About the time that Hill was writing to his assistant editor, he was meeting daily, at the home of Obadiah B. Brown, a preacher-politician, where Amos Kendall, a Kentucky editor, then obscure, but destined to become the master mind of the Administration, was holding forth, and organizing a number of fellow journalists who had been useful in the campaign, to compel recognition. There, in the home of the jovial preacher, Kendall and Hill were making common cause with the smiling Major M. M. Noah of New York, Nathaniel Green of Massachusetts, and the quiet but sagacious Gideon Welles of Connecticut. More political history was being made in the humble abode of Brown than in the crowded, smoke-laden room at Gadsby’s.[128] The Kentucky editor does not seem to have encountered the same reticence in Jackson that Hill had found. After his first call at Gadsby’s, we find him writing his wife: “He expressed his regards for me and his disposition to serve me, in strong terms.” And a few days later, after his second call, he writes: “The other day I had a long conversation with General Jackson. At the close of it, after saying many flattering things of my capacity, character, etc., he observed, ‘I told one of my friends that you were fit for the head of a department, and I shall put you as near the head as possible.’”[129] It is significant of the change of the times that, while the practical politicians of the new school were encouraged and jubilant, the seasoned veterans of political battle-fields were discouraged and not a little disgruntled. Amusing tales of the discomfiture of these were gayly carried to the politicians of the Opposition in the salon of Mrs. Smith, who recorded, toward the close of February, that “every one thinks there is great confusion and difficulty, mortification and disappointment at the Wigwam, as they call the General’s lodgings. Mr. Woodbury[130] looks glum, as well as several other disappointed expectants.”[131]