If Postmaster-General Barry was unknown to Washington, it was a matter of indifference to him. In politics he was an exotic. Entering Congress as a young man, he could have remained indefinitely, but congressional life did not allure him. For twenty years he had been an influential State politician, serving in the legislature until sent to the United States Senate to fill an unexpired term. It is an interesting commentary on his preference for State office that he resigned from the Senate, where he might have remained, to become Chief Justice of the State Supreme Court. Living in Lexington as a neighbor of Henry Clay, he had been for many years one of the great leader’s most ardent supporters, and it is significant of the character of the man that, while he supported Clay against Jackson in 1824, the “bargain” story transformed him into a bitter foe. In view of their relations to the Jackson Administration years later, the estimate of Barry reached by Amos Kendall in 1814, and recorded in his “Autobiography,” is interesting, and serves to account for the feeling, scarcely concealed, with which the journalist-politician afterwards undertook the unraveling of the difficulties into which Barry had plunged the Post-Office Department. It was when Kendall was on his way to Kentucky that he first met the Lexington politician and went down the Ohio River with him and Mrs. Barry with “servants, horses, and carriages,” in a boat thirty feet long, with three apartments. At the end of the journey Kendall wrote: “He appears to be a very good man but not a great man. For our passage he charged nothing, and in every way treated me like a gentleman. His lady seems to be a woman of good disposition, but uneducated.” In contradiction to this estimate, we have another in which he is described as possessing extraordinary abilities, active business habits, an exact knowledge of men and things, and as being “a great orator.”[176] And this same authority describes Mrs. Barry as “frank, lady-like, free from affectations, possessing a fine person and agreeable manners.” Parton tells us that he was “agreeable and amiable, but not a business man”--which is the final verdict of history. In person he was above the medium height, but slender and thin in face. He was modest in demeanor, and energetic--even though he did not always properly direct his energy--and fond of society. He became Postmaster-General because, according to the Jackson standard, he had richly earned the reward.