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 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 animosity 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 _Recorder_ the treacherous Callender’s attack upon the personal 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 vilified by the opposition press. Coleman was not content with harping upon Jefferson’s actual humiliations and errors, as his flight before Tarleton in 1781 and his opposition 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 sensibility to shame; and we congratulate the American public that our chief magistrate has so completely arrived at this enviable point.”