During the five years he held his inferior post, Kendall became more powerful than any Cabinet Minister in the determination of Jacksonian policies. A little later, a contemporary observer of men at the capital described him as “secretive, yet audacious in his political methods, a powerful and ready writer, and the author of many of Jackson’s ablest State papers.”[346] There in his office we may picture him, alone, with pad and pencil, preparing elaborate political war maps, and literature for propaganda, or in earnest conversation with Lewis and other members of the Kitchen Cabinet, forging thunderbolts with which to smite the foe. And it was very soon after he had left this subordinate post that Harriet Martineau was impressed with the uncanny mystery of the “invincible Amos Kendall.” “I was fortunate enough,” she wrote, “to catch a glimpse of the invincible Amos Kendall, one of the most remarkable men in America. He is supposed to be the moving spring of the Administration; the thinker, the planner, the doer; but it is all in the dark. Documents are issued, the excellence of which prevents them from being attributed to the persons that take the responsibility for them; a correspondence is kept up all over the country, for which no one seems answerable; work is done of goblin extent and with goblin speed, which makes men look about them with superstitious wonder; and the invincible Amos Kendall has the credit for it all. President Jackson’s letters to his Cabinet are said to be Kendall’s; the report on Sunday mails is attributed to Kendall; the letters sent from Washington to remote country newspapers, whence they are collected and published in the ‘Globe’ as demonstrations of public opinion, are pronounced to be written by Kendall; and it is some relief that he now, having the office of Postmaster-General, affords opportunity for open attack upon this twilight personage. He is undoubtedly a great genius. He unites with all his ‘great talents for silence’ a splendid audacity.