while they never tired of capitalizing Thomas Paine’s indiscreet statement in the _Public Advertiser_ that the embargo was really preparatory to war with England. Yet it was plain to the blindest that the measure was a desperate, almost despairing, effort to avoid war. Again, the _Evening Post_ accused the South and Southwest of sheer heartlessness. Jefferson cared not who starved at the North; he had saved a fortune from his salary, and could feed his negroes herring as well as hominy. “Who is Macon?” demanded Coleman when that leader supported legislation for preventing violations of the embargo. “A man who lives on the frontier of North Carolina; who can send out his negroes to provide for him his venison and his wild turkey; who raises his own hominy and grows his own cotton by the sweat of his hundred slaves, and who I suppose feels just about as much sympathy for the millions of people in the Eastern States, at whom he levels his death-doing blow, as the Bashaw of Tripoli.” Yet the South suffered in the long run more than the North, where manufactures speedily began to arise, and Jefferson saw his property in Virginia alarmingly impaired. Until the last the _Evening Post_ struggled against war with England, but it saw clearly that it was coming. As early as 1807 its Washington correspondent, probably one of the Federalist Congressmen from New York, stated that a Cabinet officer had told him that the country would have to choose between war with England or with France, and that England would probably be selected. In 1810 the editor himself wrote that America could not remain at peace with both belligerents, “and it is very clear how the country will decide.” The journal opposed the Macon bill in 1810, permitting importation and exportation only in American bottoms, as involving certain retaliation from Great Britain. It kept its two or three short news columns garnished with paragraphs upon the many American seamen languishing in French prisons since the Bayonne Decree. Thus in 1808, giving a long account of the mistreatment of two skippers from the city, Captains Palmer and Waterman, the editor exclaimed: “My blood boils in my veins.” The next year he reproduced a pitiful letter from a tar confined at Arras, compelled to subsist on a franc a day, and burst out: “Would you rest so silent and tame under a thousandth part as much from Great Britain? You know you would not.” He wanted an instant rupture of relations with France. The military tyranny which Napoleon spread over unwilling nations of Europe was attacked in fitting terms, and we find the French cruelties in the Peninsular campaign dwelt upon at length. When in 1808 Napoleon strengthened his alliance with the Russian Emperor, Coleman demanded: “Shall we join the confederacy against England, the only free and independent nation left in Europe?”