Evening Post, November 16, 1801. William Coleman, a Massachusetts lawyer, who at one time had been associated with Aaron Burr, was made the editor. His opponents gave Coleman the title of "Field Marshal of Federal Editors "and he was unquestionably the ablest man in the country in his line.
It is to him that we owe what knowledge we have of Hamilton's editorial methods. Hamilton, it seems, was in the habit of seeing Coleman late in the evening, whenever the latter felt the necessity of the statesman's assistance. "He always kept himself minutely informed on all political matters," was Coleman's confidential statement to a contemporary; "as soon as I see him, he begins in a deliberate manner to dictate and I to note down in shorthand; when he stops, my article is completed."[1] A very humble note for an editor, but Hamilton was then a powerful political figure, with a position in his state not very dissimilar to that which Theodore Roosevelt occupied in our own time, after his retirement from office.
In New York State there was a particularly bitter struggle, because here were located Aaron Burr,—now Vice-president under Jefferson, although secretly opposed to him—and Hamilton, the acknowledged leader of what remained of the Federalist party. Burr's endeavor to make himself a leader of the anti-Jeffersonian party led to vicious attacks on him by the American Citizen, edited by James Cheetham, one of the vigorous editors of the day. Duane, editor of the Aurora, and Coleman, editor of the Evening Post, constituted, with Cheetham, a triumvirate of editorial pugnacity and vivacity.
As Burr also had a paper, the Chronicle, the result was a continual exchange of personalities, probably more vicious than at any period in history, at least in that of
- ↑ G. J. Clark, Memoir of Jeremiah Mason, 32.
