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136 1801. Coleman was a lawyer who had attracted the attention of the Federal leaders and had had some experience on The Gazette at Greenfield, Massachusetts. Coming to New York in 1798, he had been given an appointment in the Circuit Court, but in the political upheaval about the middle of 1801 he, along with many other members of his party, had been removed from his office.

The story of The Evening Post from 1801 to 1812 was well told by William Cullen Bryant in an editorial prepared for the semi-centennial of that paper in 1851. The original prospectus, though somewhat measured in style, was well written. The editor, William Coleman, while avowing his allegiance to the Federal Party, announced that "In each party are honest and virtuous men" and expressly persuaded that the people needed only to be well informed to decide public questions rightly. He contemplated a wider sphere than most secular papers of that day and spoke of his designs "to inculcate just principles in religion" as well as in "morals and politics." He even made some attempt to carry out this intention, for in an early number he printed a communication in reply to a heresy avowed by The American Citizen, a Republican daily paper, which had been maintaining that the soul was immaterial and that death was a sleep of the mind as well as of the body. At the outset, Coleman made a sincere effort to avoid those personal controversies so common among the conductors of party papers, and with which their columns were so much occupied. In a "leader" in the first number, he expressed his abhorrence of "personal virulence, low sarcasms, and verbal contentions with printers and editors" and his determination not to be deviated from the line of temperate discussion—a resolution he found difficult to keep.

The Evening Post occasionally indulged in a comment in a lighter vein. On May 18, 1802, it answered a female correspondent, who had asked why the paper, like other papers, had not censored the style of ladies' dress then in vogue: "Female dress of the modern Parisian cut, however deficient in point of the ornament vulgarly called clothing, must at least be allowed to