His first step on taking charge was thoroughly to familiarize himself with the minute details of his office, with the special functions of each subordinate, and the character of the man. He soon discovered the secret of the good-natured Barry’s undoing, when a clerk, suspected of having relations with a contractor as agent, approached him ingratiatingly with the announcement that he “had control of funds and would be happy to accommodate him with loans.” He was promptly discharged.[785] After a thorough survey, Kendall concluded that “a few powerful mail contractors, through favors to the officers and more influential clerks, had really controlled the department, and for their own selfish ends, and been the cause of all its embarrassments.”[786] He adopted stringent rules for the guidance of employees. The acceptance of a gift was to mean dismissal. So, too, with free rides on stage-coaches, steamboats, or railroad cars carrying mail. Applying the rules as rigidly to himself as to others, he promptly returned all presents and free tickets, and thenceforward the Postmaster-General paid his way. But the task confronting him was tremendous. The department was deeply in debt and was sinking deeper. Not satisfied with the showing of corruption by the congressional committee, he went over the ground and uncovered crookedness it had overlooked. The postmaster of New York was caught in the net and instantly dismissed. Some powerful and influential contractors who had carried the mail between Washington and Philadelphia were suspected, and Kendall made a searching investigation. Major Barry, still in Washington at this time, became seriously disturbed, and conceived the notion that his successor was bent on embarrassing him, and Kendall, who had no suspicion of his predecessor, sent for him and personally reassured him. But there were other embarrassments within the Administration household. Mrs. Eaton, then in Washington, and intimate with the family of one of the contractors who was pressing a claim that Kendall was examining, called one day on Mrs. Kendall with the bald proposition that if the claim were allowed, the contractor would present the wife of the Postmaster-General with “a carriage and a pair of horses.” The incident was promptly reported to Kendall, who recorded the story many years later.[787] Applying himself and his administrative genius diligently to his task, driving out the incompetent and corrupt, practicing economy while extending the scope of the department’s services, he soon put it on a paying basis, and before the expiration of Jackson’s Administration, less than two years later, wiped out the deficit. This is the man some historians have described as a vulgar politician and a “printer.” VI