The most militant of the Kitchen Cabinet was Isaac Hill, whose name was anathema to the Federalists of New England. A poor boy educated in a printshop, slight and lame, hurling picturesque phrases and bitter reproaches at the powerful enemy, excoriating it with his satire and sarcasm, and slashing it with the keen blade of his wit, it is not surprising that the impression handed down by the Intellectuals of the Opposition is unfavorable. Where they have not dismissed him with a shrug, they have damned him as a dunce--and largely because he gave virility to a minority and made it militant, and, despite overwhelming odds, established in the hotbed of proscriptive Federalism a vigorous Democratic paper which was quoted from New Orleans to Detroit, and from Boston to St. Louis. If he lacked the depth and the constructive faculty of Kendall, and the literary finish of Blair, he possessed a genius as a phrase-monger which spread his fame and served his party, and in the heat of a campaign, one of his stinging paragraphs was as effective as one of Kendall’s leaders. There was no finesse in his fighting--he fought out in the open, in full range of his foe, and with any weapon on which he could lay his hands. If the intensity of his partisanship amounted to unfairness, it had been made so by the intolerance and bigotry of the Opposition of his section. Since no member of the Kitchen Cabinet more insistently demanded of Jackson the adoption of the spoils system, it is not unprofitable to inquire into the origin of his state of mind. His life was a tragedy. Born in abject poverty, a cripple from childhood, he had seen his father and grandfather become mental wrecks. Under this cloud, in this state of penury, he looked out upon the world. Shut off by his infirmity from physical labor, he had no money for an education, and he lived on an unpromising New Hampshire farm, where there were no schools, libraries, or books, and few papers. But before he was eight he had read the Bible through. Two years before he had read the story of the Revolution from books borrowed, and had supplemented his reading by having a relative, who had fought with Washington, describe the burning of Charlestown and the Concord fight. There was infinite pathos in his passion for the printed page. But college was out of the question, the printing-office the only possible substitute, and thus, after a long apprenticeship, he took over a wobbling paper at Concord and became an editor.