Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/261

Rh though Green's warm friendship for John C. Calhoun led him to follow that leader rather than the President.

Amos Kendall, who was an assistant editor under Green, afterward became Jackson's confidential advisor. Green's friendship for Calhoun led the President to decide on having an organ of his own, edited by a man whom he could trust; he selected for this purpose Francis P. Blair, editor of the Frankfort Argus, a paper controlled by Kendall. Jackson brought Blair to Washington and established the Globe, and more directly than had Hamilton or Jefferson, he made the paper a vehicle for the expression of his personal views.

Green has left on record the statement that President Jackson's action in starting a new paper cost him $50,000 a year. Some one trifed to patch up the differences between Jackson and Green and the latter says that, before the President's own cabinet, he. Green, refused to shake hands. How Harris and Zenger and Edes would have stared at that performance!

It was said that the President often turned his mail over to Blair, allowing him to edit it as he was disposed. Amos Kendall, becoming editorial writer on the Globe, had nightly private conferences with Jackson, at which the President would lie down and smoke and dictate his ideas "as well as he could express them," while Kendall would write and re-write until by alterations and corrections he had succeeded in getting his articles as the master mind wished them. "General Jackson needed such an amanuensis—intelligent, learned, industrious—as Mr. Kendall was," says Henry A. Wise of Virginia. "He could think but could not write; he knew what nerve to touch, but he was no surgeon skilled in the instrument of dissection. Kendall was."