assume, was sent by Noah to the newspaper, and “a portion of Amos Kendall’s letter, with a head and tail put to it ... was published as an editorial the next morning”; and this “was the first savage attack on the United States Bank” in the columns of that paper.[420] And almost immediately afterwards James Gordon Bennett, writing for the “Courier and Enquirer,” began a series of powerful articles in support of the policy of that journal.[421] Indeed, if an explanation for Jackson’s position must be sought in the Kitchen Cabinet, it would be more profitable to seek it in the principles of Amos Kendall, who had written against the Bank long before he had met the President, and while still on friendly terms with Clay. Others of Jackson’s intimates were equally hostile. The views of Benton had been urged for years; and Hugh L. White, Senator from Tennessee, one of his confidential advisers in the early days of his Administration, had long distrusted the institution as tending to extravagant speculation, and as threatening the liberties of the people through its increasing influence in elections.[422] But Jackson himself needed no propagandists at his elbow. He had been prejudiced against the Bank for twenty years by Clay’s slashing speech against it when the first Bank applied for a recharter.[423] In his Message of December, 1830, Jackson dismissed the Bank in a paragraph, clearly indicative of unfriendliness; and in December, 1831, he scarcely mentioned it at all, except to call attention to his previous statements. But from the moment the first Message was read, Biddle’s complacency was disturbed. His correspondence during the next two years shows him active and alert in attempts to conciliate his foe in the White House. Less than a week after one son of Alexander Hamilton had penned the first warning of war, Biddle was reading a letter from Alexander Hamilton, Jr., a brother, assuring him that the die was cast, the war inevitable, and warning him against the presidential aspirations of Van Buren, to whose political fortunes his brother was then attached.[424] Biddle replied that the Bank views of the Message were Jackson’s, honestly held, and that for the time the Bank’s policy would be one of “abstinence and self-defense.”[425] “The expressions of the Message were the President’s own,” he wrote the head of the Washington branch immediately afterward, “ ... and inserted in opposition to the wishes, if not the advice of all his habitual counsellors. It is not, therefore, a cabinet measure, nor a party measure, but a personal measure.”[426] And had he not ample encouragement in the letters of Major Lewis, a household guest of Jackson’s, recommending the appointment of certain men to the directorship of the branch in Nashville?[427] Nevertheless, he was not at all positive that the recharter might not be made a party measure. Especially concerned with Van Buren’s attitude, he was being constantly