, on Nov. 16, 1806, business affairs were greatly systematized; a fact of which we find evidence both in the disappearance of complaints of arrears, and in the ledgers and a curious old account book, 1 801-18 10. These accounts throw much light on mechanical details. A frequent charge for "skins" presumably refers to the buckskins which were cut and rolled into balls, soaked in ink, and then used by the printers' devils to pound the forms and thus ink the type. Almost daily charges appear for candles and quill pens. The journal seems to have paid many of the ex- penses of apprentices, for there are numerous entries for "cloathing" and for board at $3 a week. Coleman drew 94 THE EVENING POST upon the till occasionally, as is shown by an item of May 25, 1809: "Boots for Mr. Coleman, $10." But all the improvements that Burnham made in the business management did not save Coleman at times before 18 10 from half-resolving to let the Evening Post die and to return to the bar again; in the year named, when he was trying to arrange his English debts, he confessed such a hesitation. When Duane of the Aurora charged that the Federalist newspapers in seaport towns were bribed "by support in the form of mercantile advertisements*^ to oppose all Jefferson's measures, Coleman bitterly replied that Federalist merchants actually neglected their press. Taking up a copy of the chief Federalist organ in Phila- delphia, and one of the chief neutral journal there, he found six ship advertisements in the former and forty in the latter; while "on a particular day not long since the New York Gazette had eighty-five new advertise- ments, the Mercantile Advertiser sixty-one, and the Eve- ning Post nine." But after the Embargo and the war the skies slowly brightened, not so much because of the growing circula- tion as because of the more remunerative advertisements. It was not the $40-a-year advertising that paid, but the single "ads" inserted at the new rate of 75 cents a "square." There were now many more of these. Be- cause of the rapid growth of the city a brisk trade had sprung up in Brooklyn and Manhattan real estate, which by 1820 often engrossed from one-eighth to one-fourth the whole paper. Steamboats had come, and from Capt. Vanderbilt's little Nautilus, which left Whitehall daily for Staten Island at 10, 3, and 6:30, charging twenty-five cents a trip, to the big Chancellor Livingston running to Albany, and the boat Franklin, which offered excursions to Sandy Hook, with a green turtle dinner, for $2, all were advertising. Competing stage-coach lines were eager to impress the public with their speedy schedules; advertising that you could leave the City Hotel at 2 p. m., packed six inside and eight outside a gaudily painted THE CITY AND THE POST 95 vehicle, and be at Judd's Tavern In Philadelphia at 5 a. m. the next day. Competition continued keen, for while weak news- papers died, new journals were constantly being estab- lished. The most important of these were Charles Holt's Columbian, established in 1808 as a Clintonian sheet; the National Advocate, founded in 18 13 and edited for a time by Henry Wheaton, later known as a diplomat, who supported Madison; and the American, an evening journal first published in the spring of 1 8 19, and edited by Charles King, later president of Columbia College. But the Eve- ning Post kept well to the front, as is shown by a table of comparative circulations in May, 18 16: Mercantile Advertiser, 2000 Gardiner's Courier, 980 Daily Gazette, 1750 Columbian, 825 Evening Post, 1600 National Advocate, 875 Commercial Advertiser, 1200 The circulation of the Mercantile Advertiser, we are told by Thurlow Weed, who was then working on the Courier, was considered enormous. It seldom had more than one and a half or two columns of news, while Lang's Gazette frequently carried only a half column; so that the Evening Post was clearly the leading newspaper. People in the early twenties regarded it as a well estab- lished institution. Its editor had become one of the lesser notables of the city, like Dr. Hosack and Dr. MItchill; and we are informed by a contemporary that he "was pronounced by his advocates a field-marshal in literature, as well as politics." Poor as the newspapers of that time seem by modern standards, the Evening Post when compared with the London Times or the London Morning Post (for which Lamb and Coleridge wrote) was not discreditable to New York; it was not so well written, but it was as large and as energetic in news- gathering and editorial utterance. CHAPTER FOUR LITERATURE AND DRAMA IN THE EARLY '^EVENING POST" The infancy of the Evening Post coincided with the rise of the Knickerbocker school of letters, with which its relations were always intimate. Its first editor delighted in his old age to speak of his friendship with Irving, Hal- leck, Drake, and Paulding; while the second editor, Bry- ant, escaped inclusion with the Knickerbockers only by the fact that his poetry is too individual and independent to fit into any school at all. A mellow atmosphere hangs over the literary annals of New York early in the last century. We think of young Irving wandering past the stoops of quaint gabled houses, where the last representatives of the old Dutch burghers puffed their long clay pipes; or taking country walks within view of the broad Tappan Zee and the sum- mer-flushed Catskills, halting whenever he could get a good wife to favor him with her version of the legends of the countryside. We think of that brilliant rainbow which Halleck stopped to admire one summer evening in front of a coffee-house near Columbia College, ex- claiming: "If I could have my wish, it should be to lie in the lap of that rainbow and read Tom Campbell" ; of Paulding, Henry Brevoort, and others of the "nine worth- ies" holding high revel in "Cockloft Hall" on the out- skirts of Newark; and of Drake, the handsomest young man in town, like Keats studying medicine and poetry, and like Keats dying of consumption. We think of how the young men of the city were less interested in the news of Jena and Trafalgar than that Moore and Jeffrey had been arrested for fighting a duel, that Mr. Campbell had improved the leisure given him by a government pension by writing "Gertrude of Wyoming," and that "The Lay of the Last Minstrel" was the work of a Scotch border sheriff. 96 LITERATURE AND DRAMA 97 When the first Evening Post was laid on six hundred doorsteps and counters, New York was almost ready to assert her temporary primacy in literature. Irving was studying law downtown in the office of Brockholst Livings- ton; Paulding, four and a half years older, was living with his sister, Mrs. William Irving; Cooper was at school with an Englishman in Albany; Halleck was a child of eleven playing about the Guilford Green. Bryant at Cum- mington had not yet begun his juvenile scribblings, but would soon do so. Charles Brockden Brown had just re- turned to the city from a summer excursion, and was watching the sale of the second part of "Arthur Mervyn." Coleman sometimes met him at the homes of John Wells and Anthony Bleecker. The few Americans who paid any attention to letters had till now kept their gaze chiefly upon New England and Philadelphia. Dwight, the presi- dent of Yale, had just finished revising Watts's Psalms, Joel Barlow, after shining abroad as a diplomat and mak- ing a fortune in speculation, was living in state in Paris, and Trumbull, another of the Hartford Wits, had just become a Connecticut judge. Nothing better than the unreadable "Columbiad" of Barlow and Dwight's "Trav- els" was now to be expected from this trio. But in New York by 1805, though there was as yet little pure litera- ture, there was an intellectual and semi-literary atmos- phere. In addition to the young Knickerbockers, men- tion should be made of Tom Paine, dividing his last days, in debt, dirt, and dissipation, between New York and New Rochelle; and Philip Freneau, who frequently came over from his New Jersey seat. Washington Irving made his first appearance in the Morning Chronicle, his brother's journal, where at nine- teen he published his "Jonathan Oldstyle" papers. Nearly five years later he, his brother William, and his brother-in-law, Paulding, collaborated upon the "Sal- magundi Papers," issued in leaflet form "upon hot-pressed vellum paper, as that is held in highest estimation for buckling up young ladies' hair." The twenty numbers, full of whimsy, mock seriousness, and light satire, de- 98 THE EVENING POST lighted Coleman not as literature but as journalism. He saw that his long editorials attacking Jefferson's measures for coast defense were flimsy weapons compared with the humorous "Plans for Defending Our Harbor," which he copied in full, saying that it "hits off admirably some of the late philosophical, economical plans which our phi- losophical, economical administration seems to be intent on our adopting." The Evening Post termed the whole series "the pleasant observations of one who is a legiti- mate descendant of Rabelais, and a true member of the Butler, Swift, and Sterne family." Irving perhaps re- called this praise when the time came to announce his next work. The clever expedient by which announcement and ad- vertisement were joined is familiar to all readers of the "Knickerbocker History of New York." Irving handed to Coleman for publication in the Evening Post of Oct. 26, 1809, the following notice: Distressing Left his lodgings some time since, and has not since been heard of, a small elderly gentleman, dressed in an old black coat and cocked hat, by the name of Knickerbocker. As there are some reasons for believing he is not entirely in his right mind, and as great anxiety is entertained about him, any information concern- ing him, left either at the Columbian Hotel, Mulberry Street, or at the office of this paper, will be thankfully received. P. S. Printers of newspapers would be aiding the cause of humanity in giving an insertion to the above. Such notices were then not infrequent. An authentic account has been preserved of how, some years later, the Evening Post saved the life of a Vermonter named Stephen Bourne by publishing an appeal for information regarding the whereabouts of an eccentric fellow named Colvin, who had disappeared and of whose murder Bourne had just been convicted upon circumstantial evi- dence. This appeal was read aloud in one of the New York hotels. It occurred to one of the guests that his brother-in-law in New Jersey had a hired man whose de- LITERATURE AND DRAMA 99 scrlption answered to that given of Colvin; identification followed; and Bourne was released to fire a cannon at a general celebration of his deliverance. The news of Knickerbocker's disappearance caused much concern, and a city officer took under advisement the propriety of offering a reward. Within a fortnight a letter was published in the Eve- ning Post which described the appearance of Knicker- bocker trudging wearledly north from Kingsbridge. Two days later appeared in the Post an announcement by Seth Handaside, proprietor of the Columbian Hotel, that "a very curious kind of a written book" had been found in the room of Mr. Diedrich Knickerbocker, and that if he did not return to pay his bill, it would be disposed of to satisfy the charges. A preliminary advertisement of the two volumes of the Knickerbocker "History" was printed in the Evening Post of Nov. 28, by Innskeep and Brad- ford, with the price — $3. Because the Evening Post circulated among the most intelligent people of the city, and because it had never forgotten that one object stated in its prospectus was "to cultivate a taste for sound literature," it was chosen by Drake and Halleck as the medium for the most famous series of satirical poems, the "Biglow Papers" excepted, in American literature. Year in and year out, the Evening Post kept a space at the head of its news columns open for the best verse it could obtain. Just a month after it was established it plumed itself upon the publication of an original poem by the coarse but lively English satirist, "Peter Pindar" (Dr. John Wolcot), with whom Coleman corresponded. Wolcot is best remembered for verses ridiculing George III, and for his witticism that though George was a good subject for him, he was a poor subject to George. His contribution for Coleman, however, was not satiric, but a jejune three-stanza "Ode to the Lark." In 1803 the editor obtained a poem from the banker-poet Samuel Rogers, then regarded as a luminary of the first magni- tude. A year later he had the distinction of receiving 100 THE EVENING POST from the august hand of Thomas Moore himself, who was on a tour through America, a manuscript poem, which was published In the Evening Post of July 9 without a title, and may be found In Moore's works under the head- ing, "Lines Written on Leaving Philadelphia." Unfor- tunately, Coleman had to accompany the publication with an apology; for though Moore had requested that the verses, which express his gratitude for his reception in Philadelphia, be withheld until Joseph Dennle could print them In his Portfolio there, Coleman had indiscreetly lent a copy to friends, and they had become such public prop- erty that there was no reason for keeping them longer out of the Post. Much verse was also clipped from English periodicals and new English books, and it Is creditable to Coleman's taste that Wolfe's "Burial of Sir John Moore" and Byron's stanzas on Waterloo were reprinted immediately after their first publication. He received vast quantities of indifferent American verse, signed with assumed names — "Mercutio," "Sedley," "Puck," and "Paridel"— to- gether with some respectable nature poetry by "Mat- thew Bramble." In 1820-21 there were contributions from John Pierpont, the author of "Airs of Palestine," and Samuel Woodworth and George P. Morris, two minor Knickerbockers whose names are kept alive by "The Old Oaken Bucket" and "Woodman, Spare That Tree." We may be sure that keen young men like Hal- leck and Drake kept their eyes upon this poetical corner of the Evening Post, and Indeed, Halleck apeared in it as early as the fall of 18 18. He had come to town seven years previous, had taken a place in the counting room of Jacob Barker, a leading banker and merchant, had become intimate with Drake and attended his wedding, and had written many and published one or two songs. He frequently revisited his boyhood home at Guilford, Conn., and during a passage up the Sound one fine autumn evening he mentally composed the stanzas entitled "Twi- light." Immediately upon his return to New York he sent the verses anonymously to the Evening Post; and LITERATURE AND DRAMA loi though Coleman was exceedingly fastidious in his literary tastes, he gave the lines to the printer after a single read- ing. This was one of the first two poems which Halleck placed in his collected writings. On a crisp March evening the next year readers who opened the Evening Post at their tea-table saw in a promi- nent position among the few news items the following acknowledgement : Lines addressed to "Ennui" by "Croaker" are received, and shall have a place tomorrow. They are the production of genius and taste. A personal acquaintance with the author would be gratifying to the editor. The next day, March lo, the position of honor was given up to the poem. "We have received two more po- etic crackers of merit from our unknown correspondent, *Croaker,' " wrote Coleman, "which shall appear, all in good time. But we must husband them. His promise to furnish us with a few more similar trifles, though he tells us we must expect an occasional touch at ourselves or party, is received with a welcome and a smile." And on March ii, Croaker's lines, "On Presenting the Free- dom of the City to a Great General" — Jackson had just received that honor — were accompanied with another appeal: Is it not possible that we can have a personal and confidential interview with our friend "Croaker," at some time and place he will name? If he declines, will he inform me how he may be addressed by letter? In the meantime, whatever may happen (he, at least, will, before long, understand me), I expect from him discretion. Succeeding issues showed that the connection between Croaker and the Evening Post had become fixed and that the city was in for whole series of skits on men, manners, and events. On March 12 was printed the poem called "The Secret Mine Sprung at a Late Supper," dealing with a recent political episode; next day it was followed by verses, "To Mr. Potter, the Ventriloquist," then a 102 THE EVENING POST popular performer; on the 15th there appeared "To Mr. Simpson," addressed to the manager of the city's chief theater; and on the i6th two poems were printed at once. Most of the Knickerbocker art was imitative, and the Croaker poems were In a vein which had been much ex- ploited In England. "Peter Pindar," George Colman the younger, whose humorous poems entitled "Broad Grins" had run through edition after edition, Tom Moore, and those kings of parody, Horatio and James Smith, were the models whom Croaker and Co. con- sciously or unconsciously followed. The moment was a happy one for such bold and witty thrusts. Had they appeared when party feeling was running high before or during the war, they would have given mortal offense; but the tolerance accompanying the political era of good feeling robbed them of any sting. From Coleman's ef- forts to arrange an Interview with the authors, we may surmise that he feared some other editor would share the prize, and that he had suggestions for further squibs. His literary discernment was never better evinced than by his enthusiastic reception of the first Croaker contribution. A dull editor would have passed over the lines to ennui — which were only a facile expression of weariness with the new books by Lady Morgan and Mordecal M. Noah, the Edinburgh Review, Gen. Jackson's reception, Clin- ton's political prospects, and the Erie Canal plans — with- out perceiving their unusual qualities; a careless editor would have printed them without asking for more. Cole- man saw the possibility of indefinitely extending the satires. The origin of the poems had been purely casual. Hal- leck and Drake, the former now a prosperous and trusted aid of old Jacob Barker's, the latter a full-fledged physician recently returned from Europe, happened in their romantic attachment to spend a leisurely Sunday morning with a mutual acquaintance. As a diversion, Drake wrote several stanzas upon ennui, and Halleck capped them. They decided to send them to Coleman, and, if he would not publish them, to Mordecal N. Noah, William Coleman Editor-in-Chief 1801-1829. LITERATURE AND DRAMA 103 the Jewish journalist who had recently become editor of the Democratic National Advocate. Drake, returning to his home, also sent Coleman the two additional "crack- ers" which he acknowledged. The name "Croaker" then carried as distinct a meaning as would Dick Deadeye or Sherlock Holmes to-day, being that of the confirmed old grumbler In Goldsmith's "Good-Natured Man." Cole- man's request for a meeting was granted by the poets, who, as Halleck told his biographer, James Grant Wil- son, one evening knocked at the editor's door on Hudson Street: They were ushered into the parlor, the editor soon entered, the young poets expressed a desire for a few minutes' strictly private conversation with him, and the door being closed and locked, Dr. Drake said — "I am Croaker, and this gentleman, sir, is Croaker, Jr." Coleman stared at the young men with indescribable and unaffected astonishment, — at length exclaiming: "My God, I had no idea that we had such talents in America!" Halleck, with his characteristic modesty, was disposed to give Drake all the credit; but as it chanced that Coleman alluded in particularly glowing terms to one of the Croakers that was wholly his, he was forced to be silent, and the delighted editor continued in a strain of compliment and eulogy that put them both to the blush. Before taking their leave, the poets bound Coleman over to the most profound secrecy, and arranged a plan of sending him the MS., and of receiving the proofs, in a manner that would avoid the least possibility of the secret of their connection with the Evening Post being discovered. The poems were copied from the originals by LangstafF [an apothecary friend], that their handwriting should not divulge the secret, and were either sent through the mails, or taken to the Evening Post office by Benjamin R. Winthrop. The poems now followed in quick succession. On March 17 there was a sly skit upon the surgeon-general, Samuel Mitchill, the best-known — and most self-impor- tant — physician and scientist In the city, and a man noted in the history of Columbia College; the next day an ad- dress to John Minshull, a prominent merchant; on March 19 a poem of general theme, "The Man Who Frets"; on 104 THE EVENING POST March 20 and 25, verses upon Manager Simpson of the Park Theater again; and on March 23 lines "To John Lang, Esq.," the sturdy old editor of the Gazette. An apostrophe "To Domestic Peace" and "A Lament for Great Ones Departed" also appeared in March, as did two complimentary epistles in verse to the authors, se- lected by Coleman from "the multitude of imitators that the popularity of Croaker has produced." One writer spoke of Croaker and Co. as "the wits of the day and the pride of the age," while the other credited them with making "all Gotham at thy dashes stare." There was a pause early in April while Drake was out of town, and Coleman confessed that "on account of the public, we begin to be a little impatient." But the series re- commenced on April 8, and by May i, when a poem to William Cobbett, the eminent English journalist, then sojourning on Long Island, appeared, twenty-one had been printed. One Croaker contribution had meanwhile come out in Noah's National Advocate. After another pause, on May 29 the Evening Post published the gem of the whole collection, Drake's "The American Flag," with the final quatrain written by Halleck. Coleman prefaced this famous patriotic lyric with the remark that it was one of those poems which, as Sir Philip Sidney said of the old ballad of Chevy Chase, stir the heart like a trumpet. It might more truly be said that, with its blare of sound and pomp of imagery, it stirs the hearer like a full brass band. Probably not even Coleman realized how many generations of schoolboys would declaim : When freedom from her mountain height, Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night, And set the stars of glory there! The success of the "Salmagundi Papers" did not com- pare in immediacy or extent with that of the Croaker poems. Copies of the Evening Post, which now had 2,000 subscribers, passed from hand to hand. In homes, book- Stores, coffee-houses, taverns, and on the street corners LITERATURE AND DRAMA 105 every one, as Halleck wrote his sister on April i, was soon discussing the skits. "We have had the pleasure of seeing and of hearing ourselves praised, puffed, eulogized, execrated, and threatened as much as any writers since the days of Junius," he informed her. "The whole town has talked of nothing else for three weeks past, and every newspaper has done us the honor to mention us in some way, either of praise or censure, but all united in owning our talents and genius." The two young men, unused to seeing themselves in print, were tremendously elated. Once upon receiving a proof of some stanzas from the Evening Post, Drake laid his cheek down upon the lines and, with beaming eyes, exclaimed to his fellow-poet: "O, Halleck, isn't this happiness !" Most of the Croaker series, which was virtually concluded in June, though two poems now generally bracketed with them appeared in 1 82 1, were too much the product of joint labor to be assigned to one writer or the other; the theme suggested itself, and both would elaborate it. The newspapers received dozens of replies or imita- tions, Coleman once showing Halleck a sheaf of fifteen that had come in during a single morning. In spite of their local subjects, many of the poems were reprinted all over the North, and as far south as Washington. Wood- worth, who himself wrote not a little on New York affairs, successfully begged a contribution from Halleck for his magazine. It may be mentioned that Coleman took some liberties with the series. To one he prefixed a humorous letter, in another he inserted a couplet, and in a third he altered the overworked name Chloe to Julia. To modern readers the allusions to persons and events have lost their wit, and the historical interest they have gained is only partial compensation. We find little humor in the contretemps which occurred when Gen. Jackson, entertained by the city leaders, and already a Presidential possibility, threw the dinner into confusion by toasting De Witt Clinton, who as a former Federalist was heartily hated by many New York Democrats. Hence those io6 THE EVENING POST numbers seem the freshest which are most general in theme. The "Ode to Fortune" is better than the lines "To Simon," who was caterer at fashionable balls and weddings. "The Man Who Frets" is more interesting than "To Capt. Seaman Weeks," who was leading an in- dependent political movement against Tammany. Only here and there are jests that we still appreciate, as the advice to the theatrical manager to discharge his come- dians and hire the side-splitting legislators at Albany, and satire still comprehensible, as the verses upon Trum- bull's florid Revolutionary paintings, which now hang in the national Capitol: Go on, great painter! dare be dull — No longer after Nature dangle; Call rectilinear beautiful ; Find grace and freedom in an angle; Pour on the red, the green, the yellow, "Paint till a horse may mire upon it," And while I've strength to write or bellow, I'll sound your praises in a sonnet. But the skits are almost a catalogue of the worthies of the town. The prominent merchants were represented by such names as Henry Cruger, Nathaniel Prime, John K. Beekman, and John Jacob Astor. The politicians — Henry Meigs, who voted for admitting Missouri, Clinton, Morgan Lewis, Rufus King, and others — -had more atten- tion than any other group. Croaker had much fun at the expense of the chief hotel-keepers: Abraham Martling, owner of the Tammany Hall Hotel, and a political figure of importance, William Niblo, whose restaurant at Wil- liam and Pine Streets was popular, and Cato Alexander, to whose tavern on the postroad four miles out all the young bucks made summer excursions. The stage folk received generous space, among them James W. Wallack and Miss Catherine Lesugg, later Mrs. James Hackett, whose family names were to figure so prominently in American theatrical history. Fifty years later James Hackett himself contributed to the Evening Post an LITERATURE AND DRAMA 107 interesting chapter of reminiscences of Halleck, recalling how they had first become friends when they were both admirers of the blooming Miss Lesugg, then fresh from England, and how they maintained the friendship till Halleck's death. Even the editors — Coleman, Lang, Woodworth, "whose Chronicle died broken-hearted," and Spooner of Brooklyn — were not spared by Croaker. Newspapers, however, usually establish a literary rep- utation not by original poetry, but by literary criticism, and we may well stop to examine the Evening Post^s rec- ord in this field. It was slightly handicapped by the fact that between 1801 and the appearance of "The Spy" in 1 82 1 there was virtually nothing worth criticizing. Charles Brockden Brown had finished his career as a novelist before the Evening Post was fairly launched. Irving was silent after his publication of the Knicker- bocker "History" until the first part of "The Sketch- Book" appeared in 18 19. In verse almost nothing but that marvelous piece of boyish inspiration, "Thanatop- sis," is now remembreed. Patriotic Americans of the day, like Coleman, made a painful effort to believe that Alls- ton's "Sylphs of the Seasons," Paine's "Juvenile Poems," Mrs. Sigourney's "Moral Pieces," and Pierpont's "Airs of Palestine" were very nearly as good as the literature coming from the pens of Byron, Coleridge, Scott, Words- worth, Keats, and Shelley; but the pretense was a ghastly mockery. Most of the early book notices in the Evening Post were of two useful kinds : they were either an examination of political pamphlets for party ends, or a gutting of new books of travel, biography, and history for their news value. From the very commencement of the journal, many columns of matter were furnished by the various pamphlets called forth by Vice-President Burr's attempted suppression of John Wood's "History of the Administra- tion of John Adams" ; for this internecine warfare among Democrats delighted all Federalists. In the first days of 1803 pamphlets upon the annexation of Louisiana began to demand selection and comment. Then came pamphlets io8 THE EVENING POST upon the embargo, non-intercourse, impressment, and the conduct of the British minister, Jackson. The original publication of the very effective pamphlet by a "New England Farmer" upon "Mr. Madison's War" was in installments in the Evening Post during the summer of 1 8 1 2. Gouverneur Morris inspired the newspaper's care- ful attention to the Erie Canal question; one evidence of its interest in the subject was a series of articles in the spring of 1807, reviewing the writings of "Agricola" upon it. The books which were gutted were sometimes exceed- ingly interesting. Thus in 18 16 Coleman published copi- ous extracts from James Simpson's "Visit to Flanders," a vivid account of Waterloo and other battlefields as they appeared the month after Napoleon's defeat. In 18 17 much was made of Cadwallader Colden's "Life of Ful- ton," and two years later of M. M. Noah's entertaining "Travels in England, France, Spain, and the Barbary States." The extracts from O'Meara's memoirs of Na- poleon, printed in 1822, led Coleman into an attack upon Napoleon's jailer at St. Helena, Sir Hudson Lowe; and when Col. Wm. L. Stone of the Commercial Advertiser came to Lowe's defense, an animated controversy fol- lowed. It was part of Coleman's editorial creed to beat the big drum for American letters. Most of the Knicker- bocker writers were themselves really provincial in liter- ary matters, keeping always a nervous and envious eye upon England; for it was the period when, as Lowell puts it, we thought Englishmen's thought, and with English salt on her tail our wild eagle was caught. This pro- vincialism frequently expressed itself in an insistence that America was, not America, but a bigger England, and that the Hudson was not the Hudson, but a nobler Thames. Coleman thought it his duty to encourage native literature, and the amount of fifth-rate verse that was given patriotic praise in the Evening Post is dismaying. The ode of Robert Treat Paine, jr., "Rule New Eng- land," was commended with a warmth that owed some- LITERATURE AND DRAMA 109 thing to Coleman's intimacy with the elder Paine. Per- sonal considerations also had their share In the flattering notice of Winthrop Sargent's "Boston" the next year. Coleman was one of the few who has ever closed Peter Quince's "Parnassian Shop" "with Impressions favorable to the young author." In 1805 he was struck by the "Democracy Unveiled" of Thomas Green Fessenden, a poetaster who had got some notice by writing a success- ful book while Imprisoned for debt in Fleet Street, Lon- don. Francis Arden received favorable mention for a translation of Ovid, while another very minor bard, Rich- ard B. Davis, who before his premature death had been a friend of Irving and Paulding, was generously praised In 1807. The Post published a review of Plerpont's "Airs of Palestine" by Henry Brevoort, Irvlng's bosom friend, and pronounced it indispensable to any American library. It thought Halleck's amusing satire on a New York merchant family In society, "Fanny," a better poem than Byron's "Beppo," whose verse It Imitated. Byron's popularity at this time was such that when his "Mazeppa" was published in England, a copy was hurried to Phila- delphia by the fast ship Helen, was placed In the printer's hands at 2 p. m., and twenty-two hours later the volumes were issuing from the press complete and being rushed to the bookstores. But there were a few books that live. After Brockden Brown's death in 18 10, we find repeated mention of him, "amiable and beloved by all his acquaintances," by Cole- man. "Wieland" the editor thought worthy of his powers; and he remarked of "Ormond" that the reason why it was formal and uninteresting was, as he personally knew, that It was "written by stinted tasks of so many pages a day, and sent to the printer without correction or revision, or even reading over, till It came back to him in proof." One of Coleman's last contributions to the Eve- ning Post was a short notice of a new set of Brown. He singled out for remark the fact that the novelist seldom troubled to give minute descriptions of sensible objects. "These he generally dispatches with a few brief and bold no THE EVENING POST touches, and bends his whole strength to the speculative parts of the work, to follow out trains of reflection and the analysis of feelings." In 1806 the Evening Post car- ried a half dozen articles upon Noah Webster's new octavo dictionary of the English language, condemning it as to definitions, orthography, and orthoepy, and quarrel- ing violently with some of Webster's grammatical and etymological opinions. The reviewer accused Webster of grossly misrepresenting the views of the English lexicog- rapher Walker. Webster replied in two long and forcible articles, compelling the reviewer to admit some mistakes. Irving's career was closely followed by the Post. It defended his Knickerbocker "History" against the em- battled Dutch families, led by Gulian C. Verplanck, who charged that he had defamed them. When the first part of "The Sketch Book" appeared, a prompt review was contributed by "a literary friend," probably Brevoort or Paulding. Warmly eulogistic, it is still discriminating. It commended Irving for his "grace of style; the rich, warm tone of benevolent feeling; the freely-flowing vein of hearty and happy humor, and the fine-eyed spirit of ob- servation, sustained by an enlightened understanding, and regulated by a perception or fitness — a tact — wonderfully quick and sure." It declared "Rip Van Winkle" the masterpiece of the collection. "For that comic spirit which is without any infusion of gall, which delights in what is ludicrous rather than what is ridiculous (for its laughter is not mixed with contempt), which seeks its gratification in the eccentricities of a simple, unrefined state of society, rather than in the vicious follies of arti- ficial life; for the vividness and truth, with which Rip's character is drawn, and the state of society in the village where he lived, is depicted; and for the graceful ease with which it is told, the story of Rip Van Winkle has few competitors." Unfortunately, Coleman added a footnote in which he stated his personal opinion that "Rip Van Winkle" lacked probability, and that the poetical tale of "The Wife" was superior. Six weeks later the second part of "The Sketch Book" LITERATURE AND DRAMA iii was reviewed with equal taste by apparently the same hand — that of some one who knew how hard Irving was hit by the death of his fiancee, and his circumstances abroad. At the beginning of 1823 Coleman himself wrote two long articles in praise of the new "Brace- bridge Hall," declaring that he had undertaken the task of rescuing it "from the rude and ill-natured treat- ment of some of our American critics"; the Literary Re- pository and two newspapers of Philadelphia and Balti- more having assailed it. One reason for its ill-natured reception, he thought, was the high charge made for the American edition, and another the kindly view it took of British life and manners. He showed no little acquaint- ance with Irving's personal affairs, and probably had seen some of his letters home. One epistle, written late in 1 8 19, and telling of the essayist's acquaintanceships in London, had been copied out by Mrs. Hoffman, mother of Irving's dead sweetheart, for the Evening Post, Those were the days in which Sydney Smith's taunt, "Who reads an American book?" struck home. In 1820 Coleman recorded with pride that the rage for new publications was so great that "not a day passes but the press is delivered of two or more"; though he re- ferred to magazines as well as books. On Sept. 4, 1823, he boasted that such value was becoming attached to American literature in Great Britain that its republica- tion was profitable. A Scotch publisher had begun issu- ing selections from Irving, Brooks, Percival, and others in a miscellany circulated from Edinburgh. "Our sun has certainly arisen, and one day, we predict, it will beam as bright as it does, or ever did, in the Old World; and the Americans who may arise in future ages will not have to blush on hearing their classics named with the great- est of antiquity." More space was consistently given by the Evening Post to reviews of plays than to book notices. In fact, the keen interest of New Yorkers in the theater had produced very competent dramatic criticism before the newspaper was founded. William Dunlap, the famous manager- 112 THE EVENING POST playwright of the time, tells us that in 1796 there was organized in the city a little group of critics, including Dr. Peter Irving, Charles Adams, son of John Adams, Samuel Jones, William Cutting, and John Wells, the law- partner of Coleman. They would take turns writing a criticism of the evening's play, and meet next day to dis- cuss and revise it before handing it to one of the news- papers. Their meetings had ended before 1801, but after the Evening Post began publication several of the group, and especially Wells, wrote much for the new journal. The theater was the more prominent in Old New York because the variety of public entertainments in and just after 1803 was small. Those with a literary turn of mind might drop in at the Shakespeare Gallery on Park Street, which afforded a "belles lettres lounge" — that is, a table laden with newspapers and magazines of the day, and soft seats in a well-lighted room, for $1.50 a year. Those with scientific tastes could go to the Museum on Broadway, with its curiosities ranging from mastodon bones to a representation of Gen. Butler being toma- hawked by the Osages, and another of Mrs. Rawllngs and her six infants at a birth. There was a thin stream of entertainers — magicians, who were approved because their illusions taught the young to beware of wily rogues; ventriloquists, balloonists, rare at first and objects of supreme Interest, exhibitors of lions and tapirs, and novel- ties like the Eskimo whom a sea captain brought to town and who gave aquatic exhibitions on the Hudson. In summer the public had several open-air amusement places. One named Vauxhall was situated near the top of the Bowery, offering music, fireworks, and refreshments. An- other was the Columbian Gardens, and the most ambitious was the Mt. Vernon Gardens. In winter, one of the chief fashionable events was the annual concert of the Philhar- monic Society, held impressively at Tontine Hall on Broadway, and consisting half of instrumental music, half of vocal solos from now forgotten operas like the "Siege of Belgrade." About New Year's began the select LITERATURE AND DRAMA 113 dances of the City Assembly, in the assembly rooms in William Street. Here young ladies made their debut, the finest gowns were exhibited, and the bucks showed a skill acquired at the dancing school of M. Lalliet. This list of amusements comes near being exhaustive, and the Park Theater was always the center of attrac- tion. The building, fronting on Park Row, had been completed in 1798 at a cost placed by the Evening Post — no doubt an overestimate — at $130,500. The charge was $1 for box seats, of which there were at first three full circle tiers, and after 1807 four; 75 cents to the pit, and 50 cents to the gallery. Early in the century per- formances began at 6:30, and at 9:30; the first play was usually followed by a farcical after-piece. Washington Irving as a lad used to pretend to go to bed after prayers, descend to the ground by way of the roof of a woodshed, and slip away to see this final performance. The Evening Post gives us a good deal of information about the man- agement of the theater, which was under Dunlap until 1808, and then under Cooper and Price. In its first issue Dunlap appealed to his patrons against the dan- gerous practice of "smoaking," saying that the use of cigars was a constant topic for ridicule by European trav- elers. From Coleman's later comments we learn that no woman would for a moment have thought of sitting anywhere but in the boxes, and that no gentleman would have shared the gallery with the rough crowd that filled it. Even the pit, with its dirty, broken floor, its backless benches, and its incursions of rats from crannies under the stage, would now be considered hardly tolerable. About the entrance there always clustered a set of idle boys and disorderly adults who, when spectators left during an intermission or before the after-piece, set up a clamor for the return checks. Efforts to stop the gift or sale of these checks were in general futile. The interior was renovated in 1807, enlargements were made to give a total of 2,372 seats, patent lamps were installed, and a room above the lobby was fitted up as a bar and 114 THE EVENING POST restaurant. Still further improvements were made in 1809. The independent and severe criticisms of the acting which appeared in the Evening Post, and to a lesser extent in Irving's Morning Chronicle^ were not at first relished- by theatrical folk. The names of the actors and actresses, Cooper, Fennell, Hallam, Turnbull, Mrs. Johnson, and so on are now all but forgotten. In Boston in 1802 dramatic criticism was written largely by performers themselves, who sat up till an early hour to insure proper newspaper notices, and in Charleston the same practice had been known. In all cities most actors held that no one was really competent to serve as a critic unless he was familiar with the performances at the two great London theaters. So irritated did the dramatic guild become that in January, 1802, there was produced at the theater a satire upon the Evening Post reviews, written by Fennell and called "The Wheel of Truth." It was designed to show one Littlewit, a newspaper critic, in a ludicrous and foolish light. He was represented as finding fault with Stuart's portrait of Washington because by the footrule the head was a half-inch too long, and with a certain book because for the same price he could buy one twice as heavy. Coleman answered this attack in ^vt columns published in two issues, which was five columns more than it deserved. He, Wells, and Anthony Bleecker continued reviewing, and a contemporary writer records that he "aimed to settle all criticism by his individual verdict." Upon most of the plays there was little to say, for they were long familiar to readers and theater-goers. Shakespeare was given year in and year out, a full dozen of his dramas. Others of the Elizabethans, including Ben Jonson, Marlowe ("The Jew of Malta"), Massin- ger, Middleton, and Beaumont and Fletcher, were occa- sionally seen. Otway's "Venice Preserved" was some- thing of a favorite. The comedies of Sheridan, Gold- smith, and Fielding had regular representations. George Colman's plays, especially "John Bull," were highly pop- ular, John Home's "Douglas" was always sure of a house, LITERATURE AND DRAMA 115 and for the first two decades of the century Kotzebue was much played and admired; while many of Scott's novels and poems were dramatized. The Evening Post said of the first performance of "Marmion," in 1 8 1 2, that it "presents a chef-d'oeuvre of melodramatic excellence." In William Dunlap at first, and later in M. M. Noah, New York had its own rather crude dramatists. When the latter's patriotic play, "She Would be a Soldier; or, The Plains of Chippewa," was presented in 18 19, Cole- man spoke of it coldly, suggesting that the plot had been inspired by the French tale of "Lindor et Clara, ou la Fille Soldat," and admitting only that "it is not deficient in interest." But he applauded Noah's "Siege of Tripoli" next year as deserving what it met, "a greater degree of success than we ever recollect to have attended an ori- ginal piece on our stage." Its vivacity, its martial ardor, its declamation, he thought calculated to arouse a high and manly patriotism. Nearly the whole of the criticisms, however, had to be given up not to plays, but to perform- ers and interpretations of parts. It was only toward the end of Coleman's long editor- ship that the first brilliant chapter in the history of the New York stage began. The actor of greatest note be- fore the War of 18 12 was George Frederick Cooke, who was warmly applauded by the Evening Post in a run which began at the Park Theater in November, 18 10, and who lies buried in St. Paul's churchyard. It is interesting to note that during the war English stage-folk, for most of the actors and actresses of the day were English, continued to play before admiring audiences. An engage- ment which the manager had made with Philip Kemble was suspended; but the Evening Post announced in August, 18 12, when fighting was general, that the well- known London actor Holman and his daughter had just sailed, and they had a successful New York engagement that autumn. The Evening Post in 18 19 greatly admired the English singer and actor Phillipps, and Coleman's praise helped to bring him $9,900 gross in six benefit nights. It had a warm word for Catherine Lesugg and ii6 THE EVENING POST for James W. Wallack, when they made their New York debut in September, 1818. But the first great dramatic event at the Park Theater was the initial American ap- pearance, on Nov. 29, 1820, of Edmund Kean in "Richard III." Kean was in his early thirties, and for a half dozen years, since his first triumphant season at Drury Lane in 1 8 14, New York had been hearing of his magnificent powers. Coleman went to the theater that autumn night suspicious that most of his reputation had been acquired by stage trickery and appeals to the groundlings. He saw a man below the middle stature, and heard a voice thin and grating in its upper tones. "But," admitted the editor, "he had not finished his soliloquy before our preju- dices gave way, and we saw the most complete actor, in our judgment, that ever appeared on our boards." The eyes were wonderfully expressive and commanding, and in its lower register the voice, said Coleman, "strikes with electric force upon the nerves, and at times chills the very blood." He declared, in an enthusiasm which recalls Coleridge's remark that seeing Kean play was like reading Shakespeare by lightning flashes: We had been induced to suppose that it was only in the more important scenes that we should see Kean's superiority, and that the lighter passages would, in theatrical phrase, be walked over. Far otherwise; he gave to what has heretofore seemed the most trivial, an interest and effect never by us imagined. The most striking point he made in the whole play (for we cannot notice the many minor beauties he exhibited) was his manner of waking and starting from his couch, with the cry of "Give me a horse — bind up my wounds! Have mercy, heaven! Ha, soft, 'twas but a dream." . . . This, with all that followed, was so admirable; bespeaking a soul, so harrowed up by remorse, so loaded with his guilt, as gave such an awful and impressive lesson to youth, that no one who witnessed it can ever forget it. When Kean played in "The Merchant of Venice," ac- cording to the Evening Post, the audience hung so breath- less upon him that "when it was almost impossible to LITERATURE AND DRAMA 117 restrain loud bursts of delight, a kind of general 'hush I' was whispered from every part." Many thought that his best role was Sir Giles Overreach, and an anonymous critic In the Evening Post said so. Coleman wrote that the effect he produced as King Lear was Indescribable: Strong emotions even to tears were excited in ail parts of the house ; nor were they confined to the female part of the audience. It could not be otherwise. Who could remain callous to the appearance of a feeble old monarch, upwards of fourscore years, staggering under decrepitude and overwhelmed with misfortunes, attended with aberration of mind which ends in downright mad- ness? Such a representation was given with perfect fidelity by Mr. Kean. His plaintive tones were heard from the bottom of a broken heart, and completed the picture of human woe. Nature, writhing under the poignancy of her feeling, and finding no ut- terance in words or tears, found a vent at length for her inde- scribable sensations in a spontaneous, idiotic laugh. The impres- sion made upon all who were present, will never be forgotten. His dreadful imprecations upon his daughters, his solemn appeals to heaven, struck the soul with awe. On the final night, Dec. 28, according to the report in the Evening Post, the theater rang with unprecedented plaudits, and at the close the audience rose by common Impulse and cheered Kean three times three. But when Kean returned to New York in 1825 he was greeted with a storm of mixed applause and anger — his first night was the night of the famous "Kean Riot." In 1 82 1 he had accepted a summer engagement in Boston, and on the third night, finding the theater almost empty because of the heat, refused to go on with the play, thereby giving great offense. Moreover, after his return to England, reports of his flagrant Immorality reached America. When the Commercial Advertiser heard of his second tour. It denounced him as a shameless "scoundrel" and "libertine." Coleman, however, was eager to defend him. The Park Theater opened on Kean's first night, Nov. 14, at 5 130, and It was at once filled with a crowd of more than 2,000. Seven-eighths, according to the Eve- ning Post, were eager to hear Kean, but about one hun- ii8 THE EVENING POST dred, many of them Bostonlans, made up an organized opposition. The moment the actor stepped forward, the groans, hisses, and shouts of "Off KeanI" mingled with the clapping and the cheers of his friends, were deafening. The play proceeded amid a continued uproar. Some few scenes In the fourth and fifth acts were heard, but the others. Including all in which Kean appeared, were given in dumb show. The actor tried repeatedly to address the audience, but In vain. At one point he was struck In the chest by an orange. One interrupter was put out by the Infuriated audience, and fights occurred in various parts of the pit, with damage to benches and furniture. It would be pleasant to say that the Evening Post roundly denounced this disgraceful scene, but It rebuked It only mildly. Fortunately, the outrage was not re- peated. Kean Issued a mollifying address, the Bostonlans went home, and a reaction ensued. As the Evening Post records, every one of his houses was filled to overflowing, and when he took his benefit night on Feb. 25, 1826, upon leaving, his receipts were $1,800 clear. Compared with that of Kean, the debut of Junius Brutus Booth, made in "Richard III" on the night of Oct. 5, 1 82 1, attracted little attention. He came to the city a perfect stranger, and slowly made his way. When Edwin Forrest appeared at the New York Theater, in the Bowery, In the autumn of 1826, the Evening Post pronounced this American-born actor as good as any but the very foremost Englishmen — "irresistibly Impos- ing," indeed. But the only engagement comparable with Kean^s was that of Macready, who made his bow on Oct. 3, 1826, as VIrglnius In the well-known tragedy of that name by Knowles. He was greeted so enthusiasti- cally that he was disconcerted, and many thought him no better than their old favorite. Cooper. But on the sec- ond night, when he Impersonated Macbeth, his genius was perceived. Coleman wrote that he had never seen the role embodied so consistently. "There was a unity in his conception of character, which made the development LITERATURE AND DRAMA 119 of Macbeth's feelings and prompting motives . . . per- fectly Intelligible, from hfs first Interview with the weird sisters to the final overthrow of all his hopes, and his des- perate conflict with Macduff." The New York which Macready visited in 1826 was no longer a city of one playhouse, though when people spoke of ''the theatre" they still always meant that on Park Row. The people could now support more than one star and one company at a time. Macready finished his October engagement on the 20th, and was immediately followed by Mr. and Mrs. James K. Hackett, In the first American performance of "The Comedy of Errors." At the Chatham Theater, Junius Brutus Booth was playing Shakespeare; on the 25th he gave "Othello," with James Wallack as lago. Mrs. Gilbert at the New York Thea- ter, a brand-new edifice in the Bowery, seating 3,000 spec- tators, was presenting "Much Ado About Nothing." She was succeeded the next month by Forrest In a reper- tory of plays. The Evening Post that spring had sur- prised many by stating that the profits of the Chatham Theater the previous season had been $23,000, and the gross receipts $75,000. Of the former sum "The Lady of the Lake" alone, a play with musical numbers inter- spersed, had yielded $10,000. The newspaper was de- lighted when the Hacketts received, on their three bene- fit nights In "The Comedy of Errors," a total of $3,500. This was actually $1,100 more than the balloonist, Eugene Robertson, took one afternoon that month when he floated from Castle Garden to Elizabeth, N. J., in the presence of a crowd estimated at more than 40,000. The day when the Evening Post should have a musical editor was as far distant as that when it should give to sports more than a semi-annual paragraph or two upon the races. But Coleman enthusiastically reviewed the first Italian opera offered in the city — a performance of Rossini's "Barber of Seville" at the New York Thea- ter on Nov. 29, 1825. The fashion of the town turned out to see this Italian troupe, headed by Seiior Garcia, on every Tuesday and Saturday during the middle of the I20 THE EVENING POST winter; paying $2 for box seats and $i for the pit. "In what language shall we speak of an entertainment so novel in this country?" asked the editor: All have obtained a general idea of the opera by report. But report can give but a faint idea of it. Until it is seen, it will never be believed that a play can be conducted in recitative or singing and yet appear nearly as natural as the ordinary drama. We were last night surprised, delighted, enchanted ; and such were the feelings of all who witnessed the performance. The repeated plaudits with which the theater rang were unequivocal, unaffected bursts of rapture. Would American taste approve of the opera? "We pre- dict," Coleman ventured, "that it will never hereafter dispense with it." M CHAPTER FIVE BRYANT BECOMES EDITOR OF THE "EVENING POST ?» In 1829 Richard H. Dana, the poet and father of the author of "Two Years Before the Mast," remarked that "If Bryant must write in a paper to get his bread, I pray God he may get a bellyful." Bryant had entered the office of the Evening Post in the summer of 1826, half by accident and without any intention of making journal- ism his profession; yet he was to remain there fifty-two years, till the very day he received his death-stroke. No other great figure in American literature save Dr. Frank- lin has such a record as a publicist. How did it happen that the foremost poet in America, already known as such by "Thanatopsis" and "To a Waterfowl," became the "junior editor" of the Evening Post in Coleman's de- clining years? The young poet-lawyer had come to New York city from Great Barrington, Mass., at the beginning of 1825, when he was but thirty years old, brought thither by Henry D. Sedgwick and Gulian C. Verplanck, two citi- zens of substance and influence who had been struck by the genius shown in his first volume of verse. The Sedg- wicks were a well-known Berkshire family. Catharine M. Sedgwick, later modestly famous as a novelist, was the first to make Bryant's acquaintance, and had strongly commended the struggling barrister to her older brother Henry, who was a leader at the New York bar. With neither his profession nor with life in a small town was Bryant contented ; and the applause which had been given to "Thanatopsis" in the North American Review, to "The Ages" when he read it before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, and to his first thin volume in 1821, seemed to justify his hopes for a metropolitan literary career. "The time is peculiarly propitious," Henry Sedg- 121 i 122 T15F EVENING POST wick urged him from New York; "the Athenaeum, just Instituted, Is exciting a sort of literary rage, and It Is pro- posed to set up a journal In connection with It." If his pen did not yield a full living, he could make an additional sum by giving lessons to foreigners In the English lan- guage and literature. Bryant willingly yielded. Leaving his wife and baby behind, he settled in a boarding house that spring, and became one of the two editors of the monthly New York Review, the first number of which appeared in June, 1825. His arrival to reside In New York had attracted gen- eral notice. To all discerning lovers of literature In the city, and they were many, his best poems were well known. Verplanck had given his first volume a cordial review in the New York American, and when he had made a pre- liminary visit to the city In 1824 the Evening Post had reprinted "Thanatopsis" with a warm word of praise. At the homes of Sedgwick and Verplanck, the former a sort of Holland House for New York, Bryant was at once made acquainted with Fitzgreene Halleck and J. G. Perclval, with the aspiring young poets Hillhouse and Robert Sands, with the artists S. B. F. Morse and Dunlap, with Chancellor Kent and President Duer of Columbia. We may be sure that Coleman, who was proud of his friendship with Brockden Brown and Irving, did not fail to seek out the young New Englander who had come from near his former home, and whose poem "Green River" celebrated a stream that Coleman knew well. On Nov. 16, 1825, the Evening Post republished from the New York Review Bryant's "The Death of the Flowers," on March 3, 1826, It took from a magazine his "To a Cloud," and on June 11 It reprinted "The Song of Pit- cairn's Island"; while various flattering references were made to his work. Yet Bryant's position was a precarious and anxious one. He wrote his friend Dana that, relieved as he was to get out of his "shabby" profession as a lawyer, in which he had been shocked by a bad miscarriage of justice and by the petty wrangles in which he was involved, he was BRYANT BECOMES EDITOR 123 not sure that he had found a better. Reviewing books was not the most congenial of employments. His salary was at first $1,000 a year; but the Review drooped, and after an effort had been made to bolster it up by amal- gamation with two other periodicals, Bryant found him- self in the early summer of 1826 co-editor of the United States Review and Literary Gazette, with a quarter ownership and a salary of only $500. His confidence in his ability to live by his pen was so shaken that he ob- tained a permit to practice law in the city courts, and was actually associated with Henry Sedgwick in a case. At this juncture, in the middle of June, William Cole- man was thrown from his gig by a runaway horse. It was for a time doubted whether he would recover, and as he was confined to his room for ten weeks, it was nec- essary to find some one to assist his son on the Evening Post. A temporary position was offered Bryant, and Verplanck and others earnestly counselled him to take it. ''The establishment is an extremely lucrative one,'* wrote Bryant. "It is owned by two individuals — Mr. Coleman and Mr. Burnham. The profits are estimated at about thirty thousand dollars a year — fifteen to each proprietor. This is better than poetry and magazines." Throughout July Bryant was busy upon the Evening Post; on Aug. 2 he wrote an account of the Columbia Commencement for it, criticizing the young speakers for confusing "will" and "shall"; and on Aug. 12 he fur- nished It two brief poetic translations, from Clement Marot and Dante, neither of which is Included In his col- lected works. Immediately thereafter he set out on a trip to Boston, to bear to Richard H. Dana also an offer from the Evening Post of a permanent place on Its staff, which Dana, after some hesitation, refused. This trip was made possible by Coleman's renewed attention to the journal. The poet's absence gave the Evening Post an opportunity to speak highly of Bryant, whom it now considered a full staff-member. On Aug. 21-22 it re- published his poem "The Two Graves" from the United States Review, writing of the accomplished author as one 124 THE EVENING POST to whom, "by the general assent of the enlightened por- tion of his countrymen 'The lyre and laurels both are given With all the trophies of triumphant day.' " Another evidence of the high esteem in which the news- paper held Bryant appeared when on Sept. 5 it translated from the Revue Encyclopedique of Paris a flattering no- tice of "the exquisite and finished beauty of the little poems from the pen of W. C. Bryant." The French magazine credited "the poet of the Green River" with having destroyed "the too commonly received opinion that the moral and physical features of the New World are too cold and serene for the glorious visions of poetry." In October Coleman spoke of the editors of the United States Review as "men whose labors heretofore have contributed so much to the elevation of the American character in the republic of letters" ; and he reprinted Bryant's "Mary Magdalene." The poet returned from Boston via Cummington, and brought his wife with him to live. It was made clear to readers that fall that there was a new and vigorous hand in the management of the jour- nal. Coleman's steady loss of health had been accom- panied by a decline in the strength of his editorial utter- ances. Moreover, he was an editor of the old school that had passed away with the era of good feeling, and that was now out of place. He liked to fight over old battles — he debated the Hartford Convention with Theodore Dwight, and the Florida Purchase with the National Ad- vocate. His newspaper was neither Whig nor Democrat, but might best be described as a Federalist sheet quali- fied by a mild attachment to Andrew Jackson. In the Presidential election of 1824 it had supported Crawford simply because Coleman hated John Quincy Adams as a traitor to Federalism. It was prosperous, for Michael Burnham, still an active man, saw to that. It had im- proved in many respects. In 18 16 it had been enlarged to offer six columns to the page, instead of five, or twenty- BRYANT BECOMES EDITOR 125 four in all, and the amount of miscellaneous matter had increased; a short time earlier It had begun printing two editions, one at two and the other at four p. m. ; in May, 1 8 19, It had used its first news illustration, a rough draw- ing of "the velocipede, or swift-walker" ; and In January, 18 17, it had begun to make a very rare use of the first page for news. But the journal tended too much to look backward, not forward. Bryant's son-in-law and biographer, Parke Godwin, states that in the years 1826-29 we can trace his labors in the Evening Post in longer and better book reviews, more attention to art, clearer characterizations of public men, and frequent suggestions of reform In city affairs. This is in part misleading. The frequent suggestions for local improvements were an old feature of the journal, and did not become more numerous. Characterizations of public men were not often written nor were they important. More books were noticed, especially those of Bliss & White and the young firm of Harpers, because there were more books — the Post remarked that in the last three months of 1825 no less than 233 volumes had come from the American press, apart from periodicals, of which 137 were original American works; but mere no- tices were furnished, not reviews. More than once Bryant, who unmistakably penned these notices, apolo- gizes for their brevity and sketchiness by saying that he had not had time to do more than glance through the book in hand. However, the frequency of these notices, and the Inclusion of much literary gossip and book an- nouncements, gave the newspaper an increased literary flavor. There was, as Godwin says, more news of art, for Bryant was Interested in painting, and supplied long criti- cal descriptions of new canvases by Dunlap and Wash- - ington Allston, both his friends. There was an increased amount of news about Columbia College and those pro- fessors, Anthon, Da Ponte, and Henry J. Anderson, whom Bryant knew well. The English magazines and newspapers were read more diligently, and interesting 126 THE EVENING POST items from them grew in number. Bryant took in charge the filling of the upper left-hand corner of the news- page with poetry, and we see fresher and better verse there — verse by Thomas Hood, Bishop Heber, Hartley Coleridge, and other Englishmen who preceded Tenny- son and Browning. The poet wrote some fresh little essays; as editor of the United States Review, for exam- ple, he had compiled a curious article from an old colonial file of the New York Gazette, and he made another on the same topic equally curious, for the Evening Post. A few of the essays were satirical — e.g., one of April 23, 1828, dealing with the fashion of indiscriminate puffery that had grown up in dramatic criticism. Between 1826 and his departure upon a trip to Europe in June, 1834, Bryant — with one exception to be noted later — wrote no signed verse for the Evening Post, re- serving his few productions, since he was too busy for much poetical composition, for the magazines and an- nuals. But several effusions from his pen can nevertheless be identified. In the first two months of 1829 the town was much interested by the courageous woman lecturer, one of the first of the long line which has struggled to enlarge woman's sphere. Miss Fanny Wright. Bryant, as his letters show, wrote the rather scornful ode to this free-thinking disciple of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, which appeared in the issue of Jan. ^ : Thou wonder of the age, from whom Religion waits her final doom, Her quiet death, her euthanasia, Thou in whose eloquence and bloom The age beholds a new Aspasia! * * * * * ♦ O 'tis a glorious sight for us. The gaping throng, to see thee thus The light of dawning truth dispense. While Col. Stone, the learn'd and brave, The press's Atlas, mild but grave. Hangs on the words that leave thy mouth, Slaking his intellectual drouth, BRYANT BECOMES EDITOR 127 In that rich stream of eloquence, And notes thy teachings, to repeat Their wisdom in his classic sheet . . . Another bit of verse, a short political satire (March 25, 1831), is identifiable by the fact that it is signed "Q," the initial Bryant used for dramatic criticism, and that it is marked as his in the files presented by the Evening Post to the Lenox Collection. Called "The Bee in the Tar Barrel," it represents the buzzings of the National Gazette — Henry Clay's organ in New York — over the tariff, the removal of the Cherokees, and other current topics : I heard a bee, on a summer day. Brisk, and busy, and ripe for quarrel — Bustling, and buzzing, and bouncing away, In the fragrant depths of an old tar-barrel. Do you ask what his buzzing was all about? Oh, he was wondrous shrewd and critical. 'Twas sport to hear him scold and flout, And the topics he chose were all political . . . Bryant also is probably to be credited with several of the last New Year's addresses of the carriers, long rhymed reviews of the year's events which were then ex- pected annually. He could have tossed off more easily than any one else in the oflfice such hexameters as the following (Jan. 2, 1829) : Since New Year's day came last about, The Emperor Nicholas sent out A potent army, full of fight, Cossack, and Pole, and Muscovite, To give the Turks a castigation. Such as they ne'er had since creation. They passed the Pruth in fine condition, And meeting no great opposition. They thought to make their winter quarters By Hellespont's resounding waters . . . There are frequently unsigned poems of a serious char- 128 THE EVENING POST acter In the Evening Post during these years, but nine in ten are so poor that it is Impossible to believe that Bryant wrote them. Now and then occurs one which might be his; such, for example, are the translations of lyrics from the German of Glelm which appeared on Nov. 13, 1827, and Dec. 2, 1828. Bryant did not claim all of his poems in even the United States Review; it has been assumed of these, and it may be assumed of any lost in the Evening Post files, that they were not worth claiming. As a young man, Bryant took his journalistic duties light-heartedly, and one of his distinctive contributions lay in his literary hoaxes. He and his close friend Robert C. Sands, a talented young assistant of Col. Stone in editing the Commercial Advertiser, delighted in them. "Did you see a learned article in the Evening Post the other day about Pope Alexander VI and Caesar Borgia?" he wrote Gulian Verplanck, then a Congressman In Wash- ington. "Matt. Patterson undertook to be saucy in the Commercial as to a Latin quotation in It, so we — i.e., Sands and myself — sent him on a fool's errand." The editor of the Commercial h3,d corrected the Evening Post^s Latin, and Bryant had replied as follows, inventing the authority he cited : As to the Latin of the phrase, "Vides, mi fili, quam parva sapi- entia guhernatur mundusi' he affirms that it is not good. He says that it should be, "Vides, mi fili, quantilla sapientia regitur mundus." He adds, however, that it was not said by any of the Popes, but by some great statesman, whose name he does not give, probably because he does not know it. As to the correctness of the Latin, that is no business of ours. ... If any of the Popes spoke bad Latin, two or three hundred years before we were born, it should be recollected that it was not in our power to* help it. As to the fact of the phrase being made use of by one of the Popes, we will only say to the writer in the Commercial, that if he will consult the work entitled Virorum Illustrium Reliquice, collected by the learned Reisch and published at the Hague, by John and Daniel Steucker, in 1650, a work well known to scholars, he will find that the words, as we have quoted them, were addressed by Pope Alexander VI to his son Caesar Borgia. BRYANT BECOMES EDITOR 129 Upon a more elaborate hoax Bryant and Sands were assisted by Professors Anderson and Da Ponte — "a very learned jeu d'esprit," he called It. It was a long letter to the Evening Post signed John Smith, in which they took a familiar couplet and translated it through all the principal tongues, ancient and modern, even into several Indian languages. It is hard to believe that these erudite quips had a large audience; but Bryant's ode to Fanny Wright was much admired, and was generally attributed to Halleck, until that gentleman disclaimed it. In these ^^ high-spirited productions we see a side of Bryant that largely disappeared under his growing cares and the dig- nity that increased with his celebrity. We see the Bryant who used to meet with Verplanck and Sands at the house of the latter's father in the hamlet of Hoboken, and make it ring with declamation and uproarious laughter. We see the poet-editor who used to throw off all anxieties and go for long walks, studying nature or chatting with companions, and who once at an evening party apologized for his fatigue by explaining that he had .covered the road from Haverstraw to New York, nearly forty miles, that day. Bryant had his fun-loving side, and the few men whom he found closely congenial had no reason to complain of his coldness, as others often did. "^-^ But the new editor's most effective impress upon the fl/^ Evening Post was in its political and economic utterances, j The journal had already inclined toward a low-tariff ' policy, for the commercial community of New York op- posed protection; but its editorials upon this subject, as upon many others, were feeble. Bryant in the year 1822-24 had been led by his friends the Sedgwicks to study the British economists, Adam Smith, Thornton, and Ricardo, and the debates upon tariff questions prominent in Parliament about 1820. Theodore Sedgwick was a pro- 1 nounced advocate of free trade, and completely converted^] Bryant. From the young man's convictions upon this l^^^^ subject flowed his attachment to Jackson as an opponent \ of protection and monopoly, and his intense dislike of 1 Clay, the leading advocate of the so-called American ( 130 THE EVENING POST tariff system. He had once been a Federalist, and as a boy had written a hot Federalist poem, "The Embargo," but his free-trade views now fast made him an ardent Democrat. His sympathies in commercial legislation were not with his native New England, but with the South. Martin Van Buren writes in his Autobiography regard- ing the "American" or protective tariff theories that "To the very exposition of the system and the persistent as- saults upon its injustice, and impolicy by the New York Evening Post, the country is more indebted for its final overthrow, in this State [New York] at least, than to any other single influence." This was true. Bryant, who was to oppose protection till his death in 1878, lost no time in 1826 in aligning the journal against the legis- lation then proposed for higher duties upon woolens. He ^aracterized the act of 1824 as "our last and worst" tariff, and that autumn supported his friend Verplanck, with C. C. Cambreleng and Jeromus Johnson, for city seats in Congress as "the avowed opponents of restric- tive and prohibitory laws." On Nov. 16 he wrote con- cerning the woolens bill: From 1 81 5 to the present day the demands of ouf manufac- turers have been incessant ; and the more bounty they receive, the more exorbitant their claims. It is time that they should be taught to wait, as other branches of industry do, for that revival of trade which can alone give them relief. ... If the woolen manufactures have grown with unnatural rapidity during the last ten years, no legislativjc remedy can be applied ; it is an evil which in every branch of industry periodically finds its own remedy. All acquainted with the subject know that our manufacturing is our most profitable branch of industry, and we trust Congress will no longer continue to pamper capitalists so highly favored by circumstances. Almost alone among the Northern newspapers — the Providence Journal was its most important ally — the ^Evening Post unsuccessfully combated the tariff of 1828. The newspaper ascribed to it the Paterson textile strike of I828, and predicted that these industrial outbreaks BRYANT BECOMES EDITOR 131 would yet equal the Manchester and Birmingham riots. In 1830 it asked where were the busy thousands who had once been employed in the city's shipyards, along the docks, or in establishments for fitting out vessels. A few half-idle men were left; the rest, thanks to the tariff, were "in the miserable abodes of poverty, or in the poorhouse." John Jacob Astor early in 1831 asked for a higher duty upon furs, declaring that he was undersold in the Eastern market by British traders who possessed an advantage in dealing with the Indians. The blankets, strouds, and garments which the savages liked were not made in the United States, but had to be imported from England and to pay a heavy duty, so that the Canadian fur agents could offer much more than the Americans for pelts. The Evening Post pounced upon this as an argu- ment not for a tariff upon furs, but for abating the tariff on blankets and clothing. Naturally, in 1828 the Post supported Jackson against J. Q. Adams for the Presidency, Bryant adding new rea- sons to those Coleman had used against Adams four years earlier. He represented the section that clamored for protection, while Jackson was for a lower tariff. Under the urgings of Senator Rufus King a decade be^ fore, the Post had said hard things about Jackson, but now it praised him for his long public service, for his Roman strength of will, and for his clearsighted political tenets. When he became President, it supported his Indian policy; it urged him on, as we shall see later, in his determination to crush the United States Bank. The tariff act of 1832, carrying a moderate reduction of du- ties, it naturally applauded. It was a compromise bill^ Bryant admitted. "Yet a large majority of the friends of free trade are satisfied with it, because although not what they would have it, it is still a positive good, it simplifies the collection of the revenue, it removes many of the embarrassments in the way of the fair trader, it diminishes the temptation to smuggling, and it is an ap- proach, if nothing more, to a fair and equal system of duties." [/ 132 THE EVENING POST While giving the Evening Post a clear-cut, courageous tariff policy, Bryant did much else with the editorial page. Early in 1827 he came out with a far more ringing de- nunciation of lotteries than it had before printed, and in August he induced It to announce that It would accept no more advertisements relating directly or indirectly to * {tickets in them. During the same year, following a num- ber of business failures in the city, he wrote in advocacy of a comprehensive national bankruptcy act, such as was not passed till near the end of the century. To his sur- prise, merchants frowned on the proposal, and the Eve- ning Post was left, in his expressive words, "like a public actor who believes he has just said something highly to the purpose, and looks around for applause, but meets only hisses." Later, In 1837, ^^^ Buren formerly recom- mended a general bankruptcy law to Congress, but again It met with no favor. A number of steamboat accidents caused the journal to press for legislation punishing crim- inal carelessness and manslaughter by fitting penitentiary sentences. It took up with zeal, following Jackson's Inaugural message, the Administration's campaign against the policy of national aid to internal Improvements, for Bryant regarded such gifts to special local and political interests as an evil almost as great as protective tariff. When the first rumblings of nullification were heard from South Carolina in 1829, the Evening Post refused to follow those newspapers which treated the subject flippantly. "Every man of common sense must know that if but a single stave Is withdrawn from the barrel, it inevitably tumbles to pieces," Bryant warned his read- ers; "and that whatever be the dimensions of the stave withdrawn, the catastrophe Is equally sure and fatal." It was impossible for the journal not to sympathize with the hot-tempered South Carolinians who wanted to de- stroy the application of the tariff of 1828 to their State. It thought that Col. Hayne was no more wrong about the Constitution than the turncoat Webster was wrong about the tariff; but It warned Calhoun's and Hayne's followers that their project was "insane" : BRYANT BECOMES EDITOR 133 It is the destiny of all republics to be agitated occasionally by the desperate plans of disappointed and ambitious men, resolved to rule or ruin. Such might succeed with a corrupt people, but not in our intelligent and free land. Public opinion has indig- nantly rejected every proposition to dismember our confederacy, and has pronounced a just judgment on those who prefer them- selves to their country — we have already among us more than one blasted monument of selfish ambition. The wreck of our republic is not yet at hand — the people's devotion to the Union is invincible, and the same verdict awaits every man, whether of the North, the South, the East, or the West, who would dare to violate its integrity. (Aug. 29, 1832.) Whether applauding Jackson as he sternly recalled South Carolina to Its senses, or attacking the protection- ist doctrines, Bryant tried to open his editorials with a flash of humor or an apposite story. When the American delayed a twelvemonth In apologizing for an Insult to Jackson, he told the anecdote of the worthy widow whose husband had been dead for seven years and who declared that she could stand It no longer. The opponent who sighed for the time when the Administra- tion would go into a state of "retiracy" reminded him of the Irishman who had rushed for a map when he learned that Napoleon had taken Umbrage. An ex- change with a discourteous antagonist recalled the mem- ber of the House of Commons who, having said that a colleague was not fit to carry guts to a bear, and being required to apologize, stated: 'T retract — you are fit to carry guts to a bear." During 1831 many Americans were boasting of having known Louis Philippe when he was an expatriate in this country; and in rebuke to their snobbery, the editor spoke of the man who was proud of having been noticed by a king — the king had said, ''Get out of my way, you scoundrel!" Bryant wrote laboriously, not fluently, and made so many corrections that his copy \vas often almost illegible; but he wrote with polish. Coleman's health after his runaway accident steadily failed. He had wholly lost the use of his lower limbs, and Bryant tells us that his appearance was remarkable. ''He 134 THE EVENING POST was of a full make, with a broad chest, muscular arms, which he wielded lightly and easily, and a deep-toned voice; but his legs dangled like strings." The National Journal of July, 1827, commented upon his declining strength, in April and June, 1828, Evening Post readers were told that he was confined to his home, and on July 14, 1829, he died. Bryant instantly became, what he had previously been in all but name, editor-in-chief. Some as- sistance was needed, for Coleman's son, though a man of literary tastes, did not wish to enter the office. In 1827 a share in the newspaper had been offered to Robert Sands, but after some hesitation he had declined it. Now an edi- torial position, and the opportunity of becoming part owner, was tendered William Leggett, a spirited young reformer who had been connected with the Morning Chronicle, and more recently had been editor of a frail weekly called the Critic, the final numbers of which he had not only written but set up, printed, and delivered himself. He gladly accepted. Within four and a half years of coming to the city a literary adventurer, Bryant had thus become editor of one of its oldest and most prosperous journals. He had done this not because he had an inborn tendency to jour- nalism, not because he wished to make a newspaper the sounding board for certain ideas or doctrines, but chiefly because he could not live by pure literature, and because the bar, for which he was in many ways well equipped, \ did not please him. But he did bring to the newspaper I great ability and high ideals. No American editor of im- l portance had made such use of the editorial page as he I began to make. He had a love of freedom, a sense of Ijustice, and a shrewd judgment of men and affairs, which his retiring nature debarred him from bringing into play in any other way. As an editor, this shy, unsocial man could work at arm's length for the benefit of the people and nation, and except at arm's length he could have had no public career at all. He was willing to toil hard in his chosen calling, and for many years to push poetry, though upon poetry alone he relied for enduring fame, into a BRYANT BECOMES EDITOR 135 secondary position. He had a keen sense of the dignity that should belong to his profession, and by word as well as example preached against that use of epithet and insult which was then common in it. In one of his early essays he deplored the character of many journalists: Yet the vocation of a newspaper editor is a useful and indis- / ^ pensable, and, if rightly exercised, a noble vocation. It possesses j this essential element of dignity — that they who are engaged in it are occupied with questions of the highest importance to the hap- piness of mankind. We cannot see, for our part, why it should not attract men of the first talents and the most exalted virtues. Why should not the discussions of the daily press demand as strong reasoning powers, as large and comprehensive ideas, as pro- '■ found an acquaintance with principles, eloquence as commanding, and a style of argument as manly and elevated, as the debates of , the Senate? Once established in full charge of the Evening Post, with a capable lieutenant, he was able to make rapid, far- reaching, and profitable improvements In the form of the journal. In 1829 it was still closely akin to the Evening Post of 1 80 1 — four pages of six columns each, much smaller than newspaper pages of to-day, dingily printed and ineffectively made up. When he left for Europe five years later the four pages had seven columns each, and were much larger than present-day pages — great blanket papers. Old John Randolph of Roanoke wrote Bryant complaining that these expansive sheets crinkled so badly in the mail that he had to have his housekeeper iron them out. But the results of the enlargement were an enhanced revenue from advertisements, and a rise of the subscription list, at $10 a year, above 2,000. In 1834 the management boasted that the journal had never been in a more prosperous condition, and that not three other papers in the city were so productive. The whole number of employees, including those in the mechanical departments, was then thirty. When Bryant wrote his wife in 1826 that the Evening Post's profits were $30,000 a year, he overestimated 136 THE EVENING POST them; Its gross receipts were only that much. But Bryant's share In the newspaper, which was at first one-eighth, which In 1830 became one-fourth. In 1832 was one-third of seven-eighths, and In 1833 was a full third, sufficed to free him from all money cares at once, and within a short time to make him prosperous. The journal's books were balanced each year on Nov. 16, the anniversary of Its founding. On that date In 1829, it was found that the net profits were $10,544, of which Bryant's one-eighth made $1,318.04. The next year the net profits had risen to $13,466, and Bryant's quarter share was $3,366.51. In 1831 there was a further in- crease to $14,429, making Bryant's income $3,507.24. A heavy slump occurred the following twelvemonth, cut- ting the net profits to $10,220, and the poet's share to $2,980.99, but this was only temporary. For the half- year alone ending May 16, 1833 — the figures for the full year are lost — the profits were $6,000.35, making Bry- ant's Income for six months exactly $2,000; and for the full year which closed Nov. 16, 1834, his one-third share yielded no less than $4,646.20. In those days an income of $4,000 or above was handsome, and Bryant was able to sail In the summer of 1834 with a full purse. The literary world, however, looked with cold dis- approval upon Bryant's entrance into the newspaper field, which it believed was occupied by cheap political con- troversialists, and thought offered an atmosphere hostile to poetry. It found confirmation for this attitude in the marked slackening of Bryant's productiveness as a poet. Of the whole quantity of verse which he wrote during his long lifetime, about 13,000 lines, approximately one- third had been composed before 1829. During 1830 he wrote but thirty lines, during 1831 but sixty, in 1832 only two hundred and twenty-two, and in 1833 apparently none at all; nor was his verse of this period in his best vein. He was too completely occupied in mastering his new calling to cultivate the muse. "Would that Mr. Bryant was employed in writing poetry . . . and sending back his thoughts to the streams BRYANT BECOMES EDITOR 137 and mountains which his young eyes were familiar with, and from which he drank his first inspiration!" lamented a writer in the New England Magazine for 1831. *'But alas I he is busied about far other things, and what he is writing, is as little like poetry, as Gen. Jackson Is like Apollo." This writer had called on the editor in his little Pine Street office. "He is a man rather under the middle height than otherwise, with bright blue eyes and an ample forehead, but not very distinguished either in face or person," we are told. "His manners are quiet and unas- suming, and marked with a slight dash of diffidence; and his conversation (when he does converse, for he is more used to thinking than talking), is remarkably free from pretension, and is characterized by good sense rather than genius." Why could he not have remained a lawyer in Great Barrlngton, amid his Berkshire hills and brooks? We cannot close this notice without again expressing our sor- row at the nature of Mr. Bryant's present occupation, and that a man capable of writing poetry to make so many hearts throb, and so many eyes glisten with delight, should be lending himself to an employment in which the greater the success the more occasion there is for regret, for it must arise from the exertion of those very qualities which we are least willing a poet should possess. " 'Tis strange, 'tis passing strange, 'tis pitiful, that" he should hang up his own cunning harp upon the willows, and take to blowing a brazen and discordant trumpet in the ranks of faction. An early number of the Southern Literary Messenger regretted that Bryant was to be found "dashing in the political vortex" with those who "engage In party squab- bles." The New York Courier and Enquirer, In an ut- terance of 1832 which is to be discounted because of editorial jealousy, remarked that "he has embarked in a pursuit not suited to his genius and utterly at variance with all his studies and habits of mind. We wish him a better fate than can ever be his while doomed to follow a business for which he has not a solitary qualification, and compelled to give utterance to sentiments he most cordially despises." 138 THE EVENING POST To a certain extent Bryant agreed with these writers. I He did not believe journalism an unworthy or undigni- ! fied occupation. In the Evening Post of July 30, 1830, I he gave reasons for holding the contrary opinion, descant- ing upon the value of the opportunity to guide the think- Vjing of thousands. "In combating error in all shapes and disguises," he wrote, it was ample compensation for an editor's trials "to perceive that you are understood by the intelligent, and appreciated by the candid, and that truth and correct principles are gradually extending their sway through your efforts." But he had no attachment as yet to the editorial career, he wanted with all his heart to have leisure for pure literature, and he meant to get out of the newspaper office as quickly and finally as possible. He bracketed it with the law as a "wrangling profes- sion," and talked of being chained to the oar. Always fond of travel, he escaped from his desk after 1830 as much as he possibly could. In January, 1832, he took a trip to Washington, making the establishment of a reg- ular Washington correspondence his excuse, and had a conversation of three quarters of an hour there with Jackson. That spring he made an excursion to Illinois, to visit his brothers. During the summer of 1833 he went to Montreal and Quebec. When he took passage abroad on June 24, 1834, he hoped that the business capacity of Michael Burnham and the editorial capacity of William Leggett would make anything but intermittent attention by him to the Evening Post thenceforth unnecessary. "I have been employed long enough with the management of a daily newspaper, and desire leisure for literary occupa- tions that I love better," he later wrote his brother. "It was not my intention when I went to Europe to return to the business of conducting a newspaper." He hoped that his third share would support him. How these expectations were suddenly wrecked, and how Bryant was brought back by harsh necessity to res- cue the Evening Post from ruin, is a dramatic story. CHAPTER SIX WILLIAM LEGGETT ACTING EDITOR; DEPRESSION, RIVALRY, AND THREATENED RUIN One of the most popular pieces of sculpture the country has ever known, Horatio Greenough's "Chaunting Cher- ubs," was being widely discussed in the early thirties, as was Hiram Powers's ''Greek Slave," a little later. In a witty moment the Courier and Enquirer christened Bryant and William Leggett, for Leggett also wrote poetry, "the chaunting cherubs of the Evening PostJ' The name had outward appropriateness, but it would really have been more fitting to call Leggett a spouting volcano. While Bryant controlled the journal, it abstained from any harsh abuse of other journals. His rule was to notice no personal attacks, and to make none in retaliation. Only once in fifty years did he, passing in the street an editorial adversary who had given him the lie direct, lose control of himself. The diarist Philip Hone tells the story under date of April 20, 1831 : While I was shaving this morning at eight o'clock, I witnessed from the front window an encounter In the street nearly opposite, between William C. Bryant and William L. Stone; the former one of the editors of the Evening Post, and the latter editor of the Commercial Advertiser. The former commenced the attack by striking Stone over the head with a cowskin; after a few blows the men closed, and the whip was wrested from Bryant and car- ried off by Stone. When I saw them first, two younger persons were engaged, but soon discontinued their fight. The next day Bryant made a public statement of this incident, pointing out the gross provocation that he had received, but apologizing to his readers for having taken the law into his own hands. Particularly as there de- veloped some doubt whether Col. Stone was the author 139 140 THE EVENING POST of the attack, he could never hear the matter referred to without showing his chagrin and regret. But Bryant had no sooner left the office for Europe than it became plain that Leggett had no such scruples. In one brief paragraph he managed to call the editor of the Star a wretch, liar, coward, and a vile purchased tool who would do anything for money. The "venomous drivel" of the Commercial Advertiser might sometimes require notice, he wrote a few days later, but his con- tempt for the editor was "so supreme that to us, per- sonally, he is as if he were not — a perfect non-entity." In the autumn Assembly campaign Leggett shotted his guns, and on Sept. 23 and 24 let off broadsides that shook the town. He accused the Daily Advertiser of "a vile untruth" ; he called the editor of the American a "detestable caitiff," a "craven wretch, spotted with all kinds of vices," and "a hireling slave and public incendiary"; while he characterized the Courier and Enquirer as a blustering, bullying sheet, reeking with falsehood, pandering to the vulgar, profligate, im- pudent, inane, and inciting men to riot and bloodshed. On Sept. 26 Leggett was able to fill a column with answers. "The editor is deranged," said the American; he should be "committed to Bedlam," averred the Gazette; "a writ de lunatico^^ is needed, chimed in the Courier; this, said the Star, "is too true to make a jest of"; and the Boston Atlas professed horror at "the fero- cious, mad, and bloody words of this desperate print." Leggett was not deranged, but simply in full fighting trim, and showing the defects of his really sterling vir- tues. By sheer slashing vigor as a political writer he achieved in a half dozen years upon the Evening Post a permanent fame as a reformer and controversialist. Whittier, in his essays, compares Leggett with Hampden and Vane, and declares that "no one has labored more perseveringly, or, in the end, more successfully, to bring the practice of American democracy into conformity with its professions." His poetical tribute to "the bold re- former" and his "free and honest thought, the angel ut- LEGGETT ACTING EDITOR 141 terance of an upright mind," is better known. Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., believed that but for Leggett's untimely end he might have made one of the greatest names in American history. Bryant's memorial tribute : The words of fire that from his pen Were flung upon the fervid page, Still move, still shake the hearts of men, Amid a cold and coward age, was no exaggeration, but true for the whole generation which followed Leggett's death. The editor's political writings were perhaps the most potent force in shaping the ideas of democracy held by Walt Whitman, who in 1847 wrote of the necessity of following the doctrines of the "great Jefferson and the glorious Leggett," and who in his old age spoke to Horace Traubel of his high admira- tion for him. A recent historical writer has said that Leggett was "one of the most sincere and briUiant apos- tles of democracy that America has ever known." When Leggett became junior editor of the Evening Post he was known solely as a writer of essays, stories, and verse. He was a New Yorker by birth, but had been educated at Georgetown, D. C, had been given a taste of Illinois prairie life in his later youth, and had entered the navy as a midshipman at the age of twenty, resigning six years later because of the overbearing conduct of his commander. A volume of his poems, "Leisure Hours at Sea," and some tales of pioneer and sailor life which he published in annuals and magazines, gave him a suffi- cient reputation to enable him to found his weekly mis- cellany, the Critic. He stipulated with Bryant that he should not be required to write upon political topics, "on which he had no settled opinions, and for which he had no taste" ; but within a few months he found himself almost wholly devoted to them. Bryant imbued him with his own ardent free-trade doctrines, and his own warm admiration for Jackson and Jacksonian measures. He was eight years younger than the senior editor. His associates describe him as a man of middle stature, com- 142 THE EVENING POST pact frame, great endurance, and a constitution naturally strong, but somewhat impaired by an attack of the yellow fever while serving with the United States squadron in the West Indies. His naval training had given him a dignified bearing, his address was easy, and his affability and mildness of manner surprised those who had known him only by his fiery writings. He was fond of study; and his ability to write fluently in his crowded, littered back room on Pine Street, the crash of the presses in his ear, amid a thousand distractions, amazed everybody. Bryant and Leggett had now labored together five years, 1 829-1 834. The chief local occurrence in this period was the great cholera epidemic of 1832, causing an exodus from the city which the Evening Post of August 6 estimated at above 100,000. The two editors worked manfully, though perhaps hardly candidly, to allay the panic. Although the first case appeared on June 26, so late as July 13 they maintained that there was no epi- demic, in the strict sense of the word; and ten days later they denied with vehemence the allegation of the Courier and Enquirer, which was exaggerating the plague, that two Evening Post employees had died of cholera. Throughout the great war over the Bank of the United States the Evening Post had stood by the President. Jackson appealed to the loyalty of Bryant and Leggett in equal degree, but differently. To Leggett he was "the man of the people," a son of the frontier, a democrat from heel to crown. In Bryant he awakened the same admiration that he aroused in Irving, Cooper, Bancroft, and in Landor abroad: admiration for his adventurous heroism, his unspotted honesty, his simplicity, his stern directness, his tenacity in pressing forward to his goal. One had to be either the wholehearted admirer of "Old Hickory" or his wholehearted opponent, and as early as Jackson Day in 1828 Bryant had become the former, writing for a dinner at Masonic Hall an ode which, ac- cording to Verplanck, threw Van Buren into ecstasies. Not a single measure of Jackson's, not even his wholesale removals from office under the spoils system, was cen- LEGGETT ACTING EDITOR 143 sured by the Evening Post, and by 1832, after the end of nullification, it was hailing him as "the man destined to stand in history by the side of Washington, the one bearing the proud title of the Father of his Country, the other the scarcely less illustrious one of Preserver of the Union." All Jackson's charges against the Bank — that it was a source of political corruption, that it was monopolistic, that it was hostile to popular interests and dangerous to the government, that it was unsafely managed — were echoed by Bryant and Leggett. Probably only the accu- sation that it had gone into politics was fully warranted, but the Evening Post pressed them all. Speaking of the Bank's "enormous powers" and "its barefaced bribery and corruption," it applauded Jackson's veto of the bill to recharter it, and his withdrawal In 1833 of the gov- ernment deposits in it. When the Bank curtailed its loans to meet the withdrawal of these deposits, the editors thought that It was trying to coerce the people and gov- ernment, by threatening a panic, into yielding. "The object of the Bank is to create a pressure for money, to impair the confidence of business men In each other, and to keep the community at large in a state of great uncertainty and confusion, in the hope that men will at last say, 'let us have the Bank rechartered, rather than that . . . the whole country should be thrown Into dis- tress.' " The alliance of the chief statesmen in Congress on behalf of the Bank drew from the journal three inter- esting characterizations (March 31, 1834) : Clay: — . . . The parent and champion of the tariff and in- ternal improvements ; of a system directly opposed to the interests and prosperity of every merchant in the United States, and calcu- lated and devised for the purpose of organizing an extensive and widespread scheme through which the different portions of the United States might be bought up in detail. ... By assuming the power of dissipating the public revenue in local improvements, by which one portion of the community would be benefited at the expense of many others. Congress acquired the means of in- fluencing and controlling the politics of every State in the Union, 144 THE EVENING POST and of establishing a rigid, invincible consolidated government. By assuming the power of protecting any class or portion of the industry of this country, by bounties in the shape of high duties on foreign importations, they placed the labor and industry of the people entirely at their own disposal, and usurped the preroga- tive of dispensing all the blessings of Providence at pleasure. . . . It is against this great system for making the rich richer, the poor poorer, and thus creating those enormous disproportions of wealth which are always the forerunner of the loss of freedom; it is against this great plan of making the resources of the General Government the means of obtaining the control of the States by an adroit species of political bribery, that General Jackson has arrayed himself. . . . He has arrested the one by his influence, the other by his veto. Calhoun: — Reflecting and honest men may perhaps wonder to see this strange alliance between the man by whom the tariff was begotten, nurtured, and brought to a monstrous maturity, and him who carried his State to the verge of rebellion in opposition to that very system. By his means and influence, this great Union was all but dissolved, and in all probability would at this moment lie shattered into fragments, had it not been for the energetic and prompt patriotism of the stern old man who then said, "The Union — it must be preserved." Even at this moment Mr. Calhoun . . . still threatens to separate South Carolina from the confederacy, if she is not suffered to remain in it with the privilege of a veto on the laws of the Union. Webster: — Without firmness, consistency, or political courage to be a leader, except in one small section of the Union, he seems to crow to any good purpose only on his own dunghill, and is a much greater fowl in his own barnyard than anywhere else. He is a good speaker at the bar and in the House; but he is a much greater lawyer than statesman, and far more expert in detailing old arguments than fruitful in inventing new ones. He is not what we should call a great man, much less a great politician; and we should go so far as to question the power of his intellect, did it not occasionally disclose itself in a rich exuberance of con- tradictory opinions. A man who can argue so well on both sides of a question cannot be totally destitute of genius. And here these three gentlemen, who agree in no one single principle, who own no one single feeling in common, except that of hatred to the old hero of New Orleans, stand battling side by side. The author and champion of the tariff, and the man who on every occasion denounced it as a violation of the Constitution; LEGGETT ACTING EDITOR 145 the oracle of nullification and the oracle of consolidation ; the trio of antipathies ; the union of contradiction ; the consistency of incon- sistencies; the coalition of oil, vinegar, and mustard; the dressing in which the great political salad is to be served up to the people. In this aggressive writing we see Leggett's pen; and it was only after Bryant left the Evening Post in his sole charge that It entered upon Its hottest fighting. The first episode, Its defense of abolitionists In the right of free speech, was highly creditable to it. The abolitionists had begun to arouse popular resent- ment In New York so early as 1833; on Oct. 2 of that year, a meeting of the "friends of immediate abolition" at Clinton Hall had been broken up by a tumultuous crowd, which adjourned to Tammany Hall and there de- nounced the agitators. Lewis Tappan, head of one of the largest silk houses In the city, and for a short time after 1827 editor of the Journal of Commerce; his brother Arthur Tappan; Joshua Leavitt, the Rev. Dr. F. F. Cox, the Rev. Mr. Ludlow, and several other Protestant clergymen made up a constellation only less active than that formed In Boston by William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Samuel J. May, and John Plerpont. During the spring of 1834 these men con- tinued their speechmaking, and Ludlow and Cox went so far as to appeal to all Northern negroes for support, and to defend Intermarriage between whites and blacks- Few New Yorkers then regarded Southern slavery as a national shame, and almost none had any patience with abolition. Most of the press denounced the movement emphatically; the Evening Post refused to do this, though It called It wild and visionary. On July 7 some negroes repaired to the Chatham Street Chapel for a belated celebration of the Fourth, and at the same time the Sacred Music Society met there for practice, claiming a prior right of occupancy. Pa- triotism and music were forgotten in the ensuing melee. The Evening Post had felt that trouble was brewing, and it raised a warning voice : The story is told in the morning papers in very inflammatory 146 THE EVENING POST language, and the whole blame Is cast upon the negroes; yet it seems to us, from those very statements themselves, that, as usual, there was fault on both sides, and especially on that of the whites. It seems to us, also, that those who are opposed to the absurd and mad schemes of the immediate abolitionists, use means against that scheme which are neither just nor politic. We have noticed a great many tirades of late, in certain prints, the object of which appears to be to excite the public mind to strong hostility to the negroes generally, and to the devisers of the immediate emancipa- tion plan, and not merely to the particular measure represented. This community is too apt to run into excitements ; and those who are now trying to get up an excitement against the negroes will have much to answer for, should their efforts be successful. . . . Other journals, especially the Courier and Enquirer, continued their provocative utterances and called for public meetings to protest against the abolition move- ment. The result was that disturbances occurred on the night of Wednesday, the ninth, and reached their climax on Friday In scenes not equaled until the Draft Riots, r "At an hour after dark on Friday, Lewis Tappan's store \ was attacked and its windows were broken. At ten t o'clock the mob broke in the doors of Dr. Cox's church on Laight Street, and demolished Its interior, after which it made a rush for his home on Charlton Street, but found it picketed by the police and retired. The next objective was Mr. Ludlow's church on Spring Street, which was half demolished, together with the Session House next door. Thereupon the rioters made for the principal negro quarter of the town, in the region about Five Points. The Five Points has figured on some of the blackest pages of New York's history. It was here that fourteen negroes were burned In 1740 during the so-called Negro Insurrection; here the Seventh Regiment was called out in 1857 ^^ quell a riot; here the "Dead Rab- bits" later fought the "Bowery Boys," and here stood the notorious Old Brewery that the Five Points Mission displaced. But it never saw more panic and outrage than on that night. The St. Philip's African Episcopal Church in Centre Street and a negro church in Anthony Street LEGGETT ACTING EDITOR 147 were left mere battered shells by the mob ; a negro school- house In Orange Street was wrecked; and twenty houses were wholly or partly destroyed, and much of the contents stolen. Innocent negroes were beaten into unconscious- ness. The colored people by hundreds fled northward into the open fields. Just before midnight infantry and cavalry arrived, but took no punitive measures. The Evening Post called for unremitting severity: Let them be fired upon, if they dare collect together again to prosecute their infamous designs. Let those who make the first movement toward sedition be shot down like dogs — and thus teach to their infatuated followers a lesson which no milder course seems sufficient to inculcate. This is no time for expostulation or remonstrance. . . . We would recommend that the whole mili- tary force of the city be called out, that large detachments be stationed wherever any ground exists to anticipate tumultuary movements, that smaller bodies patrol the streets in every part of the city, and that the troops be directed to fire upon the first dis- orderly assemblage that refuses to disperse at the bidding of law- ful authority. The Posfs uncompromising stand was thoroughly un- popular — unpopular with not merely the ignorant, but with m ost business men. A Boston journal noted that "the EveningFost was the only daily paper in that city which condemned the riots with manly denunciation, with- out a single sneering allusion to the abolitionists, and in return for this manifestation of a love of law and order, the Courier assailed the Post as a promoter of the plan of parti-colored amalgamation, and strongly hinted that the mob ought to direct its vengeance against that office.'* This was true. The Courier and Enquirer had said that Editor Leggett, who had dared defend the vile abolition- ists, richly deserved the severest castlgatlon which had been planned for those who would make their daughters the paramours of the negro. In the summer of 1835 Leggett showed even greater courage upon the same subject. The postmaster of Charleston, S. C, had refused to deliver abolitionist let- ters and documents upon the ground that they were incen- ^ H^ THE EVENING POST diary and insurrectionary, and on Aug. 4 Postmaster- General Kendall upheld him in a letter stating that by no act or order would he aid in giving circulation to documents of the kind barred. It must be remembered that the Evening Post had thus far stood by Jackson's I administration in every particular. It must also be re- j membered that Leggett at this time thoroughly disap- y \ proved of the abolition movement as untimely and im- practicable. But he saw in Kendall's measure a bureau- cratic censorship In its most odious and arbitrary form, and he called the action an outrage : Neither the general postoffice, nor the general government it- self, possesses any power to prohibit the transportation by mail of abolition tracts. On the contrary, it is the bounden duty of the government to protect the abolitionists in their constitutional right of free discussion ; and opposed, sincerely and zealously as we are, to their doctrinces and practices, we should be still more opposed to any infringement of their political or civil rights. If the gov- ernment once begins to discriminate as to what is orthodox and what heterodox in opinion, what is safe and what unsafe in tendency, farewell, a long farewell, to our freedom. Only three of the really influential newspapers of the land declined to admit that Kendall had either done right, or had simply chosen the lesser of two evils : the Boston Courier, edited by J. T. Buckingham, the Cincinnati Gazette, edited by Charles Hammond, and the Post. Unpopular as was the Evening Post's defense of free , speech, Its stand upon financial and economic questions was far more heartily detested. It rapidly ceased, after its first attacks upon the Bank, to hold its old position as a representative of the city's commercial Interests. It is rue that some rich New Yorkers felt a jealousy of the Bank because it belonged to Philadelphia, while others stood loyally with the Democratic Party in denouncing it. But Gulian Verplanck and Ogden Hoffman, close friends of the Post, were typical of many who went over to the Bank's side. Not a few business men affiliated with Tam- many joined the ranks of Jackson's enemies. Historical ^ LEGGETT ACTING EDITOR 149 opinion inclines to the view that Jackson did not have a sufficient case against the Bank, which was a salutary institution, and certainly New York commercial circles believed this. A majority of the voters were with Jack- son. Thurlow Weed told a friend that all of Webster's unanswerable arguments for the Bank would not win one- tenth the ballots won by two sentences in Jackson's veto message relating to European stockholders and wicked special privilege. But It was not the mass of poor voters on which a sixpenny journal like the Evening Post relied for sustenance, but upon the professional and business men. Leggett's cardinal conviction, expressed with a fire and energy then unequaled In journalism, was that the great enemy of democracy Is monopoly. He hated and assailed all special Incorporations, for In those days they usually carried very special privileges. Charters were obtained by wire-pulling and legislative corruption, he said, to put a few men, as the ferry-owners in New York City, in a position where they could gouge the public. He wished banking placed upon such a basis that legislative Incor- poration, exclusive in nature, would not be needed. He wanted all franchises abolished, and would have forbid- den any grant to a company of the exclusive right to build a turnpike, canal, railroad, or water-system between two given points. He objected even to the incorporation of colleges and churches, quoting Adam Smith to show that his views upon this head were less eccentric than they seemed. Joint stock partnerships, he believed, would meet all business necessities. The Legislature should pass one general law, which will allow any set of men, who choose to associate together for any purpose, to form themselves into that convenient kind of partnership known by the name of incorporation"; so that any group would be permitted freely to form an Insurance company, a bank, or a college granting degrees. This, of course, would not exclude governmental supervision. Although there were then grave abuses in monopolistic incorpora- tion, Leggett pushed his doctrine quite too far, I50 THE EVENING POST Equality was Leggett's watchword. Those were the days when State Legislatures were abolishing the last property restrictions upon suffrage, and vitriolic was the wrath which the Evening Post poured upon all who op- posed the movement. The whole period it pictured as a battle between men and money; between "silk-stocking, morocco-booted, high-living, white-gloved gentlemen, to be tracked only by the marks of their carriage wheels," and hardworking freemen. It objected to the theory that the state was an aggregation of social strata, one above the other, and maintained that all useful citizens should fare alike. Upon the word "useful," in Carlylean vein, it insisted, for they must be "producers." Tariffs, inter- nal improvements at the expense of State and nation, and special incorporations, were violations of equality; while the spirit of speculation was condemned as creating a "paper aristocracy." On Dec. 6, 1834, Leggett vindi- cated the right of the laboring classes to unite in trade unions, a right then widely denied. It is clear that his ultra-democratic crusade was essentially an accompani- ment of the rise of a new industrialism. It had its af- finities with the frontier equalitarianism personified by Jackson, but Its primary aim was the protection of the toiling urban masses. ^ Leggett was upon firm ground when In 1835 he began to attack the inflation, gambling, and business unsound- ness of which every day afforded fresh proofs. There was grotesque speculation in Southern cotton lands, Maine timber. New York and Philadelphia real estate, and the Western lands enhanced in value by the Erie Canal. Capital was abundant, prices were rising, and every one seemed to be getting rich. Most Northern States were undertaking costly Internal improvements with a reck- less faith in the future. Leggett looked with two-fold alarm and indignation upon the flood of paper money then pouring from small banks all over the country. De- preciated paper, in the first place, was used to lower the real wages of mechanics; in the second place, he main- tained that the grant to State banks of the power to issue LEGGETT ACTING EDITOR 151 bills placed the measure of value in the hands of specula- tors, to be extended or contracted according to their own selfish wishes. On Dec. 24, 1834, just before the Legis- lature met, the Evening Post published an appeal to Gov. Marcy. The banknotes, it said, were driving specie out of circulation, and causing a fever of reckless speculation. "Already our merchants are importing largely. Stocks have risen in value, and land is selling at extravagant rates. Everything begins to wear the highly-prosperous aspect which foretokens commercial revulsion." It rec- ommended that the State should forbid the issue of any banknotes for less than $5. "For these views," Leggett wrote in March, "we have been bitterly reviled." On June 20, 1835, the Post pub- lished a striking editorial entitled "Out of Debt," in allu- sion to the current boast that the nation owed no one. On the contrary, it stated, the people "are plunging deeper and deeper into the bottomless pit of unredeemed and irredeemable obligations." It estimated that the six hundred banks of the nation had issued paper in excess of $200,000,000. "Who will pay the piper for all this political and speculative dancing?" The panic of 1837 gave the answer. By his ringing editorials, written day after day at white heat, a really noble series, Leggett became the prophet of the Loco-Foco party, which arose as a radical wing of the New York Democracy and lived only two years, 1835-37. The origin of the name is a familiar story. On Oct. 25, 1835, a meeting was held at Tam- many Hall to nominate a Congressman ; the conservative Democrats named their man in accordance with a pre- arranged plan, put out the lights, and went home; the anti-monopoly radicals produced tallow candles from their pockets, lit them with loco-foco matches, and nominated a rival candidate. Leggett was not an active politician. But the Loco-Foco mass-meetings of the two ensuing years, and their two State conventions, enunciated the same equalitarian doctrines which Leggett had begun to preach in 1834. 152 THE EVENING POST Not only those whose interests were affected by Leg- gett's anti-monopoly, anti-speculation, anti-aristocracy crusade, but many other staid, moderate men, were horri- fied by it. He was charged with Utopianism, agrarianism, Fanny-Wrightism, Jacobinism, and Jack Cade-ism. His writings were said to set class against class, and to threaten the nation with anarchy. Gov. William M. Marcy called Leggett a ''knave." The advance of the Loco-Foco movement was likened to the great fire and the great cholera plague of these years. When Chief Justice Marshall died in the summer of 1835, Leggett unspar- ingly assailed him and Hamilton as men who had tried "to change the character ~gf~ th e " government from popular to monarchical," and to destroy "the great principle of human liberty." Marshall was regarded by most prop- ertied New Yorkers as the very sheet-anchor of the Con- stitution, and for them to see him denounced as a man who had always strengthened government at the expense of the people was too much. Ex-Mayor Philip Hone was handed that editorial on an Albany steamboat by Charles King, and dropped the journal with the vehement ejacula- tion, "Infamous!" "This is absolutely a species of im- piety for which I want words to express my abhorrence," he entered in his diary. For the courage, the eloquence, and the burning sin- cerity of Leggett's brief editorship we must heartily ad- mire him; but it cannot be denied that he made the Evening Post, for the first and last time in its career, extravagant. He was public-spirited in all that he wrote ; his prophecy of a financial crash was shrewd; in defend- ing the abolitionists against persecution he was in advance of his generation; and his comments upon many minor questions of the day were sound. But the newspaper lacked balance, and its influence was perhaps not so great as when Bryant had been at hand to exercise a restraint upon Leggett. Such an impetuous man could not spare his own health. Almost daily the Evening Post had car- ried an editorial of from 1,000 to 2,000 words. On Oct. 15, 1835, these utterances broke abruptly off, and it LEGGETT ACTING EDITOR 153 became known that Leggett was gravely 111 of a bilious fever. His place was temporarily supplied by Theodore Sedgwick, Jr., and then by Charles Mason, an able lawyer of the city. Bryant, loitering along the Rhine, had hastily to be recalled. Although Leggett had boasted the previous May that the Evening Post had more subscribers than ever before and an undiminished revenue from advertisements, its condition was rapidly declining when the editor fell ill. For this there were a number of reasons. Leggett's radicalism had offended many sober mercantile adver- tisers. He, like some other editors, had objected to blackening the newspaper's pages with the small conven- tional cuts of ships and houses used to draw attention to advertisements, and had thereby lost patronage. After the death of Michael Burnham, in the summer of 1835^ the business management had fallen to a scamp named Hanna, who was generally drunk and always insolent. Warning symptoms of the approaching panic were In the air, money becoming so tight late in 1835 ^^^^ reputable mercantile firms could not discount their notes a year ahead for less than 30 per cent. Leggett, finally, had offended valuable government friends. As he •wrote (Sept. 5, 1835): We once expressed dislike ... of the undignified tone of one of Mr. Woodberry's official letters, as Secretary of the Treasury, to Nicholas Biddle ; and the Treasury advertisements were thence- forward withheld. The Secretary of the Navy, having acted with gross partiality in regard to a matter recently tried by a naval court-martial, we had the temerity to censure his conduct; and of course we could look for no further countenance from that quarter. The Navy Commissioners, being Post-Captains, . . . have taken in high dudgeon our inquiry into the oppression and tyranny practised by their order; and "stop our advertisements!" is the word of command established in such cases. When the Evening Post exposed the duplicity of Samuel Swartwout, the Collector of the Port, it at once lost all further support from the Custom House. And now, having censured the doctrines of Mr. Kendall and the practice of Mr. Gouverneur, the postoffice adver- tising is withdrawn, of course. 154 THE EVENING POST II While Bryant was in Europe, while the Evening Post in the spring of 1835 was beginning its abrupt plunge toward financial disaster, there occurred the simultaneous birth of the New York Herald and a new journalism. Its immediate effect upon the Post was small; its effect in the long run upon all newspapers was profound. It was to not only a half-wrecked Evening Post, but to revo- lutionized journalistic conditions, that Bryant returned from Heidelberg. When Bryant and Leggett had taken full charge of the Evening Post in 1829, the New York newspapers were a quarrelsome group of sixpenny dailies, some political, some commercial, and in their news features all slow, dull, and half-filled by modern standards. The best- known morning journal was the Courier and Enquirer, of which the editor and after a year the sole proprietor was James Watson Webb, a rich, hot-tempered, exceed- ingly handsome young man of twenty-seven, as mercurial as any Southerner, with a native taste for fighting which had been developed by his West Point education and some years in the army. Webb knew the use of the sword, pistol, and cane decidedly better than that of the pen. The Evening Post well characterized him as "a fussy, blustering, quarrelsome fellow." He repeatedly assaulted fellow-editors in the street; he repeatedly journeyed to Washington or Albany to tweak somebody's nose or ex- change shots; and while our envoy to Brazil he wanted to kill the British Minister there. When in the early thirties Congressman Cilley of Maine charged him with taking a bribe, and refused to accept Webb's challenge on the ground that the latter was no gentleman, the im- petuous editor persuaded his second to challenge and kill Cilley. Ten years later Webb provoked Congressman Thomas F. Marshall, of Kentucky, by coarse attacks, into fighting a duel, and was sentenced to two years in the State prison. Greeley and many others of note signed LEGGETT ACTING EDITOR 155 a petition for a pardon, which Bryant indignantly op- posed, but Gov. Seward granted it. Chief among the Courier^s morning rivals was the Journal of Commerce, founded in 1827 as an advocate of the introduction of religion into business affairs, which went into the hands of David Hale and Gerard Hallock after the abolitionist silk merchant, Tappan, gave it up. It refused to advertise theaters and other amusement- places, and was considered a little fanatical, but it showed extraordinary enterprise for that day in news-gathering. In 1828 it stationed a swift craft off Sandy Hook to Inter- cept incoming ships and bring the first European news up the harbor, and It subsequently arranged a relay of fast horses from Philadelphia to bring the Congressional de- bates a day in advance of Its competitors. Webb followed the example, extending the pony relay to Washington, and spending from $15,000 to $20,000 a year on his clipper boats. Some episodes of this rivalry are amusing. After the fall of Warsaw in the Polish war, the Courier and Enquirer, to punish its competitors for news-stealing, printed a small edition denying — upon the strength of dispatches by the ship Ajax — the reported fall, and saw that copies reached the doorstep of all morning journals. There was no such arrival as the Ajax. Several news- papers reprinted the bogus news without credit, the Jour- nal of Commerce doing so In its country but not its city edition; and great was the Courier's sarcastic glee. Though Webb was too explosive, too dissipated, and too slender In ability to be a great editor, he had the money to obtain able lieutenants. One was the Jewish journalist M. M. Noah, who had edited the National Advocate In Coleman's day, and written patriotic dramas. In 1825, conceiving that the time had come for the "res- toration of the Jews," Noah had appeared at Grand Island, near Buffalo, In the insignia of one of the Hebrew monarchs, and dedicated It as the future Jerusalem and capital of the Jewish nation, calling It Ararat in honor of the original Noah. Disillusioned In this project, Noah bought a share in the Courier in 1831, and in 1832 re- 156 THE EVENING POST signed It. Another worker on the Courier was Charles King; James K. Paulding contributed; and In the forties It obtained Henry J. Raymond's services. But the most notable of Its writers when the year 1829 ended was a smart young Scotchman named James Gordon Bennett, who, after knocking about from Boston to Charleston in various employments — he had even essayed to open a commercial school In New York — had made a shining suc- cess In 1828 as Washington correspondent for Webb. Bennett, at this time highly studious, had examined in the Congressional Library one day a copy of Horace Wal- pole's letters, and at once began to imitate them In his correspondence, making it lively, full of gossip, and even vulgarly frank in descriptions of men of the day. Some Washington ladles were said to be Indebted to Bennett's glowing pen-pictures for their hosbands. He was active In other capacities for the journal — he reported the White-Crowlnshleld murder trial In Salem, Mass., wrote editorials, squibs, and amusing articles of sorts; and Webb showed how fundamentally lacking he was in editorial discernment when he never let Bennett receive more than $12 a week. In 1832 the homely, thrifty youngster from Banffshire left the Courier. Others among the eleven dailies were the Commercial Advertiser, the Daily Advertiser, and the Star, the last- named being the Post's closest rival In evening circula- tion. Much attention was attracted to the Daily Adver- tiser in 1835 by the Washington letters of Erastus Brooks, a young man who wrote as brightly as Bennett but more soberly. The following year he and his brother James founded the Express, also a sixpenny paper, which succeeded against heavy obstacles. Compared with Lon- don, the New York field was overcrowded, and no jour- nal had many subscribers; the Courier was vastly proud when it printed 3,500 copies a day. Newspapers were sold over the counter at the place of publication, and at a few hotels and coffeehouses, but not on the streets; the first employment of newsboys excited indignation, and was denounced as leading them into vice. Advertising LEGGETT ACTING EDITOR 157 rates continued ridiculously small. The Evening Post and its contemporaries still made the time-honored charge of $40, with a subscription thrown in, for Indefinite space; the first insertion of a ''square," 8 to 16 lines, cost seven- ty-five cents, the second and third twenty-five, and later insertions eighteen and three-fourths cents. When the daily advertising of the Courier (apart from yearly in- sertions) reached $55, that sum was thought remarkable. The harbinger of the new journalism was Benjam in H. Day , a former compositor for the Evening Post, who in September, 1833, began Issuing the first penny news- paper with sufficient strength to survive, th e Sun . The idea of this innovation came from London, which had possessed its Illustrated Penny Magazine since 1830, sold In huge quantities In New York and other American cities; Bryant had often praised It as an Instrument for educating the poor. The Sun began with a circulation of 300, which it rapidly Increased, until after "the publication of the famous "moon hoax" In 1835 It boasted the largest circulation In the world; three years later It distributed 38,000 copies daily. Not until the Civil War did It raise Its price above one cent, and it continued to be read by the poor almost exclusively. It was not a political force, for It voiced no energetic editorial opinions, nor was it a better purveyor of Intelligence than Its neighbors. It showed no more enterprise In news-collecting. Its corre- spondence was Inferior, and Its appeal, apart from Its cheapness and special features, lay In its great volume of help-wanted advertisements. The new journalism therefore had Its real beginning when, on May 6, 1835, in a cellar In Wall Street — not a basement, but a cellar — Rer|nptt p^f-ab|j