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By Root 1545 0

Jackson’s close friend and adviser, invited to dine with the family, entrusted with writing and revising state papers. He served Jackson brilliantly in the administration’s war on the Bank of the United States, the privately owned bank that managed the government’s funds. Sharing the President’s hatred of the bank as a manipulator of public credit for private enrichment, he outlined and publicized a phased removal of federal deposits to state banks. When Congress passed a bill to recharter the bank in 1832, it was Kendall who drafted Jackson’s impassioned veto message, concluding with an attack on the rich and powerful. Nicholas Biddle, the bank’s president, denounced the message as “a manifesto of anarchy—such as Marat or Robespierre might have issued to the mob.” But the veto helped Jackson win reelection, and gave Kendall the reputation of being the power behind the throne. “He is supposed to be the moving spring of the whole administration,” Harriet Martineau wrote, recounting Washington gossip; “the thinker, planner, and doer; but it is all in the dark.”

Contemporaries of this sickly, intelligent, complex man had sharply different opinions of him. Andrew Jackson praised his “stern and unflinching honesty.” Others called him “suspicious and Jesuitical,” Jackson’s “writing machine—aye, and his lying machine.” For Morse there was no question. Seeking to establish his telegraph system nationally but contemptuous of those he called “mere men of trade,” he saw Kendall as an invaluable ally. Kendall knew the top people in government. His tenure as Postmaster General had given him knowledge of the country’s routes of communication. He had legal training, managerial skill, understanding of finance, long experience with the press, and even a real interest in inventions, having himself devised something he called a cylinder steamboat. And Kendall was sensitive to Morse’s loathing of the marketplace. “It is my earnest desire,” Kendall told him, “to see you in a condition not to be annoyed and discomforted by the unpleasant incidents which must be encountered in a business so ramified.”

No less important to Morse, Kendall was someone of his own background, social views, and temperament. Just two years Morse’s senior, Kendall had been born into a Congregationalist family that went back five generations in Massachusetts. “No man is more ready than I am to say God’s will be done,” he remarked, “and to submit to that will without a murmur.” Dubbed “the Deacon” in boyhood because of his sobriety, he frowned on the efforts of Washington society to ape the manners of London and Paris. As Postmaster General—and the owner of three or more slaves—he had treated abolitionist pamphlets as incendiary printed matter, so local postmasters in the South were forbidden to deliver them. He had read Byron and written a tragedy, “The Fall of Switzerland.” The death of his first wife left him with four children; when he remarried three years later, at the age of thirty-seven, it was to a woman barely sixteen years old.

In a decision that would redirect his energy and change his life, Morse turned over the financial management of his telegraph system to Kendall. He had found, he believed, “perhaps the most competent man in the country to manage such a concern.” As it happened, he had also found his longest-lived and, except for Allston, deepest friendship. Kendall’s existence would be affected no less, for he pledged to Morse his wholehearted commitment: “My earthly all, my time, provision for my family, now and when I am gone, are embarked in this enterprize, for which I have resigned all other business.”

One month after meeting Kendall, Morse signed an agreement granting him full power to transact all telegraph business “in as full and complete a manner as I myself could do.” The agreement covered Vail and Leonard Gale as well, so Kendall represented in his person three-quarters of the patent right to Morse’s invention. He would get a commission of 10 percent on the first $100,000 he realized from the sale of rights, and a commission of 50 percent