Scarcely had he been admitted to the bar when he was enticed by Colonel Richard M. Johnson into the editorship of the “Georgetown Patriot”; and it is illuminative of his character to find him, when the slayer of Tecumseh, a little later, upbraided him for refusing personally to abuse the Opposition, writing in his diary: “I shall give Richard my vote, but I shall not be his tool.”[340] His editorials constructive, his specialty banking and currency, he soon found himself in the editorial chair of the “Frankfort Argus,” where he was instantly engaged in bitter political controversies. Whether in argument, where he excelled, in invective, or in wit, he invariably scored heavily on the Opposition. For his generation and community, his editorial code was lofty. He promised himself never knowingly to misrepresent; if, through mistake, he did, to rectify the mistake without being asked; never to retract a statement he thought true; to resent an insult in kind; to defend himself, if assaulted, by any means necessary, even to killing, and never to run. So great was his professional self-respect that on one occasion, when vulgarly assailed in an Opposition paper, he had his answer printed in bill form and circulated by hand, rather than befoul his own journal with a suitable reply. In seeming contradiction, however, we have his merciless bombardment of the unfortunate Shadrach Penn, editor of a Louisville paper, who had a genius for attracting the ridicule of his intellectual superiors; for while Kendall was peppering him from Frankfort, George D. Prentice was bombarding him from Louisville, and between the two, he was driven whimpering from the State.[341] The physical courage of Kendall may be read in his encounters with irate victims. In one controversy he was spared the necessity of killing an assailant with a dirk by the timely interference of friends. In another he put an opponent to flight by cracking a whip and displaying the sparkling silver handle in the sun. He never ran. Under his editorship the “Argus” became a powerful political factor in Kentucky. He inaugurated the plan of printing legislative speeches, specialized on political news, intelligently discussed international affairs, launched a campaign in favor of public schools, reviewed contemporary books, dipped into religious subjects with his “Sunday Reflections,” and significantly began a fight against the National Bank in a series of articles combating the Supreme Court decision as to its constitutionality. If, thirteen years later, he was not to flinch under the lashings of the Bank press, it may have been because he had become seasoned to the punishment more than a decade before when he was described as a “political incendiary.”