“And what did he do in the general post-office? Why, the men who had practised the most enormous abuses, which had been proved by blanching evidence before Congress, he retained in the prosecution of their former business.
“The reproach is no doubt to be shared with Congress, which, on the occasion of the investigation of the sale of post-office drafts, suffered the inquiry to be stifled after attempts had been made, without success, on some poor men to suppress the truth, and who were discharged for their fidelity, whilst others were retained whose memories, like the memorable Italian delator, was non mi ricordo!
“Mr. McLean entered the general post-office when it was whelmed in abuses and in debt. Accounts in that office had not been brought up, or cash accounts balanced, for several years; and, in fact, no true account of the affairs of the post-office department at that period had ever appeared.
“Mr. McLean was a mere walking-stick for the directors of his predecessor. He made some efforts to bring up the business, and some laws were passed to oblige accountability; but he left the general post-office as he found it, deep in debt,—saddling his successor with the burden, and leaving the system in such disorder as to render it necessary for Mr. Barry to organize the department wholly anew, were it only to extricate it from the hands of those men who had thrown it all into confusion.”[38]
Mr. Barry, in his address to the people, speaking of the department as it came from the hands of Mr. McLean to him, says,—
“The late postmaster-general, in his report dated November 17, 1828, shows that, instead of saving $500,000, the expenses of his department from the 1st of July, 1827, to the 1st of July, 1828, were upwards of $25,000 more than all its revenues for the same period, and that he had entered into contracts to take effect from the 1st of January, 1829, which involved the department in an expense, for the period of only six months from the 1st of January to the 1st of July, 1829, of $40,778.55 more than all its revenue for the same time; and that the expenses of the department for the year commencing the 1st of July, 1828, were $74,714.15 more than its revenues, and that the excess of expenditure, together with the losses sustained, had diminished the finances of the department within one year to the amount of $101,266.03. In this state of things I had no agency. It was produced before I came into office.”
Amos Kendall.—Born at Dunstable, Massachusetts, August 16, 1789; graduated at Dartmouth College in 1811; about the year 1812, removed to Kentucky, and in 1815 was appointed postmaster at Georgetown in that State; in 1816 he assumed the editorial charge of the “Argus,” published at Frankfort, in the same State, which he continued until 1829, being most of the time State printer; in 1829 he was appointed fourth auditor of the United States Treasury; and May 1, 1835, postmaster-general. He resigned the latter office in 1840, and has, since the introduction of the electric telegraph, been mainly employed in connection with enterprises for its operation. He is yet living.
A GLANCE OVER HIS POSTAL OPERATIONS.
The years 1834, ’35, and ’36 were remarkable for an almost epidemic species of madness on the subject of slavery, or, rather, upon the question of the immediate emancipation of the slaves throughout the South. That this was carried to extremes by both parties there can be no doubt, and that very extremity became the chief cause of the rebellion of the South. The question has been settled by the North that although the South had all she could claim consistently under an uncertain clause of the Constitution, she had no right to make slavery a fiendish monster, that was to ride iron-shod over all the Free States in the Union, and silence the voice of Christianity in its peaceful attempts to lessen its evils. As a relic of the long past, one of the dark pages from Saxon history, the institution of slavery, as sustained in the South, was a deep, damning, dark spot on a land that boasted of principles based on three cardinal precepts, “virtue, liberty, and independence,”—a misnomer in its Constitution and laws.
While the fanatical portion of the Northern abolitionists were striving to impress upon the South the enormity of their crime in sustaining slavery, the South was equally virulent in its condemnation of their mode of doing so. Meetings were held all over the country, speeches made, and passion swayed the judgment to the total extinction of common sense. The South accused the North of encouraging amalgamation; the North indignantly denied it, and with much logic proved that it was a Southern virtue altogether.