News Articles, 1998
  News Articles, Main Page

THE GHOSTS OF JACKSON HILL

The Mansion had become a monument to Washington's ability to forget. Then a neighbor began asking some pointed questions

By Jefferson Morley

Sunday, September 13, 1998; Page W12

The grand new house stood not far from Taylor's Lane Road half a mile north of Boundary Street, the city limits of Washington. It was an 88-foot-long, two-story mansion that dominated a high bluff. The view looking out over what is now Rock Creek Park was spectacular.

"Hill, valley and stream, cliffs, rocks and forest trees, in an unending variety -- romantic in beauty of landscape -- are there to regale the eye," recalled the Baltimore man who bought the house in 1835. "The elevation is so high that it is the very focus of the winds, in heating weather, to save you from the dust of the avenue."

This haven from the humid torpor of Washington was rented in the tumultuous late 1830s by Amos Kendall, postmaster general of the United States and confidant of President Andrew Jackson. If you think of the roles that White House operatives like Dick Morris and James Baker have played in recent years and combine them into the singular stooped frame of a puritanical, prematurely white-haired newspaper editor from the Kentucky frontier, you will have a rough sense of the figure Amos Kendall cut back then.

Kendall was the hub of a network of editors-turned-politicos who came to Washington with Jackson in 1829 and changed the sleepy capital forever, if not for good. He and his allies founded the modern Democratic Party, developed the art of patronage and pioneered the use of the national press to wage political struggle. At the same time, he and the rest of the political class had to cope with rising racial tensions as the city's working-class whites became increasingly threatened by the growing population of emancipated blacks.

A hard-working hypochondriac with a vigorous pen, Kendall gained influence steadily through Jackson's two terms in office, 1829 to 1837, writing presidential veto messages and speeches, scrutinizing contracts and cutting sensitive deals. He was "the president's thinking machine and writing machine and his lying machine," charged Rep. Henry Wise of Virginia. He was "chief adviser, chief reporter, amanuensis, scribe, accountant general, man of all work. Nothing was well done without the aid of his diabolical genius."

In the spring of 1838, Kendall escaped the city by renting this splendid, if unadorned, 10-room spread. He dubbed the place Jackson Hill, in admiration of his friend. Kendall lived there with his second wife, Jane Kyle Kendall, and four children. Between hostile hearings on Capitol Hill and legal battles in court, he entertained his pals and married off two of his daughters in the house, all the while complaining about the twin afflictions of asthma and an empty bank account.

The secluded spot befitted a man of Kendall's agrarian temperament. Behind the house, a dirt road curled down the hill toward Rock Creek, where John Quincy Adams, the dour former president turned anti-slavery congressman, owned a four-story brick mill. (It consistently lost money.) Some of the workers at Adams Mill lived in shanties along the creek far below the house. Otherwise, Kendall's closest neighbors were the souls of departed Quakers, buried in a cemetery a hundred yards south of his back door.

Now blink your eyes and see this same patch of earth 160 years later.

The dusty thoroughfare of Taylor's Lane Road has become eclectic Columbia Road. The Quaker cemetery is now a soccer field in Walter Pierce Community Park. And if you look from that field toward the grounds of the National Zoo, you may be able to glimpse, through the trees, the peaked roof of the mansion where Amos Kendall once held forth.

You can approach the house through the large brown iron gate at a service entrance to the zoo off Adams Mill Road. Veer to the right past the sign that says "Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center," and you will soon see a big crumbling stucco structure looming ahead. The windows are boarded up, the doors nailed shut, the front steps missing, the gutters gone. There is no plaque to commemorate the master of American politics and commerce who called this home. Once a citadel of influence, Jackson Hill is now a monument to Washington's awesome ability to forget.

Earlier this year, officials from the zoo and the Smithsonian Institution asked Congress for $100,000 to study the architectural history of this house. And therein lies a tale relevant not just to the neighborhood politics of Washington, but also to President Clinton's national conversation on race: how the reality of America's racial struggles is forgotten, buried and, finally, recovered.

It all started when Eddie Becker saw a garbage dumpster.

Becker, 48, a documentary filmmaker and freelance radical, was walking through Walter Pierce Park in in the spring of 1997 when he happened to look down the hillside where a community garden is located. On the other side of the fence that separates the park from the grounds of the National Zoo, there was a new dumpster. A few days later, he passed by and saw three dumpsters.

"I just thought it was the wrong image, to put a garbage site so close to a community garden. I felt it was disrespectful," Becker says, pulling on his salt-and-pepper beard. "They weren't putting their dumpsters right next to the neighborhood on the other side of the zoo."

The other side of the zoo, where the main entrance is located, is Connecticut Avenue, an upper-income, predominantly white neighborhood. The Adams-Morgan side of the zoo is much more mixed, ethnically and economically.

"I thought race might have something to do with it," Becker says. He had just finished working on a TV documentary segment on skinheads in Portland, Ore., and the experience had led him to wonder about the wellspring of racial hostility in those teenagers. He concluded that "it mostly came from the 250 years in which white people had to rationalize the violent coercion of people because of the color of their skin."

But Becker didn't have all that worked out in his mind. He figured the zoo would quickly see the error of its ways and he could go back to his next video project. When he learned that the zoo had plans to build a 4,000-square-foot waste removal site, complete with a mulching center that would benefit the community gardeners, he was even more disturbed. Garbage was garbage. Why did it have to go right next to the place where local residents grew vegetables, puttered and chatted?

He began walking around the area, looking for other places where the zoo might stash its trash, and walked up on this abandoned mansion -- right in the middle of the neighborhood where he had lived for 20 years. He'd never known it was there.

Becker inquired at the public affairs office of the zoo and was told that the building was known as the Holt House, that the zoo's administrative offices had been located there for many years, and that the zoo had plans for it -- plans that could not be shared with Becker.

"There was a scent, a bad smell about the way they were dealing with me," says Becker with some relish, "and I went after it like a Rottweiler."

Officials of the zoo and the Smithsonian (of which the National Zoo is a part) likewise had a bad feeling about Becker's confrontational style.

"He has not been," one official said carefully, "constructive."

As their battle was joined, it developed into the familiar drama of American reformism, writ small: an energetic activist, imbued with moral fervor, impatient with those who cannot see reality (as he sees it), doing battle with pragmatic government officials who pride themselves on public service while faithfully pursuing the particular agendas of their agencies.

Becker wanted to learn more about the enigmatic mansion off Adams Mill Road, so he went to the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. The building, he discovered, was built sometime between 1800 and 1830. As far as the records showed, the first known occupant was a man named Henry Holt, who bought the place in 1844, hence the name Holt House. What interested Becker most was the legend that John Quincy Adams had frequented the house.

"Adams had some implications for me," Becker says, "because I knew he had accommodated and accepted slavery as president [from 1825 to 1829] and then had changed his mind, so he characterized for me the hope that I have that America can change."

Becker also knew that Adams had owned a mill in the area, and he started doing research on the extensive history of slavery in the mills along Rock Creek. He learned that Adams had purchased his mill from a slave owner.

"I had this fantasy that I would find that Adams had renounced the use of slaves in his mill and that was how he became anti-slavery."

Becker didn't know much about 19th-century Washington, but he was well acquainted with what goes into the making of the public record. In the 1980s, he worked for four years at the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research group, and became one of the plaintiffs in an ongoing lawsuit that requires U.S. government agencies to preserve their electronic records.

Robert Hoage, the director of the zoo's public affairs office, became the point man for the zoo. And he too had resources at his disposal -- namely, the apparatus of the zoo's parent agency, the Smithsonian Institution.

"This whole thing is about the legacy of slavery," Becker says.

Asked to comment on that, Hoage thinks for a long moment. "It's about the facts," he says with a sigh. "The facts."

Thus they clashed, the indignant citizen and the responsive bureaucrats. It happens all the time. But in this case, the clash unearthed new facts. It clarified and deepened our understanding of life in and around Jackson Hill. In effect, it made history.

In the spring of 1839, both Amos Kendall and John Quincy Adams were headed for trouble.

Kendall, as postmaster general, was under attack for instituting a spoils system at the post office. The year before, a Pennsylvania stagecoach company called Stockton and Stokes had gone all the way to the Supreme Court seeking reversal of Kendall's decision to cut off its contract -- and had won a $162,000 judgment. In March 1839, Kendall was grilled by senators about his firings of post office employees. Kendall countered that he had eliminated a deficit and conserved the people's money.

Adams's problem was the white-hot issue of slavery in the District of Columbia -- and his dilemma was due in no small part to Kendall.

Kendall's first important decision after becoming postmaster general in the summer of 1835 concerned slavery. The newly formed American Anti-Slavery Society in New York City had begun mailing abolitionist literature to the South. A mob of whites in Charleston, S.C., responded by breaking into the local post office, hauling the offensive material outside and burning it. As a government official, Kendall was quick to say he did not condone mob violence, but he decided that the law allowed the states to suppress the abolitionist publications. "We owe an obligation to the laws," he wrote to the Charleston postmaster, "but a higher one to the communities in which we live."

Within days, the Charleston mob had imitators in Washington. When a local woman was nearly murdered by one of her slaves, the rumor quickly spread that the assailant had been incited by an abolitionist. An angry crowd of unemployed mechanics and footloose boys descended on the Washington County Jail at Judiciary Square, demanding the head of a New York doctor arrested for carrying anti-slavery pamphlets.

Beverly Snow, a free black man who ran a fashionable restaurant on Sixth Street called the Epicurean Eatery, confronted the mob and, according to one report, spoke rudely about the "morality of their wives." Outraged whites responded the next day by sacking Snow's establishment and then setting out to intimidate any free blacks they could find. The mob coursed through the streets for the next three days. While Snow hid and Kendall boarded himself up in his office, the rioters smashed the windows of a black church near Capitol Hill, attacked a couple of brothels frequented by blacks and trashed two schools for black children.

Adams, who lived on 16th Street, near what is now Meridian Hill/Malcolm X Park, observed the white riot with his usual gloomy insight. He regarded Kendall as something of a swindler and wasn't surprised that he didn't stand up to the rioters. The deeper problem, he noted, was the contradiction at the heart of the American experiment.

"Slavery and Democracy, especially the Democracy founded as ours is on the rights of man, would seem incompatible with each other," he wrote in his diary, "and yet at this time the Democracy of the country is supported chiefly, if not entirely, by slavery."

Kendall's acquiescence to the violence set in motion events that dragged Adams deeper into the anti-slavery fray. The suppression of abolitionists' direct-mail campaigns, notes historian William Lee Miller, "shunted the energies of the abolitionist bloodhounds in another direction." The young radicals of the American Anti-Slavery Society began mobilizing their chapters across the Northern states toward a new goal: abolishing the slave trade in the District of Columbia. The publicly licensed slave prisons around the city were especially notorious as cockpits of brutality.

Soon a blizzard of petitions hit the Congress. From December 1838 to March 1839, for example, Congress received 1,496 anti-slavery petitions bearing 163,845 signatures, half of them given specifically in support of abolition in the District. (It was as if 3 million signatures had landed on Newt Gingrich's desk since May.)

It fell to Adams, the only ex-president ever to serve in the House, to try to introduce the petitions. Among the handful of anti-slavery representatives from the North, only Adams of Massachusetts had the prestige and the parliamentary wits to battle the spokesmen for the slave bloc. Adams was careful to stress always that he was not endorsing the cause of the petitioners, merely their right to be heard in the Congress. Nonetheless, he was denounced as a fool and a scoundrel and was threatened with assassination. After this struggle dominated three straight sessions of Congress, Adams began to think better of the fight.

In April and May of 1839, Adams published two widely reprinted essays rebuking the abolitionists for their "senseless and overbearing clamor" against the slave trade in the District, a demand he described as "utterly impracticable."

It was a predicament of American reformism, writ large: an aroused moralistic minority confronting the realities of a continental nation where the suppression of African American aspirations conferred benefits on the white majority.

Adams's adherence to practical politics may have been necessary, even wise, but it broke the momentum of the American Anti-Slavery Society and alienated many of his admirers. It had a real price too in the lives of African Americans. The slave trade in the shadow of the Capitol would continue for another decade.

Amos Kendall's worries were no less acute. His tenure as postmaster general was increasingly embattled. In the fall of 1839, Stockton and Stokes added injury to insult by suing him personally for the loss of its contract. In May 1840, Kendall resigned from the postmaster general's job to launch a campaign newspaper supportive of incumbent President Martin Van Buren. When Van Buren was defeated that November, Kendall was out of a job and out of favor. Then, in early 1841 the Supreme Court again ruled in favor of Stockton and Stokes, ordering Kendall to pay the firm $11,000 out of his own pocket.

"It was a very dark moment in a life that had several dark moments," says Donald B. Cole, an emeritus history professor at Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, who is writing a biography of Kendall.

Sometime in the spring of 1841, Kendall moved out of the big house on Jackson Hill. In June of that year, a front-page advertisement in one of the local newspapers, the Daily National Intelligencer, announced the availability of the house while conceding its flaws.

"Fatally for the interest of the owner [the house] was called Jackson Hill, by an influential friend of 'the old tyrant,' " the ad read. "And more still, to the injury of the property, it has undergone three years of deterioration by the worst treatment by those who unfortunately tenanted. The proofs of which are grievously visible at a glance. And for the whole three years not a dollar, so far, has been received for damages or rent."

It seems that Amos Kendall and his brood had trashed the place and skipped out on the rent.

In the spring of 1997, the Adams-Morgan Advisory Neighborhood Commission asked zoo officials to present their plans for the site to the community, which they did in April and then again in July. Eddie Becker had handed out leaflets beforehand, and 35 to 50 people turned out for each meeting, many expressing reservations about or opposition to the proposed waste transfer and mulching center.

In May, Becker scored his first direct hit. He was studying documents at the Smithsonian when he realized that the long-gone Quaker cemetery hadn't been the only burial ground in the area. There had also been a cemetery for African Americans from the end of the Civil War. Studying a 19th century map, Becker realized the dumpsters were sitting on land the zoo had bought from something called the Union Benevolent Association (Colored).

The National Zoo was dumping trash on the sacred ground of newly freed slaves!

It was true, though not exactly the whole story. The remains of the black people buried were supposed to have been removed in 1890 -- with the assistance of at least one of the black trustees of the cemetery association. Still, Becker was feeding copies of the map and other documents to a reporter from a neighborhood paper. Last fall, the zoo withdrew the dumpsters, cleared the area of debris, reseeded the grass and returned the area to a more natural state.

"The existence of the cemetery on zoo land had simply slipped from our institutional memory," Hoage says. "It was an honest mistake, and we salute the community for calling it to our attention."

The zoo also responded to Becker's concerns about the Holt House's condition by cleaning up the grounds around the house and patching a hole in the roof. Determined not to have another memory failure, the zoo asked the Smithsonian's Office of Architectural History and Historic Preservation to undertake an intensive search of public records on the big house, the Quaker and African American cemeteries and the Adams Mill. More than 700 pages of documents were collected. Copies were deposited in the Cleveland Park library, and a Web site was established (www.si.edu/oahp/holthous/).

Becker wasn't impressed. He already had his own Web site (http://innercity.org/ holt/) and was continuing his own scholarly activism, complementing archival research with discussions in Walter Pierce Park. He approached passerbys and shared what he had learned. These talks led him to a longtime zoo employee who claimed to have seen slave shackles in the basement of the house. He met Eileen Crawford, an African American therapist whose house overlooks the park and who is active in the citizens group that looks after it. She was irked, not placated, by the dumpster-removal episode.

"Their idea is, 'Whatever we do, you should be grateful,' " Crawford says. "Our idea is they have an ethical obligation to be responsible to the community."

In April, Crawford and Becker staged a demonstration near the Connecticut Avenue entrance to the zoo. Calling themselves the Sacred Ground Committee, they handed out a flier that made some provocative assertions. Among them:

ZOO OFFICIALS REFUSE TO OBEY THE HISTORIC PRESERVATION PROCESS.

The house is on the National Historic Register. Intentionally or not, the zoo was casual about compliance with the law that requires owners of such properties to keep the public notified of changes in their status. The zoo had let the house deteriorate in the early 1990s without informing anyone. Not that anyone was terribly interested.

HOLT HOUSE [WAS] BUILT BY AFRICAN AMERICAN SLAVES.

This is debatable. "We looked for any document anywhere that slaves had participated in the building of the house or lived there," says Cynthia Field, chief of the Smithsonian's Office of Architectural History and Historic Preservation. "We found nothing. That's not to say that they didn't -- maybe they did -- but there's no evidence that they did. Mr. Becker is just making it up."

Becker notes that slavery was pervasive at the time, so that it is much more reasonable to assume that enslaved people were involved in building the house than to assume that they weren't. Field and Becker agree that the most likely candidate for builder of the house on Jackson Hill is a Maryland mill owner named Roger Johnson, who controlled many slaves.

And: HOLT HOUSE CONTAINS IMPORTANT SLAVE ARTIFACTS.

This is dubious. Smithsonian officials looked at the nails that supposedly secured the shackles and concluded that the earliest they could have been manufactured was 1890, 25 years after the abolition of slavery. Hoage, miffed by Becker's antics, issued a news release stating: "To date, there is no documented evidence, no hard facts to prove that either slaves or slave artifacts" were ever in the house.

But there was a slave in the house, because there was a slave owner in the house: Amos Kendall. He owned slaves when he lived in Kentucky and when he first moved to Washington. The 1840 census of Washington noted that Kendall, living at Jackson Hill, owned one slave. But the Smithsonian researchers' expertise is in architecture and engineering; they didn't know who Kendall was. They had overlooked a 1981 letter from a Kentucky woman saying that Kendall's daughter had been married in the house. It was only Becker's activism and research that prompted the public release of all 700 pages of documents unearthed by the Smithsonian. It was only the combination of the two that brought to light the "hard facts" of slavery on this historic site.

The name of the African American who lived at Jackson Hill is unknown. He or she was probably a cook. In all likelihood, he or she was never manacled in the basement. But he or she was living on the premises in 1840 in coerced bondage to Amos Kendall, an appeaser of slave power. This person may have even seen John Quincy Adams, prudent foe of slavery, periodically riding past on his way to inspect his money-losing mill.

Henry Holt, a reclusive man from New York state, bought the mansion in 1844. Like the previous occupant, he owned a slave -- a 35-year-old mulatto woman, according to 1850 census records discovered by Becker. For the next five decades, Holt farmed the land, growing Indian corn and raising pigs.

John Quincy Adams died in 1848. Thirteen years later, the civil war that he had long dreaded came to pass. By the time the war was over and slavery abolished, the Adams Mill had ceased operation. In 1870, his son, Charles Francis Adams, sold the land that lay between the big house and the Quaker cemetery to the Union Benevolent Association (Colored), a congressionally chartered group of African Americans who wanted to establish their own burial ground.

"Pretty Prospect," as the field was known, quickly became a favorite final resting place for both free-born and newly emancipated blacks. One of the grander tombstones, costing $900, marked the grave of Lindsey Muse, a former messenger for the Navy Department. In 1890, the city commissioners stopped issuing permits for burials at Pretty Prospect. The federal government condemned 1.7 acres along the northern edge of the cemetery and laid claim to the land -- to create a buffer between the zoo and the graveyard. The zoo offered the Union Benevolent Association $2,000 for the land and $1,000 for the removal of bodies. The association agreed to the deal, but there is no record of the removal of the remains. That same year, 1890, the newly established National Zoological Park bought Henry Holt's house. The shanties and the pigpens around the house were pulled down. The interior was refurbished and the zoo installed offices.

The city grew. The old Adams Mill slowly crumbled. The weeds in Pretty Prospect grew taller, the tombstones tilted. In 1940, the city condemned the land, and the remains of 129 people buried there were moved to Woodlawn Cemetery in Southeast. But the evacuation was apparently incomplete: Twenty years later, teenagers from Adams-Morgan, roaming in what was now a construction site, started finding skulls and other bones in the dirt.

The land's owners, Jacob and Maurice Shapiro, were not pleased with this archaeological discovery. The Shapiro brothers had made a deal to build a high-rise apartment building on the spot to take advantage of the same wonderful view that Amos Kendall had enjoyed. But those bones and community opposition stood in the way, and construction was halted. As the land remained undeveloped over the years, Walter Pierce, organizer of a neighborhood sports club, began using it for youth baseball leagues. In 1981 the city paid the brothers Shapiro $1.6 million to go away, and the land became a park. In the mid-1980s, a playground, benches and a basketball court were added and the community garden was organized.

In 1988, the zoo moved the last of its administrative offices out of the Holt House. When homeless people began sneaking onto the premises, the windows and doors were boarded up. Like the Adams Mill and the Quaker and African American cemeteries, the old house was crumbling into oblivion.

Until citizen Eddie Becker spotted that dumpster.

Becker is talking again:

"I'm afraid the history of the site is becoming a metaphor for the memory of slavery. It is also being forgotten. Holt House is now in worse shape than ever because the zoo, when it finally got around to cleaning up the house, took off the gutters. Now the rain goes straight onto the foundation. And, after saying that they didn't want to desecrate the burial ground and pulling out their dumpsters, the zoo is now doing road repairs and parking their backhoes and tractors in the exact same spot where the dumpsters were. You know that if it was their relatives who had been buried there, they wouldn't be putting their heavy equipment there. They just don't care.

"The Smithsonian, which is supposed to care about these things, doesn't want to think about the memory of slavery because the Smithsonian experience is the story of American ingenuity -- the great Industrial Revolution. That leaves out the story of how slave labor built the foundation of that revolution. If the Smithsonian can avoid the memory of slavery here, at the Adams Mill and the Holt House, then the denial is pretty powerful."

Hoage thinks Becker is unreasonable.

"We have to repair that road and make it usable again," he said. "The ground will be regraded and reseeded. It's only temporary and it will be returned to its naturally green state. As for the house, our maintenance people found that the gutters were clogged and water was backing up, so it was better to remove them."

Cynthia Field of the Smithsonian says her office will continue to research the history of the house. "Whether this is slave history or American history in dynamic Jacksonian America, we've got something historic here. The question is, what are we going to do with it?"

That's the question facing Congress. In its budget request for fiscal year 1999, the Smithsonian and the zoo requested $100,000 to conduct a "historic structures" report on the Holt House. The House passed an appropriation bill prohibiting the expenditure of zoo funds on the Holt House; the Senate bill, as reported out of committee, contains no such language. A House-Senate conference committee will probably decide the issue within a month.

And what happened to Amos Kendall, the diabolical genius turned deadbeat tenant of Jackson Hill? With a mixture of piety, ingenuity, charity and exploitation, he wove together a remarkable second act of his utterly American life.

Let us return to 1841. In March of that year, John Quincy Adams redeemed himself in the eyes of most abolitionists by arguing the case of the mutinous crew of the slave ship Amistad before the Supreme Court -- and winning. Kendall was broke so he had to borrow $7,000 from a friend. He used the money to start a newspaper, Kendall's Expositor, and to buy a large parcel of land northeast of the Capitol. He may have also used the money to buy slaves, because (as discovered by the indefatigable Becker) the city's 1841 tax rolls indicate Kendall paid $1,800 in taxes on slaves, perhaps as many as 27 slaves, that year. Soon after, he built a simple wood frame house on his new property, which he named Kendall Green.

His fortunes only recovered in 1845, when he began working with Samuel Morse, inventor of the telegraph. Morse had come to Washington seeking to get government support for his revolutionary means of communication.

"Kendall suggested to Morse that he'd do better setting up a private telegraph company instead . . ." wrote columnist James Burke in Scientific American magazine last year. "In return for this blindingly obvious idea, Kendall got 10 percent of the first $100,000 Morse would make and 50 percent of the rest." Kendall became, in his own words, "tolerably rich." In fact, he was worth more than a million dollars.

He regularly attended prayer meetings at the Calvary Baptist Church in downtown Washington, taught Sunday school and donated more than $100,000 toward the construction of a new church, which still stands, at Eighth and H streets.

In 1856, Kendall donated two acres of his estate to establish a school for blind and deaf children, an institution he served as president until 1864. The school was then made into a college and he stepped aside for his very able underling, Edward Miner Gallaudet. Where Kendall Green once stood is now the heart of the Gallaudet University campus on West Virginia Avenue in Northeast.

During the Civil War, Kendall strongly supported President Lincoln's war against the secessionist Southern states but stoutly rejected the idea that the goal was to free the slaves. "The Federal Union: It must be preserved," Kendall wrote in 1863, adding "slavery or no slavery." He suggested that the plantation owners could "save what is left of [their slaves] by submission to the Constitution and laws." Slavery died with the Confederacy two years later, but Kendall's notion that the Constitution is colorblind on the civil rights of African Americans enjoys a place in American political thinking to this day.

In 1866 and 1867, Kendall traveled to Europe and the Middle East, climbing the Alps and riding horseback in Palestine. Not long after his return to Washington, he fell ill. In November 1869, at age 80, he gathered his family to his deathbed to bid all farewell. Later that day his son-in-law sent a telegram to Samuel Morse reporting that Amos Kendall had gone through death's door with a lucid mind and "a spirit triumphant."

Jefferson Morley is an editor for The Post's Outlook section.

The Washington Post Newspaper Homepage