A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall and the Rise of American Democracy

16 Private Life

16 private life Not waiting for the election returns, Kendall left on a trip west, but no matter how far he went he could not escape the unpleasant news. At Wheeling on November 10, he wrote Jane, “[Whigs] saluted me by firing a cannon under the windows of the room where I slept.” On board the steamboat the next day, he could not avoid a conversation with the colorful Whig campaigner John W. Baer, known as the Buckeye Blacksmith. In Cincinnati “a band of ‘Tip’s’ musicians” gathered at the house where he was staying and “sang several of their songs, winding up with diverse groans.” Having carried Pennsylvania , Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, the Whigs ruled the Ohio.1 Kendall was on his way to see his second daughter, Adela, now eighteen, who had married Dr. Frederick B. Culver and moved to Westport, Kentucky, close to Louisville. Visiting them was Kendall’s seventeen-year-old son, William Zebedee. As soon as Kendall arrived, he dispatched Dr. Culver and William to Arkansas to start developing 8,500 acres of cotton land that he had acquired on the Mississippi River. The two men traveled to the site, where Culver gave William the task of putting up fences and returned to Kentucky. Left on his own, a thousand miles from home, with very little money and no friends, William was as unhappy as his father had been when he arrived in Lexington. During the next year he suffered through several serious bouts of bilious fever. Not until 1842 was he back in Washington.2 Kendall’s land in Arkansas was the most recent of the speculations that had used up much of his income. Since coming to Washington he had earned a great deal of money: $48,000 from the government, $22,000 from the Globe and the Extra Globe, and smaller amounts from the sale of his mill, his share 1. Kendall to Jane Kendall, 13 Nov. 1840, in Autobiography, 429. 2. William Z. Kendall to Amos Kendall, 29 Aug. 1841, William Z. Kendall to Jane Kendall, Dec. 1841, Kendall Papers, Dartmouth College Library; Globe, 2 Sept. 1843. 234 A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall and the Rise of American Democracy in the Argus, and his stock in the Boston Land Company, a total of at least $90,000. Most of it—even much of his income from the Extra Globe—was gone. Part of it went to pay down payments and installments for his western lands. Some went for lawsuits and travel. And more than a little was lost in 1840 when the Chase Land Company, one of his latest investments, failed.3 Another drain on Kendall’s resources was his standard of living. Ever since he had been appointed postmaster general, he and his family had been living well. He and Jane dressed fashionably, drove about in a carriage and a cariole, sent their children to private schools, and paid a high rent for Jackson Hill. His personal estate was sixth highest in his ward. He had been able to put on rather splashy weddings for Adela in 1839 and for Mary Anne and her fiancé Daniel Gold less than a year later. He and Jane were no longer Washington outsiders.4 Now suddenly he was trapped. The election was lost, the Extra Globe was shut down, and he had very little income. Almost all of his assets were lands currently depressed in value, his debts had not gone away, and he was being sued. In search of a solution he thought of moving to New York to publish a newspaper, but that became impossible when he lost his personal damages case with Stockton and Stokes. The award was reduced from $100,000 to $12,000, and a second trial was ordered, but since Kendall lacked the money to pay, he was not allowed to leave the District of Columbia. So in February 1841 he started a small biweekly newspaper—really a magazine—which he called Kendall’s Expositor. There seemed to be room for the paper since the Democratic Review had moved to New York, but income came in slowly. During the summer of 1841 he had to postpone payment on two sizable notes.5 Complicating the situation was the question of where to live. With two 3. In 1842 Blair estimated that Kendall’s income since 1829 had been $110,000, but he was including $9,000 in loans and land worth $30,000 from the Boston Land Co...