The party battles of the Jackson period

by Claude G. Bowers

To the Jacksonians, the most distressing feature of the short session was the disclosure of the utter incompetency, blackened by positive crookedness, in the rapidly growing Post-Office Department, which called for the management of a man of more than ordinary organizing and business ability. Major Barry possessed neither qualification. An honest man himself, without the slightest business sense, easily imposed upon, surrounded by subordinates who were scamps, and forced to deal with mail contractors who were criminals, he lost control early in his administration. When the Clayton investigation was completed, the department was found honeycombed with fraud, plastered with forgeries, and in a hopeless financial condition. And yet no one seriously suspected Barry of complicity. Clay, who had lost the support of Harry, his neighbor in Lexington, on the “bargain” story, did not hesitate to exonerate him from culpability. But there was no defense for the conditions, and Jackson, in his Message, had recommended a complete reorganization of the department better to safeguard the public interest. The two parties stood together on the Reorganization Bill, and no member of either party attempted any justification of the conditions. But the Democrats were on their toes throughout the-session to prevent any personal condemnation of either Barry or Jackson. The Whigs lost no opportunity to capitalize the scandal. The public money had been squandered. Crooked contractors had been permitted to loot the Treasury. They did not know the extent of the corruption, nor the responsibility of the head of the department, but they did know that the putridity of the thing had never been approached in American history. The majority report of the investigating committee found a deficit of $800.000; the minority placed the amount at $300,000; but both agreed that it was due in part at least to maladministration.[780] Felix Grundy, who had charge for the Administration, rejoiced in the fact, “to the honor of his countrymen,” that no one “had been found to accuse the Postmaster-General of corruption”;[781] and Senator Bibb of Kentucky, a supporter of Clay, paid tribute to the personal qualities of Barry and ascribed the failure to “the good disposition and kindness” of the head of the department, which had been imposed upon by “interested and selfish persons to further their own private interests.” Thus, in the Senate, the debate on the Reorganization Bill was conducted with decorum and without exciting personalities. An utter lack of system, a director deficient in business sense and over-credulous, and all preyed upon by dishonest subordinates and criminally inclined speculators—such was the sense of the Senate.

But in the House, Barry’s personal integrity was not to go unchallenged. In the lower branch he was unfortunate in friends who loved, not wisely, but too well, who thought to prevent assault by challenging it. Some of these had avowed a disposition to consider such an assault a personal offense. During a night session, William C. Johnson of Maryland, a promising and eloquent young Whig of imposing personal appearance, sought an opportunity to affront Representative Hawes of Kentucky, a member of the special dueling club. An insignificant incident during the discussion of a post-route bill sufficed. On obtaining the floor, Johnson looked significantly at Hawes, and with sinister deliberation began: “It has been broadly hinted by some gentlemen ... that he who shall have the temerity to criticize the acts of the Postmaster-General must answer therefor elsewhere than in this hall.... Sir, I come from a portion of the country where the law of personal responsibility is recognized among gentlemen. I hold myself amenable to that law ...; and now, in the face of those menaces which have been thrown out on this floor, and intending to be responsible for what I am about to say, I declare that the Post-Office Department is corrupt from head to foot, through and through, and I believe that the head of the department, William T. Barry, is as culpable as any officer under his control.”

The House was instantly in an uproar as Hawes rose to ask if Johnson meant that the department was corrupt from Barry down. The young blade from Maryland jauntily replied in the affirmative. Hawes said that Barry was “as honest and honorable as any man who has a seat on this floor,” and asked Johnson for the grounds for his charge. In the spirit of swashbuckler he had set out to be, the latter merely reiterated what he had said. There was no misunderstanding the meaning of the situation—it meant a duel unless Johnson would agree to a qualification of his statement. To all such appeals he was adamant. When, as a result, he was challenged by Barry’s son, he began to hedge with the demand that the duel take place “immediately.” He would not even consent to a day’s delay, and young Barry withdrew the challenge. The incident proved nothing except that in the Thirties young men carried chips on their shoulders, and bandied words lightly.

The contemporaries of Barry exonerated him, and history has acquiesced in their verdict.[782] But it was apparent that his usefulness in the Cabinet was over. He had never been qualified. While the debate on the Reorganization Bill was still in progress, Jackson summoned Amos Kendall to the task of assuming charge and placing the department on a business basis. At that time, the wizard of the Kitchen Cabinet, in ill health, and without private means, was planning to retire from the public service to serve his family more satisfactorily in a financial way. He demurred—Jackson insisted—and in the end, like the good soldier that he was, he yielded.

Barry, gracefully let out with the mission to Spain, sailed away, to die in London on the way, and Kendall took charge. It is amazing that the party prejudices of ninety years ago should still persist and refuse justice to the genius of this exceptional man. Professor MacDonald does not overstate when he describes him “as a man of remarkable administrative power.”[783] Nor is it probable that so seasoned an observer of public men as Senator Foote was unduly impressed when he described him as “discoursing upon the gravest and most important questions with a profundity and power which left a lasting impress.”[784] Brilliant with the pen, sagacious beyond almost any man of his time as a politician, wise in counsel, and yet capable of managing the dry-as-dust details of the most practical of departments, Amos Kendall is probably one of the greatest all-around publicists the Republic has produced.

His first step on taking charge was thoroughly to familiarize himself with the minute details of his office, with the special functions of each subordinate, and the character of the man. He soon discovered the secret of the good-natured Barry’s undoing, when a clerk, suspected of having relations with a contractor as agent, approached him ingratiatingly with the announcement that he “had control of funds and would be happy to accommodate him with loans.” He was promptly discharged.[785] After a thorough survey, Kendall concluded that “a few powerful mail contractors, through favors to the officers and more influential clerks, had really controlled the department, and for their own selfish ends, and been the cause of all its embarrassments.”[786] He adopted stringent rules for the guidance of employees. The acceptance of a gift was to mean dismissal. So, too, with free rides on stage-coaches, steamboats, or railroad cars carrying mail. Applying the rules as rigidly to himself as to others, he promptly returned all presents and free tickets, and thenceforward the Postmaster-General paid his way. But the task confronting him was tremendous. The department was deeply in debt and was sinking deeper. Not satisfied with the showing of corruption by the congressional committee, he went over the ground and uncovered crookedness it had overlooked. The postmaster of New York was caught in the net and instantly dismissed. Some powerful and influential contractors who had carried the mail between Washington and Philadelphia were suspected, and Kendall made a searching investigation. Major Barry, still in Washington at this time, became seriously disturbed, and conceived the notion that his successor was bent on embarrassing him, and Kendall, who had no suspicion of his predecessor, sent for him and personally reassured him. But there were other embarrassments within the Administration household. Mrs. Eaton, then in Washington, and intimate with the family of one of the contractors who was pressing a claim that Kendall was examining, called one day on Mrs. Kendall with the bald proposition that if the claim were allowed, the contractor would present the wife of the Postmaster-General with “a carriage and a pair of horses.” The incident was promptly reported to Kendall, who recorded the story many years later.[787] Applying himself and his administrative genius diligently to his task, driving out the incompetent and corrupt, practicing economy while extending the scope of the department’s services, he soon put it on a paying basis, and before the expiration of Jackson’s Administration, less than two years later, wiped out the deficit. This is the man some historians have described as a vulgar politician and a “printer.”

VI

No incident of this session so well illustrates the partisan bitterness and the venomous nature of the hates engendered by the struggles of the preceding years as the attempt on the life of Jackson at the Capitol on January 30, 1835.[788] Under normal conditions and in ordinary times the incident would have been dismissed, and, properly, ascribed to the insanity of the assailant. But it was the first time an attempt had been made upon the life of a President—and it was a President who had been intemperately denounced as a tyrant, despot, and wrecker of American institutions and liberties. Just as John Tyler had instantly thought of “political effect,”[789] the ardent friends of Jackson caught the same idea from the opposite angle. And two days later, Frank Blair in the “Globe” threw out the suggestion of a conspiracy. “Whether Lawrence [the assailant] has caught, in his visits to the Capitol, the mania which has prevailed the last two sessions of the Senate,” he wrote, “whether he has become infatuated with the chimeras which have troubled the brains of the disappointed and ambitious orators who have depicted the President as a Cæsar who ought to have a Brutus; as a Cromwell, a Nero, a Tiberius, we know not. If no secret conspiracy has prompted the perpetration of the horrid deed, we think it not improbable that some delusion of intellect has grown out of his visits to the Capitol, and that hearing despotism and every horrible mischief threatened to the Republic, and revolution and all its train of calamities imputed as the necessary consequence of the President’s measures, it may be that the infatuated man fancied that he had reason to become his country’s avenger. If he had heard and believed Mr. Calhoun’s speech of day before yesterday, he would have found in it ample justification for his attempt on one who was represented as the cause of the most dreadful calamities of the Nation; as one who made perfect rottenness and corruption to pervade the vitals of the Government, insomuch that it was scarcely worth preserving, if it were possible.”[790]

The intimation here thrown out was bitterly resented by the Opposition leaders, and particularly by Calhoun, who was mentioned. The very fact that the intemperate and insincere denunciations of high officials as responsible for the distress of the people, acting upon the diseased brain, can very easily persuade the madman to constitute himself the executioner, served to infuriate the orators who had given themselves full play. Stung to the quick, Calhoun denounced the “Globe” as “base and prostitute,” and described it as “the authentic and established organ” of Jackson, “sustained by his power and pampered by his hands.” “To what are we coming?” he exclaimed. “We are told that to denounce the abuse of the Administration even in general terms, without personal reference, is to instigate the assassination of the Chief Executive.... I have made up my mind as to my duty. I am no candidate for any office—I neither seek nor desire place—nothing shall intimidate—nothing shall prevent me from doing what I believe is due to my conscience and my country.”[791] Mr. Calhoun sat down—and Mr. Leigh immediately rose to present a report from the Committee on Revolutionary Claims.

But Mr. Calhoun’s attack on the “Globe” was not unnoticed by Blair, who replied by quoting from the most venomous portions of Calhoun’s and Preston’s tirades on the Post-Office report. A week later the Administration organ was still harping on conspiracy. “Every hour,” wrote Blair, “brings new proof to show that Lawrence has been operated on to seek the President’s life, precisely as we had supposed from the moment we learned that he had been an attendant on the debates in Congress.”[792]