The abilities of Coleman, an interesting type of the best Federalist editor, were as great as those of any other American journalist of the time. His formal training was unusually good for a day in which powerful figures like Duane, Cheetham, Binns, and Callender were comparatively uncultivated men, who wrote with vigor but without polish or even grammatical correctness. Born in Boston on Feb. 14, 1766, he was fortunate enough to be sent to Phillips Andover, the first incorporated academy in New England, soon after it opened in 1778. Though he was a poor boy, he had for fellow-pupils the sons of the best families of the region, including Josiah Quincy, the future mayor of Boston and president of Harvard; and for “preceptor” the famous Eliphalet Pearson, a master of the harsh type of Keate of Eton or Dr. Busby of Westminster. Here he gained “a certain elegance of scholarship” in Greek and Latin which, Bryant tells us, “was reckoned among his qualifications as a journalist.” He formed a taste for reading, and his editorials bear evidence of his knowledge of all the standard English authors--Shakespeare, Milton, Hume, Johnson, Fielding, Smollett, and the eighteenth-century poets and essayists. Sterne was a favorite with him, and like all other editors, he knew the “Letters of Junius” almost by heart. Most Phillips Andover boys went on to Harvard, but Coleman began the study of law in the office of Robert Treat Paine, then Attorney-General of Massachusetts, at Worcester. Nothing is known of his life there save that he became an intimate friend of the Rev. Aaron Bancroft, father of the historian George Bancroft; and that he dropped his books to serve in the winter march of the militia in 1786 against Shays.