For the benefit of the preachers, teachers, and moral forces, the old stories of Jackson’s bloodthirstiness were revived, apropos of the attack by Sam Houston on a member of Congress. At first the President had merely instigated the assault--and then the imaginative Whig scribes worked out a bloodcurdling, circumstantial story. After the brutal attack, the swaggering Houston had met Postmaster-General Barry at the theater, and the two had talked it over at the theater bar, and, after being congratulated by the Cabinet member, he had called on Jackson and been heartily commended for his act. Thus the Whigs used every weapon that came into their hands--money, subsidized and bought papers, the hostility to Masonry, the hate of the Nullifiers, the fear of Van Buren, intimidation, coercion, and slander. And something comparatively new to politics--the cartoon--soon became a feature of the fight. Here the Democrats were at a disadvantage, and the pictorial editorials that have come down to us are largely anti-Jackson. Here we find the President pictured as a raving maniac, as Don Quixote tilting at the pillars of the splendid marble bank building in Philadelphia, as a burglar attempting to force the bank doors with a battering ram, while the most popular cartoon among the friends of Clay pictured Jackson receiving a crown from Van Buren and a scepter from the Devil.[515] V But all the while the consummate politicians of the Jackson party were reaching and arousing the masses. Long before the opening of the campaign, Amos Kendall, Lewis, Hill, and Blair were cunningly appealing to the interests, the prejudices, and the hero worship of the voters of the cornfield and the village. These forerunners of the modern politician were keenly appreciative of the fact that between 1824 and 1832 a great body of voters, previously proscribed because of their poverty and lack of property, had been newly enfranchised. With the Whigs these were non-existent. The journalistic training of Kendall, Hill, and Blair pointed to the press as the surest way to reach the masses with their propaganda. The old-fashioned politician still affected a contempt for the press, and particularly for the little struggling papers of the country. The genius of Kendall immediately seized upon these, and, long before the campaign began, the sallow, prematurely gray young man of mystery, shut up in his petty office in the Treasury, was busy night and day, and especially at night, preparing articles and editorials laudatory of the Jackson policies, denunciatory of the Opposition, and these, sent to editors all over the country, were printed as their own. Thus the followers of Jackson in every nook and corner of the country were constantly supplied with ammunition in the shape of arguments they could comprehend and assimilate.