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 Coleman 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 he had then half formed an ambition to conduct a newspaper 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, Federalist candidate for Governor, 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.