[Image unavailableAMOS KENDALLFrom an engraving in the Democratic Review, March, 1838, after a drawing byCharles Fenderick
belligerently espousing the cause of the minority. It is significant of his instinctive bent that when he turned to politics he shed his timidity and stood forth a passionate militant. Graduating from the college that Webster loved, he declined his diploma, partly because of indifference, but largely because of his personal dislike of the president. Thus early he entertained no illusions, and had the courage of both his convictions and his prejudices.
Meanwhile the second war with England was on, and he was beginning to detest the New England Federalists for their disloyalty and illiberality. The pulpits rang with bitter denunciations of Madison, and ministers proclaimed from the pulpits that Democrats were “irreligious profligates.”[338]In Boston, Kendall heard the eloquent Harrison Gray Otis ferociously denounce the war, and he hastened home to enlist, to be rejected for physical disabilities.
In his twenty-fifth year he set forth from his bleak New Hampshire home to seek his fortune, and we are able to sense the spirit and temper of the youth from the jottings of his journal. At Boston he heard Edward Everett whom he thought a “youth of great promise.” At Washington he attended a White House levee, finding Dolly Madison “a noble and dignified person,” the President’s “personal appearance very inferior,” and meeting Felix Grundy and Lewis Cass. Thence he passed down the Ohio, a guest of Major Barry, and became a citizen of Kentucky.
At Lexington he entered the home of Henry Clay, engaged by Mrs. Clay as a tutor for the children. In later years, when he was the mysterious power in the Jackson Administration, and Clay the leader of the Opposition, the drawing-rooms of Washington buzzed with a fantastic tale, intended to prove his depravity and ingratitude. Harriet Martineau,[339]while in the capital, heard it and incorporated it in her book. According to this story “tidings reached Mr.and Mrs. Clay one evening that a young man, solitary and poor, lay ill of a fever in a noisy hotel in the town. Mrs. Clay went down in the carriage without delay, and brought the sufferer home to her house, where she nursed him with her own hands till he recovered. Mr. Clay was struck with the talents of the young man and retained him as a tutor of his sons, heaping benefits upon him with characteristic bounty.” Unhappily for the tale, Kendall was not ill, Mr. Clay was at Geneva at the time of his employment and during the entire period of his stay in Ashland, and the “benefits heaped upon him” consisted of $300 a year with board and lodging, and the privilege of using Mr. Clay’s library. Soon after leaving the service of the Clays, we find him recording in his diary: “Rode to Lexington and visited H. Clay. I found him a very agreeable man, and was familiarly acquainted with him in half an hour.”
However, his sojourn at Ashland was pleasurable and profitable. Mrs. Clay, deeply interested in him, chaffed him on his timidity, criticized the stiffness of his bows, and drove him to his room to practice before the mirror, admitted him to her social gatherings, called upon him to read his poetry to her friends, and rallied him about his love affairs. Thus the “mediocre” and vulgar “writer for pay” of the Jackson régime was once considered fit for the social circle in the home of Henry Clay.
Scarcely had he been admitted to the bar when he was enticed by Colonel Richard M. Johnson into the editorship of the “Georgetown Patriot”; and it is illuminative of his character to find him, when the slayer of Tecumseh, a little later, upbraided him for refusing personally to abuse the Opposition, writing in his diary: “I shall give Richard my vote, but I shall not be his tool.”[340]His editorials constructive, his specialty banking and currency, he soon found himself in the editorial chair of the “Frankfort Argus,” where he wasinstantly engaged in bitter political controversies. Whether in argument, where he excelled, in invective, or in wit, he invariably scored heavily on the Opposition. For his generation and community, his editorial code was lofty. He promised himself never knowingly to misrepresent; if, through mistake, he did, to rectify the mistake without being asked; never to retract a statement he thought true; to resent an insult in kind; to defend himself, if assaulted, by any means necessary, even to killing, and never to run. So great was his professional self-respect that on one occasion, when vulgarly assailed in an Opposition paper, he had his answer printed in bill form and circulated by hand, rather than befoul his own journal with a suitable reply.
In seeming contradiction, however, we have his merciless bombardment of the unfortunate Shadrach Penn, editor of a Louisville paper, who had a genius for attracting the ridicule of his intellectual superiors; for while Kendall was peppering him from Frankfort, George D. Prentice was bombarding him from Louisville, and between the two, he was driven whimpering from the State.[341]
The physical courage of Kendall may be read in his encounters with irate victims. In one controversy he was spared the necessity of killing an assailant with a dirk by the timely interference of friends. In another he put an opponent to flight by cracking a whip and displaying the sparkling silver handle in the sun. He never ran.
Under his editorship the “Argus” became a powerful political factor in Kentucky. He inaugurated the plan of printing legislative speeches, specialized on political news, intelligently discussed international affairs, launched a campaign in favor of public schools, reviewed contemporary books, dipped into religious subjects with his “Sunday Reflections,” and significantly began a fight against the National Bank in a series of articles combating the SupremeCourt decision as to its constitutionality. If, thirteen years later, he was not to flinch under the lashings of the Bank press, it may have been because he had become seasoned to the punishment more than a decade before when he was described as a “political incendiary.”
His friendly relations with Clay were maintained at least until the autumn of 1827, when, on a trip to New Hampshire, he wrote his wife of dining with the orator in Washington. But the campaign of 1828 found Kendall and the “Argus” valiant in the cause of Jackson, with Clay and his friends “casting aspersions upon his motives and character.”[342]In revenge for these attacks he sought the privilege of taking the electoral vote of Kentucky to Washington. Meanwhile, after the election, and before his departure, he had been informed by an emissary from the Hermitage that Jackson intended to offer him an appointment.
The Kendall lingering at the capital awaiting an appointment presents an interesting study. It is disappointing to note a certain humility and manner usually associated with the lower order of place-hunters. He was evidently ardent in his pursuit of a position. His inexperience is disclosed in his disgust on finding so many obscure politicians pretending to the distinction of having elected Jackson. And yet, so anxious was he for place, that he was willing to accept one paying an inadequate salary, and he wrote his wife that in that event he might persuade Duff Green to pay him $1000 a year for writing for the “Telegraph.”[343]During the weeks of waiting before the inauguration, he was not a little embarrassed for funds, and yet, under these drab conditions, he did not lack for invitations of a social nature. Meeting General Macomb and finding him “a Jackson man,” he expressed the hope that he might “find him a valuable acquaintance.”[344]Meanwhile he was investigating houses andrents, and concluded to economize by taking a house in Georgetown. “The house I contemplate taking,” he wrote, “is in a charming neighborhood on First Street, near Cox’s Row.”
Receiving his appointment as Fourth Auditor, he dropped from public view. Dinners and parties saw him no more. He immediately assumed the rôle of a recluse. Taking his duties seriously, he uncovered the crimes of his predecessor and sent him to jail. His rules for the conduct of subordinates were such as to merit the approval of business men—rules that the office-holder of those days scarcely understood. After a week in office he wrote his wife: “The labor is very light, and when I am master of the laws under which I act, will consist of little more than looking at accounts and signing my name.” Thus we find him systematizing his work to dedicate the greater portion of his time to the political work of the Administration. “Hamilton,” said Martin Van Buren, a month later, “Kendall is to be an influential man. I wish the President would invite him to dinner, and if you have no objection, as you are so intimate with the General, I wish you would propose to him to invite Kendall to meet us at dinner to-morrow.”[345]The invitation was extended and accepted, and the Red Fox, who had a genius for picking men, was notably attentive to the timid subordinate.
During the five years he held his inferior post, Kendall became more powerful than any Cabinet Minister in the determination of Jacksonian policies. A little later, a contemporary observer of men at the capital described him as “secretive, yet audacious in his political methods, a powerful and ready writer, and the author of many of Jackson’s ablest State papers.”[346]There in his office we may picture him, alone, with pad and pencil, preparing elaborate political war maps, and literature for propaganda, or in earnestconversation with Lewis and other members of the Kitchen Cabinet, forging thunderbolts with which to smite the foe. And it was very soon after he had left this subordinate post that Harriet Martineau was impressed with the uncanny mystery of the “invincible Amos Kendall.”
“I was fortunate enough,” she wrote, “to catch a glimpse of the invincible Amos Kendall, one of the most remarkable men in America. He is supposed to be the moving spring of the Administration; the thinker, the planner, the doer; but it is all in the dark. Documents are issued, the excellence of which prevents them from being attributed to the persons that take the responsibility for them; a correspondence is kept up all over the country, for which no one seems answerable; work is done of goblin extent and with goblin speed, which makes men look about them with superstitious wonder; and the invincible Amos Kendall has the credit for it all. President Jackson’s letters to his Cabinet are said to be Kendall’s; the report on Sunday mails is attributed to Kendall; the letters sent from Washington to remote country newspapers, whence they are collected and published in the ‘Globe’ as demonstrations of public opinion, are pronounced to be written by Kendall; and it is some relief that he now, having the office of Postmaster-General, affords opportunity for open attack upon this twilight personage. He is undoubtedly a great genius. He unites with all his ‘great talents for silence’ a splendid audacity.
“It is clear he could not do the work he does if he went into society like other men. He did, however, one evening.... The moment I went in, intimations reached me from all quarters, amid nods and winks, ‘Kendall is here,’ ‘There he is.’ I saw at once that his plea for seclusion (bad health) is no false one. The extreme sallowness of his complexion, the hair of such perfect whiteness as is rarely seen in a man of middle age, testified to his disease.[347]His countenance does nothelp the superstitious to throw off their dread of him. He probably does not desire this superstition to melt away, for there is no calculating how much influence is given the Jackson Administration by the universal belief that there is a concealed eye and hand behind the machinery of Government, by which everything could be foreseen, and the hardest deeds done. A member of Congress told me this night that he had watched through five sessions for a sight of Kendall, and had never obtained one until now. Kendall was leaning on a chair, his head bent down, and eyes glancing up at a member of Congress with whom he was in earnest conversation, and in a moment he was gone.”[348]
Such was the cleverest, most audacious, and powerful member of the Kitchen Cabinet—a man who made history that historians have written and ascribed to others who merely uttered the words or registered the will of this indomitable journalist and politician.
WhenJackson left the Hermitage, he was accompanied by Major William B. Lewis, who had been intimately identified with his campaign for the Presidency. This unobtrusive man found lodgment with his chief at Gadsby’s, where he interested himself in analyzing the characters of office-seekers for the guidance of his friend. After walking with Jackson from the hotel to the Capitol, and seeing him inducted into office, he announced his plan to return to the quiet life of Tennessee.
“Why, Major,” exclaimed the astonished Jackson, “you are not going to leave me here alone, after doing more than any other man to bring me here!”
Moved by the sincerity of the appeal, Lewis remained on in Washington through the eight years of the reign, living at the White House, and enjoying a greater personal intimacy with the President than any other politician of the time. Acceptingan insignificant auditorship at the Treasury as an excuse for staying on, he interpreted his real function as that of a political bodyguard. He came and went in the President’s private apartments at will. No formalities were interposed between these two strangely different men. No secrets formed a veil. In the midst of the bitter fights against his idol, Lewis moved quietly and uncannily about, gauging sentiment, determining the drift, analyzing men and motives, guarding Jackson against the surprise attack. When the ferocious onslaughts were at their worst in the Senate, Lewis could be found somewhere in the shadows of the chamber watching every movement of the enemy, and critically, if not always wisely, passing judgment upon the strategy of the Administration forces; and when the fight was over, he hastened to the White House, sure to find Jackson sitting up in his room with the picture of Rachel and her Bible on the table before him, awaiting the report.
There was this difference between Lewis and the other members of the Kitchen Cabinet—they all loved Jackson; but where the others thought of him as the personification of a party, Lewis could only think of him as the friend of the Hermitage. He had fought and wrought for his election, not to score a party victory, but to vindicate the man. Of Jackson’s comfort, happiness, and prestige he was supremely jealous, but there were times when he rebelled against the audacious proposals of others, more given to thinking of party, to stake the General’s reputation and success upon a party issue.
He has been called the “great father of wire-pullers,”[349]a closet man’s definition of a great manipulator of men. At the time the public began to speculate on the presidential possibilities of Jackson, the Major was his neighbor. He was not a penniless adventurer or soldier of fortune. There was nothing in politics for himself for which he cared abauble. He was living comfortably on his large productive plantation, with slaves in the fields, and books in the library. Jackson had learned to love and trust him years before when he was chief quartermaster on the General’s staff in the campaign of 1812-15, and in the final settlement the Government was found to be indebted to him to the amount of three cents—which was never paid. When the Jackson movement became serious, the Major, knowing the General’s strength and weaknesses, took charge of all confidential matters. To just what extent he contributed to Jackson’s election no one ever knew—but all knew that he had played an important part. He conducted all the correspondence, and carefully scrutinized, and often revised, the General’s letters; and another of his functions was to serve as a sort of valet for all State occasions when Jackson should be carefully groomed.
He possessed the qualities that Jackson lacked. Where Jackson was impulsive, he was deliberative; where Jackson was prejudiced, he was tolerant; where Jackson was rash, he was prudent, if not timid; where Jackson was a man of action, he was a man of thought; and while Jackson had ideas, he furnished the vehicle to bear them in parade. During the many months preceding the election of 1828, this practical, polished politician was studying the political war map, and quietly planning successful battles in this State and that. He knew the politics of each State, the personalities and prejudices entering in, the dominating motives of all politicians, even to those never known outside their own little communities, and he knew how to play one force against the other without appearing in the game. Knowing as he did all the cross-currents of local politics, nothing ever arose that he could not deal with intelligently.
During the eight years in the White House, Lewis was a whole regiment of Swiss guards—always on duty and alert. “Keep William B. Lewis to ferret out and make known toyou all the plots and intrigues hatching against your Administration, and you are safe,” was Jackson’s advice to Polk when the latter was entering the White House. We shall find him implicated in some of the most important events of his time, making history, and yet escaping the historian. His great advantage was his perfect understanding of Jackson’s character. He often became a buffer, protecting the President against unpleasant revelations. If he thought a disclosure necessary as a protection to the grim old warrior, he told his secret; if he thought it would merely arouse to useless wrath, he buried it; and sometimes, as in the case of the Crawford letter, he bided his time for months before revealing it. All the politicians of his day passed in review before him, Democrats and Whigs, Nullifiers and Nationalists, friends and enemies, and he silently catalogued them through a Bertillon system of his own. His advice to Jackson was that of a friend to a friend, seated about the blazing White House hearth, discussing politics and men in the midst of the tobacco smoke, as they might have done in the private life of the Hermitage.
He did not possess Kendall’s genius for programmes, nor Blair’s for propaganda, but he was invaluable in the field of personalities. He alone of the three sometimes doubted and drew back in fear. When Jackson vetoed the Maysville Bill, Van Buren found Lewis’s countenance “to the last degree despondent.”[350]He dreaded and doubted the effect of the veto of the measure rechartering the Bank, and later, the withdrawal of the deposits. Having been Federalistic himself, in other days, he had a fellow feeling for Louis McLane when that politician found himself in trouble. But doubting and trembling though he sometimes was, Van Buren has testified that “no considerations or temptations, through many of which he was obliged to pass, could weaken his fidelity to the General or his desire for the success of his Administration.”[351]
In the early stages of the Bank controversy, he alone of the members of the Kitchen Cabinet maintained friendly relations with Biddle.[352]
Concerning his status among the Jacksonian leaders, biographers and historians have radically disagreed. Even among the later writers this disagreement persists, and where one dismisses the theory that he was a politician, far-sighted and astute, as without sufficient evidence,[353]another concludes that “in a day of astute politicians, Major Lewis was one of the cleverest.”[354]The truth appears to be that while he was not a moulder of policies and creator of programmes, he was one of the most clever manipulators of men and masters of personal intrigue who ever served a President. In the Kitchen Cabinet he was the personal manager—the political secretary.
Themost militant of the Kitchen Cabinet was Isaac Hill, whose name was anathema to the Federalists of New England. A poor boy educated in a printshop, slight and lame, hurling picturesque phrases and bitter reproaches at the powerful enemy, excoriating it with his satire and sarcasm, and slashing it with the keen blade of his wit, it is not surprising that the impression handed down by the Intellectuals of the Opposition is unfavorable. Where they have not dismissed him with a shrug, they have damned him as a dunce—and largely because he gave virility to a minority and made it militant, and, despite overwhelming odds, established in the hotbed of proscriptive Federalism a vigorous Democratic paper which was quoted from New Orleans toDetroit, and from Boston to St. Louis. If he lacked the depth and the constructive faculty of Kendall, and the literary finish of Blair, he possessed a genius as a phrase-monger which spread his fame and served his party, and in the heat of a campaign, one of his stinging paragraphs was as effective as one of Kendall’s leaders. There was no finesse in his fighting—he fought out in the open, in full range of his foe, and with any weapon on which he could lay his hands. If the intensity of his partisanship amounted to unfairness, it had been made so by the intolerance and bigotry of the Opposition of his section. Since no member of the Kitchen Cabinet more insistently demanded of Jackson the adoption of the spoils system, it is not unprofitable to inquire into the origin of his state of mind.
His life was a tragedy. Born in abject poverty, a cripple from childhood, he had seen his father and grandfather become mental wrecks. Under this cloud, in this state of penury, he looked out upon the world. Shut off by his infirmity from physical labor, he had no money for an education, and he lived on an unpromising New Hampshire farm, where there were no schools, libraries, or books, and few papers. But before he was eight he had read the Bible through. Two years before he had read the story of the Revolution from books borrowed, and had supplemented his reading by having a relative, who had fought with Washington, describe the burning of Charlestown and the Concord fight. There was infinite pathos in his passion for the printed page. But college was out of the question, the printing-office the only possible substitute, and thus, after a long apprenticeship, he took over a wobbling paper at Concord and became an editor.
Throwing discretion to the winds and with a sublime audacity, he took up the challenge of the powerful majority; and it required courage to pursue that course in the New Hampshire of 1809. To be a Democrat (Republican) therein those days was to offend God; boldly to preach hostility to Federalism was to proclaim blasphemy and invite destruction. The Federalistic press opened their batteries of abuse upon the obscure youth. One paper solemnly announced the discovery that he was a direct descendant of the witches who had suffered at Salem. Hill returned a spirited fire, and rejoiced in the combat. “I have hit them, for they flutter,” he said.[355]In the campaign of 1810 he fairly galvanized the prostrate friends of the National Administration into life and incurred an unbelievable hatred of the Opposition. When this crippled boy was brutally assaulted on the streets of Concord, the Federalist press of New Hampshire gloated over the attack. Nor was it above sneering at his infirmity.
Throughout the War of 1812 he was a pillar of strength to the Republic in New Hampshire. During the darkest days it was said that he was worth a thousand soldiers in heartening the patriots.[356]With the approach of the campaign of 1828, Hill’s paper, the “Patriot,” began to bombard the Adams Administration, and Clay, who was to shudder later at the wickedness of the spoils system, promptly deprived him of the public printing.
Thus the campaign of 1828 began. The stinging paragraphs of Hill made the rounds of the Democratic press of the country, and in his own State he was shamelessly assailed. Not satisfied with maligning his personal character, his enemies stooped to references to the insanity of his father in disseminating the story that he was crazy.[357]In view of this cruel personal persecution, it was but human that, on the election of Jackson, his voice should have been for war on all the Federalist office-holders. Thus his psychology is easilyunderstood. Because of his political convictions, he had been proscribed. A cripple, he had been personally attacked in the streets. In suffering he had been ridiculed. The insanity of his father had been made the subject of vulgar jests. His personal character had been assailed. And in the hour of victory, all the pent-up hatred of the years was let loose upon the vanquished foe.
Hill was the Marat of the Kitchen Cabinet, the fanatic, calling for heads—more heads—and unseemly in his mirth as they fell.
In appearance he was not prepossessing. Below the medium height, he was spare as well as crippled. In his high forehead and the expression of his eyes his intellect was indicated, and he carried himself with that haughty air of superiority which men, forced to fight for their existence, are apt to assume. This was described by his enemies as “demoniacal.” He always dressed plainly as a workingman. Without imagination or dreams, severely practical and to the point, conscious of his limitations, and passionately devoted to both his convictions and prejudices, there was nothing about him to appeal to the fashionable or the intellectually elect. In no sense dazzling in his gifts, hesitating instead of eloquent, shocking the Senate of his time by reading his speeches, and proud of his profession, he was not pointed out to travelers who wrote books, nor lionized in the drawing-rooms, nor dignified by the complimentary notices of the women letter-writers or diarists of his day. He has come down largely as his enemies have painted him, and their very hate of him discloses his effectiveness as a politician.
He was one of the Republic’s first uncompromising partisans—“My party, right or wrong.”
AnAdministration and party paper had been considered important in the political circles of the Republic from thebeginning, but it was left to the editors of the Kitchen Cabinet to develop it to the highest degree of efficiency. The “National Journal,” Court paper of the Adams Administration, had awakened the Opposition to an appreciation of the practical value of a powerful party paper. Duff Green and the “Telegraph,” in a sense, met the requirements, but even then there were Democrats of influence and aspirations who found something lacking. To Van Buren, the editor, devoted to Calhoun, was unsatisfactory. It is inconceivable that he felt the need for a more aggressive pen for the Opposition. Nevertheless, in the summer of 1826, while planning a more vigorous attack on the Adams Administration, he had an “animated conversation” concerning the need of a strictly party paper with Calhoun, at the latter’s house in Georgetown. The Carolinian urged the adoption of the “Telegraph” as the party organ, with Van Buren pressing the advantage of prevailing upon Thomas Ritchie of the “Richmond Enquirer” to accept the editorship of a new party paper at the capital.[358]Failing to persuade Calhoun, the Red Fox cleverly approached Senator Tazewell of Virginia, an ardent friend of the Carolinian, and persuaded him to join in an invitation to the Richmond journalist.[359]Ritchie declined, however, on the ground of his attachment to Virginia and his reluctance to leave old friends and associates.[360]Thus, at the beginning of the Administration, it seemed that Duff Green and the “Telegraph” were destined to become the pen and organ of the Jacksonian Democracy.
At a White House levee in the winter of 1830-31, under the very nose of Jackson, and under his roof, the intriguing Green drew the proprietor of a Washington printing-house aside to tell him confidentially of the hastening rupture of Jackson and Calhoun, and of the plans in incubation for the advancement of the presidential aspirations of the latter. Calhounorgans were to be acquired or established in all the strategic political points in the country, and when the rupture came these were to follow the lead of the “Telegraph” in a nationwide denunciation of Jackson. The printer was offered the editorship of one of these papers, and a liberal amount for his Washington plant. Thoroughly devoted to the political fortunes of the President, and not relishing the idea of being the depositary of a secret which threatened the President’s position, the printer consulted freely with his friends, and, on their advice, carried the story to the White House.
Benton tells us that the story did not surprise Jackson, who was “preparing for it.”[361]Thus we are told that in the summer of 1830 he had been impressed with a powerful editorial attack on Nullification in the “Frankfort Argus,” had made inquiries as to the identity of the author, and had authorized the extension of an invitation to assume the editorship of an Administration paper in the capital. The version of Benton differs in material points from the version of Amos Kendall,[362]who was far more intimately identified with the launching of the new paper than either Benton or Van Buren. Here we have it that the idea was not Jackson’s, and that when plans for a Jacksonian organ were presented to him “he entirely disapproved.” At that time Jackson was unable to bring himself to believe in the treachery of Green. When ultimately, however, he saw the drift, he gave his “tacit consent.”
Here Kendall’s story clashes with the theory, put forth by Green, that Van Buren was the directing genius behind the whole project. When the President finally gave his “tacit consent,” the practical politicians of the Kitchen Cabinet took charge. The various governmental offices were visited for an understanding as to what portion of the Government printing could be expected. When Van Buren, then at thehead of the State Department, was approached, he announced that he would not give a dollar of the printing of his department, on the ground that “were such a paper established its origin would be attributed to him, and he was resolved to be able to say that he had nothing to do with it.” This is typical of Van Buren, and is no doubt true. But the responses from all the other departments were satisfactory and the plans were pushed.
Having positively settled upon the paper, the next step was to find a managerial genius. In a conference between Kendall and Barry, the Postmaster-General, the latter suggested the availability of Frank P. Blair, then writing occasionally for the “Frankfort Argus,” though not attached to the paper in a regular capacity. The correspondence with Blair was conducted by Kendall. The Kentuckian, surprised, momentarily hesitated, and it was not until Kendall had agreed to bear an equal part of the responsibility that he consented.
While Blair was getting his affairs in order in Kentucky, Kendall proceeded with the arrangements in Washington, and when the editor reached the capital nothing remained unsettled but the name and a motto. The two agreed to call the paper the “Globe,” and the motto, suggested by Blair, “The World is Governed Too Much.”
Thus there appears no reason to doubt that Kendall’s version is the correct one, that Jackson was no more a leader in the movement than Van Buren, and that the idea was conceived by the little group of new and practical politicians, then coming to the fore, and who, while friends of Jackson, were interested in “measures more than men.”
Thearrival of Frank Blair in Washington was an historical event, not appreciated at the time, and scarcely properly appraised to this day. But the ugly, illy dressed stranger, whopresented himself at the White House immediately after reaching the capital, gave little promise, in his appearance, of the power within him. Instead of a large, raw-boned, husky Kentuckian expected, Major Lewis, who met him, was confronted by a short, slender man, poorly garbed, and rather timid and retiring than otherwise. The Major was frankly disappointed and probably disgusted. But when the editor was presented to Jackson, that genius took note neither of his dress nor appearance. Although expecting foreign diplomats and distinguished statesmen to dinner, he could see no reason why the unimposing little man, with the ill-fitting clothes and the ugly visage, should not remain as his guest. Assuming that he would be alone, Blair accepted, and, to his horror, he found himself in the presence of ministers in all the splendor of their official regalia. Unaccustomed to such show, and feeling the conspicuousness of his garb, he fled to a corner, hoping to escape notice. But Jackson, who never judged men by their appearance, least of all by their clothes, sought him out with the kindest intentions, and placed him beside him at the table. This act of courtesy, painful to Blair at the time, was understood and appreciated, and not only won his ardent support, but his deepest affection.
Although unknown to Jackson, who would have been uninterested if he had known, Frank Blair was qualified by blood to sit at the table of the first gentleman of the land. His grandfather had been acting president of Princeton when Witherspoon, signer of the Declaration, was summoned to New Jersey to accept the presidency. Born forty years before becoming editor of the “Globe,” he had displayed, in college, the remarkable intellectual qualities that were to make him the adviser of Presidents, and one of the most influential moulders of public opinion of his time. He distinguished himself as the best rhetorician and linguist of his class.[363]
FRANCIS P. BLAIRROGER B. TANEYWILLIAM B. LEWIS
The weakness of his voice discouraged his ambition for forensic distinction. In the Governor’s Mansion at Frankfort he was married, early in life, to a charming woman noted for “her extraordinary mental force and her sagacity.”[364]
Like Kendall and Barry, Blair had begun his political career as an ardent supporter of Clay, and like them, had broken with him on the “bargain” story. According to Blair’s contention through life, Clay had confided to him in advance that, if such a contingency as did develop should arise in the congressional caucus, he would throw his support to Adams, and that he had protested against the plan. Whether true or not, that event marked the end of Blair’s interest in the political ambitions of the man from Ashland. From 1823 to 1827 he played a conspicuous part as one of the principals in the famous fight between the New and the Old Courts which all but reduced the State to a condition bordering on anarchy. This part of his career is difficult to understand. The New Court Party, with which he was affiliated, was a revolutionary organization mustering its strength from the indebtedness and poverty of the people. It proposed to relieve the condition of the poor through methods frankly revolutionary and worse. During the period of the court fight, and while acting as the clerk of the revolutionary court, two events completely changed the course of his career. He broke with Clay and allied himself with the Democratic Party; and he became a regular contributor to the columns of the “Frankfort Argus,” and a journalist by profession. On abandoning the court clerkship he immediately identified himself with Kendall in the publication of the paper, and the combined genius of these two extraordinary men converted the little Western journal into one of the most powerful and popular of the Jacksonian organs. All the credit appears to have gone to Kendall and none to his associate, for after theelection it was Kendall and not Blair who was assured of recognition from the incoming Administration. After Kendall went to Washington, Blair, without the slightest notion of ever following, remained in Frankfort, writing special articles in support of Jacksonian policies for the “Argus.” Thus he plied his trenchant pen against the Bank, excoriated Nullification, attacked Clay, and damned Calhoun. He had suffered financial reverses, been forced to sacrifice much property, and was in distressed circumstances. Later, when he was assailed by Senator Poindexter as having gone to Washington as a “beggar,” he was indignantly to repel the charge. “The editor of the ‘Globe’ resigned, on leaving Frankfort to take charge of the press here,” he wrote, “the clerkship of the circuit court, the fees of which alone averaged $2000 annually, and the presidency of the Bank of the Commonwealth, and other employments which made his annual income upward of $3000—a sum twice as great as the salaries of the judges of the Supreme Court, and a third greater than that of the Governor of the State.”[365]Nevertheless, it was the state of his finances which had necessitated the temporary suppression of the fact that he had accepted the editorship of the “Globe.”
Once in the editorial chair, he assumed a militant attitude, and frankly announced that the paper would be devoted “to the discussion and maintenance of the principles which brought General Jackson into office”; and as early as April, 1831, four months after the first appearance of the paper, he began vigorously to advocate the reëlection of his idol in the White House.
The first issue appeared on December 7, 1830, published twice a week. In its initial days the inevitable quarrel between Blair and Green simmered, and while the “Globe” and the “Telegraph” were nervously toying with their pistols, the actual fight did not commence until Green published the Calhoun letters. Thereafter the contest was acrimonious andcontinuous. The immediate result of this battle was to impress Blair with the necessity of a daily publication, requiring a much larger outlay in money than either Blair or Kendall or both were able to advance. This, however, did not discourage the plucky little Kentuckian in the least. He called upon the friends and supporters of Jackson in the capital and throughout the country to subscribe for six hundred copies and pay for them in advance at the rate of ten dollars per annum. This money was easily collected, and thus, without the advance, by Blair, of a dollar of capital, the “Globe” was placed upon a firm and sure foundation.[366]
The journalistic genius of the little editor almost immediately gave the paper first rank in importance among all the papers then published in the country. Some of his admirers have said that “he became the master of a style of composition that compared favorably with that of Junius.”[367]However that may be, he unquestionably was forceful, entertaining, and at times, eloquent. He could be dignified and argumentative without being dull. He knew how to appeal at once to the lover of pure English and the uneducated artisan of the city or the frontiersman in the wilderness. He was a pioneer among the journalists who have known how to produce a paper that would be as welcome on the library table of the student as in the hut of the farmer on the outskirts of civilization. The secret of his strength was his direct method. There was nothing of equivocation or compromise in his character. He did not qualify away all force for the sake of conservatism. He liked to cross the Rubicon, burn the bridges, and devastate the country. Any one could understand precisely what he meant. He was intense in his convictions, and he had the audacity, inseparable from political genius, tomove in a straight line, prepared to meet the enemy even on ground of the latter’s choosing. His gift of satire and sarcasm was a joy to his fellow partisans who delighted in him. At first intended as their spokesman, he became their leader. Politicians soon learned that it was not necessary to carry suggestions to the editor of the “Globe”—they went to his sanctum to get them. Capable of a skillful use of the rapier, he preferred the meat-axe. Nothing pleased him so much as the crushing of the skulls of the enemies of Jackson, and if these should happen to be Democrats, all the greater was the joy of the operation.
This slashing, brilliant style delighted Jackson, who, strangely enough, had a profound admiration for the fluent writer. The old warrior took him to his bosom. That the editor of the “Court journal” should be mistaken was unthinkable to the President; and when any one asked him for information on any subject with which he was unfamiliar, he would invariably reply: “Go to Frank Blair—he knows everything.” And Jackson believed it. Firmly convinced that the people were entitled to all public information, when any such came to his attention he would instantly say, “Give it to Blair.”[368]He consulted the little ugly Kentuckian constantly on all matters of domestic policy, on party matters and patronage, and even on delicate points concerned with international programmes. The intimacy of this relationship soon trickled down from the capital to the party workers in the most remote sections, and, in time, the paper took its place with the Bible in all well-regulated Democratic households. Jackson himself is said to have read nothing during his Presidency but the Bible, his correspondence, and the “Globe.”[369]The Democratic press throughout the country got its cue from Blair’s editorials, and he, astute politician and advertiser, took pains to cultivate intimate relations with all papers supporting the Administration. Many articles, written by Kendall in the office of the “Globe,” and sent to country papers for publication as their own, were afterwards collected and reproduced in the Administration organ to indicate the trend of public opinion.
Naturally the enemies of the Administration in Congress looked upon Blair and his paper with venomous hatred, and not without cause. No head was too distinguished for his bludgeon, and it descended with resounding whacks upon the craniums of the greatest as well as the least of these, leading to many furious protests and denunciations on the floor of the House and Senate. The “Congressional Globe” is thickly sprinkled with references to the paper. There was nothing of novelty in a statesman rising to a question of personal privilege to explain that the editor had done him an injustice in describing him as a liar, an anarchist, or a traitor. Occasionally Clay, or some lesser light, would rise to protest against the action of the President in conveying information, to which the Congress was entitled, through the columns of his organ. Henry A. Wise would complain that “the Secretary of the Treasury has already informed Congress and the country, through the columns of the ‘Globe’ of Saturday last,” that a certain policy would be pursued.[370]Or perhaps he would merely desire to explain that a certain editorial was a “total perversion of the facts.”[371]Or maybe it was John Quincy Adams who took the floor to describe the editor of the “Globe” as “the ambassador of the Executive,” an ambassador being “a distinguished person sent abroad to lie for the benefit of his country.”[372]One member would secure recognition to “indignantly repel the charge made against him by the ‘Globe’ of being an anarchist and a revolutionist.”[373]Even Webster was not impervious to the darts of the journalist, and did not think it beneath his dignity formally toprotest against an editorial paragraph, “flagitiously false,” which had reflected upon him as chairman of the Finance Committee.[374]
With the politicians, the country press, and the party leaders in the Congress treating the “Globe” as the editorial reflection of the President, it is not surprising that the diplomatic corps should have accepted the general assumption, and that the foreign offices of Europe should have attached no little significance to any of its observations on international affairs. Of the truth of this we have one very striking illustration.
While Livingston was Secretary of State, James Buchanan was the American Minister at St. Petersburg, charged with the negotiation of a highly important commercial treaty. All went well until the terms of the treaty had been practically agreed upon, when he had an interview with the brilliant Count Nesselrode, Minister of Foreign Affairs, who protested against what he termed the unfriendly attitude of the American press toward the Emperor and Russia, apropos of Poland. Not only, he complained, had the “Globe,” which he characterized as “the Government paper,” failed to correct the false impressions of the press generally, but it “had itself been distinguished by falsehoods.” He hoped, therefore, that the President “would adopt measures to remove this cause of complaint in the future, at least against the official paper in Washington.”[375]Recovering as quickly as possible from his astonishment, Buchanan explained that the press in the United States was not subject to governmental supervision, but the practical-minded Nesselrode was not at all impressed. He baldly charged that the “Globe” “formed an exception to the rule and was a paper over which the Government exercised a direct control.” Such being the Russian understanding, the Count was disappointed at the failure ofLivingston, when he had met the Russian Minister to the United States in New York City, to offer assurances that no more offensive articles would appear in that journal, and even more chagrined to learn, after that interview, that the “Globe” had been “more violent than before.” Buchanan was forced to concede that the “Globe” was commonly called the “official paper,” but earnestly protested that it was free from governmental control. He was “persuaded that even the influence of Mr. Livingston over the editor” was not much greater than his own, and he had no influence at all. Here Buchanan was on safe ground, but Nesselrode was not so easily convinced. With a disconcerting smile of incredulity, he suggested that “General Jackson himself must certainly have some influence over the editor.” Finding himself in a blind alley, Buchanan was lamely admitting that the President might have such influence, when Nesselrode, taking instant advantage of the admission, and without waiting for the conclusion of the sentence, requested him to ask Jackson to “exercise it for the purpose of inducing the ‘Globe’ to pursue a more cautious course hereafter.” Buchanan, glad of the opportunity to drop the subject, hastened to assure the Count that it would afford him great pleasure “to make his wishes known to the President.”[376]
Thus, such was the genius of Blair and Kendall in impressing themselves upon the affairs of the Nation that, within three years after the establishment of the “Globe,” they had become political powers in the Republic, and so much international figures that their editorials were carefully read in the foreign offices of Europe.
Of the members of the Kitchen Cabinet, Lewis’s influence in determining the political fate of men, and Hill’s in establishing the system of spoils, were of no small importance, but the publicity work of Blair and Kendall, more than any other one thing, contributed to the solidarity of the party, and thegeneral popularity of Jackson and his measures. Benton, Van Buren, Forsyth, were masterful managers of Jackson’s congressional battles, where he frequently lost to Clay, but the practical politicians of the Kitchen Cabinet, through the free use of patronage and the press, aroused and organized the masses with the ballots for the succession of successful battles at the polls.
Henry Claysat in the little library at Ashland reading a letter from Webster. “You must be aware of the strong desire manifested in many parts of the country that you should come into the Senate,” the letter ran. “The wish is entertained here as earnestly as elsewhere. We are to have an interesting and arduous session. Everything is to be attacked. An array is preparing much more formidable than has ever yet assaulted what we think the leading and important public interests. Not only the tariff, but the Constitution itself, in its elemental and fundamental provisions, will be assailed with talent, vigor, and union. Everything is to be debated as if nothing had ever been settled. It would be an infinite gratification to me to have your aid, or rather, your lead. I know nothing so likely to be useful. Everything valuable in the government is to be fought for and we need your arm in the fight.”
The meaning was perfectly clear to Clay. The man in the White House, contrary to Whig expectations, was disclosing masterful qualities of leadership. The veto of the Maysville and Lexington Turnpike Bills had left no room for doubt as to his attitude toward internal improvements. No Executive had ever before so freely exercised the power of presidential rejection.[377]On the tariff he was known to favor such reasonable reductions as would conciliate the Southern States, and his brief reference to the National Bank in his first Message, disconcerting in itself, had been followed by ominously hostile action on the part of several State Legislatures.[378]Meanwhile Jackson’s candidacy for reëlection was practically announced. Major Lewis, in his subterranean manner, had been busy and with the usual results. The “New York Courier and Enquirer,” organ of Van Buren, was advocating his reëlection, and the President’s followers, quietly encouraged by Kendall and Lewis, had placed him in nomination in the legislatures of five States.
Under these conditions the old party of Adams grew restive and impatient for a strong leader, and instinctively turned to the magnetic figure of Ashland. Already his nomination for the Presidency in 1832 was a foregone conclusion. The enthusiastic acclaim which had greeted him on his political tours during his retirement had impressed his sanguine temperament as a sure omen of success. He would have preferred to have remained in retirement pending the election, but the party demand for his leadership in Washington was insistent. The Opposition needed a figure around which it could rally, and as a party leader Webster was a failure. With much reluctance Clay decided to respond to the call. The election in Kentucky had been a keen disappointment, and the enemies of the Administration had a bare majority in the legislature, but it was enough, and he was elected.
Early in November he reached the capital, “borne up by the undying spirit of ambition,” looking “well and animated,” to be received with “the most marked deference and respect.”[379]From this time on, throughout Jackson’s Presidency, he was to remain the brilliant, resourceful, bitter, and unscrupulous leader of the Opposition—as brilliant and remarkable an Opposition as has ever confronted a Government in this or any other country.
And such a politician! There have been few remotely like him, none his superior in personal popularity. His