"Your excellency please accept my resignation. My health is very feeble. I’ve made no money in office and Blair is to give me the profits of the Extra Globe. I must go back to editing Newspapers."
Amos Kendall
"What’s to become of me? Am I not to go to Russia France or England? We must provide for the family."
"I must resign provided I can do it profitably; a foreign Mission is just the thing. "
"Don’t all desert us. The Whigs will make capital out of this be sure of it."
Drawn On Stone [Political Prints from the 1830's and 1840's]
Previous Section | Amos Kendall and The Globe | Next Section

Detail (3 0f 3) |< Previous

"This is a very inauspicious time my Friends to dissolve the Cabinet. It really looks as if I am to be abandoned."
President Martin Van Buren
 
Henry Dacre
Rats Quitting the Ship
Publisher: H. R. Robinson
Lithograph
1840
Amos Kendall, a close advisor to President Martin Van Buren, resigned as Postmaster General on May 16, 1840.  He planned to focus on editing the Extra Globe, a special campaign edition of the Democratic Party newspaper, the Globe.

The cartoonist speculates that other cabinet resignations would soon follow.  Treasury Secretary Levi Woodbury and Secretary of State John Forsyth discuss their future while Globe editor Francis Preston Blair points out that their political enemies, the Whigs, would benefit if they quit their cabinet posts.   No other cabinet members resigned at the time, but President Van Buren subsequently lost the 1840 presidential election.