But the President had other plans for his favorite, Hill, over whose sharp retorts the General had so heartily chuckled during the campaign. Webb, the editor of the “Courier and Enquirer” of New York, denounced in his paper the Senate’s rejection of Hill. “Isaac Hill,” he wrote, “is a printer and was the editor of the ‘New Hampshire Patriot.’ He was always the friend of his country and its republican institutions, and when that country, during the late war, was about to be sold by traitors to the enemy; when the war was declared wicked and unjustifiable, and the Hartford Convention meditated the formation of a separate treaty with England, his voice was heard in the Granite State and in the mountains of Vermont, animating the people and arousing them to a just sense of their danger, and the blessings of freedom. He was a thorn in the side of the Tories, and though living in the hotbed of the Opposition, he pursued his course fearlessly, independently, and successfully.” Writing from Jefferson Barracks, General Henry Leavenworth entered his protest, a non-partisan one: “Isaac Hill with his ‘New Hampshire Patriot’ did more than any one man known to me to put down the ‘peace societies’ during the war,” he wrote, and he described enlistments under him following Hill’s patriotic exhortations. It is more than probable that these protests were not uninspired, and that the fine Italian hand of Amos Kendall, who had already become the managerial genius of the Administration, was in them. Certain it is that the most effective move was that of Kendall in writing to the Democracy of New Hampshire that the President “has entire confidence in Mr. Hill and looks upon his rejection as a blow aimed at himself,” and putting it up to the legislature to “wipe away the stigma cast upon this just and true man, by the unjust and cruel vote of the Senate.” The New Hampshire Democrats understood, and a little later Isaac Hill walked down the aisle of the Senate that had humiliated and rejected him to take the oath as a Senator of the United States. Thus the Senate’s fight against Jackson began at the earliest possible moment. Clay had begun his denunciations of the Administration before it was three weeks old; and the Senate sought an opportunity personally to affront the President before he had announced a policy or a programme. CHAPTER IV JACKSON BREAKS WITH CALHOUN I