GREEN, DUFF (1791-1875), American politician and journalist, was born in
Woodford county, Kentucky, on the 15th of August 1791. He was a school
teacher in his native state, served during the War of 1812 in the
Kentucky militia, and then settled in Missouri, where he worked as a
schoolmaster and practised law. He was a member of the Missouri
Constitutional Convention of 1820, and was elected to the state House of
Representatives in 1820 and to the state Senate in 1822, serving one
term in each house. Becoming interested in journalism, he purchased and
for two years edited the St Louis _Enquirer_. In 1825 he bought and
afterwards edited in Washington, D.C., _The United States Telegraph_,
which soon became the principal organ of the Jackson men in opposition
to the Adams administration. Upon Andrew Jackson's election to the
presidency, the _Telegraph_ became the principal mouthpiece of the
administration, and received printing patronage estimated in value at
$50,000 a year, while Green became one of the coterie of unofficial
advisers of Jackson known as the "Kitchen Cabinet." In the quarrel
between Jackson and John C. Calhoun, Green supported the latter, and
through the columns of the _Telegraph_ violently attacked the
administration. In consequence, his paper was deprived of the government
printing in the spring of 1831. Green, however, continued to edit it in
the Calhoun interest until 1835, and gave vigorous support to that
leader's nullification views. From 1835 to 1838 he edited _The
Reformation_, a radically partisan publication, devoted to free trade
and the extreme states' rights theory. In 1841-1843 he was in Europe on
behalf of the Tyler administration, and he is said to have been
instrumental in causing the appointment of Lord Ashburton to negotiate
in Washington concerning the boundary dispute between Maine and Canada.
In January 1843 Green established in New York City a short-lived
journal, _The Republic_, to combat the spoils system and to advocate
free trade. In September 1844 Calhoun, then secretary of state, sent
Green to Texas ostensibly as consul at Galveston, but actually, it
appears, to report to the administration, then considering the question
of the annexation of Texas, concerning the political situation in Texas
and Mexico. After the close of the war with Mexico Green was sent to
that country in 1849 by President Taylor to negotiate concerning the
moneys which, by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States had
agreed to pay; and he saved his country a considerable sum by arranging
for payment in exchange instead of in specie. Subsequently Green was
engaged in railway building in Georgia and Alabama. On the 10th of June
1875 he died in Dalton, Georgia, a city which in 1848 he had helped to
found.
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