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 was instantly 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 Supreme Court 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.