master of invective, who was proud to be called an American Junius. When the breach between Burr and the Clintons occurred in 1801, Cheetham became the scribe of the latter faction. He assailed Burr not only through the columns of the Citizen but by a running fire of anonymous pamphlets, charging upon Burr the crime of treachery to Jefferson and to the party in the late presidential election. The friends of Burr defended him in the Morning Chronicle, which they established in 1802 under the supervision of an elder brother of Washington Irving. This journal canonized Burr and denounced the ambitious oligarchy of Livingstons and Clintons.
The organ of the outgoing Federalist administration was the Commercial Advertiser, still in existence, the dean of the metropolitan daily newspapers. This paper had been founded in 1793 by Noah Webster, and had at first borne a classic name, the Daily Minerva, suggestive of its famous founder's Yale education. Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists who followed his fortunes also possessed a newspaper battery. This was the Evening Post, founded in 1801, and edited by William Coleman, a Massachusetts gentleman and a lawyer. He had been a municipal office-holder, but De Witt Clinton's new broom swept him out of office in August 1801, and the Post was established in the following November. The New York Evening Post owes its existence to the first application of the "spoils" theory in our political system. Mr. Coleman and Dr. Irving of the Chronicle were both men of erudition and scholarly tastes, but Irving could compete with neither Coleman nor Cheetham in spiteful vigor of expression. These gentlemen filled the small space reserved from advertisements with malicious paragraphs about each other, or with furious diatribes against the leaders of opposing parties. A few local chronicles and a bare summary of foreign news six or eight weeks old occasionally appeared. Jefferson's first message in 1801 was printed in the Post on the twelfth of December, 1801. It was in no wise referred to until the seventeenth, when some contributor, presumably Alexander Hamilton, hid behind the dignified Roman mask of "Lucius Crassus," and discharged a resounding volley at the message.
Cheetham and Coleman were soon embroiled, and Coleman wrote of "the insolent vulgarity of that base wretch." Duane, of the Philadelphia Aurora, was another of Coleman's antagonists, and on one occasion the latter hit both his birds with one stone, thus:
"Lie on, Duane, lie on for pay.
And Cheetham, lie thou too;
More against truth you cannot say
Than truth can say 'gainst you."
