William Stickney, ed., Autobiography of Amos Kendall (Boston, 1872)

Amos Kendall (1789-1869), Postmaster General under Andrew Jackson, wrote this account of his life; his son-in-law edited it, partly in the third person. Read in the archive.org full text in October 2026 for Deborah (Kendall) Cummings, the aunt Kendall visited at Windsor, Vermont.

• His family (p. 1): Francis Kendall of Woburn; his son Jacob; Jacob’s sons John, Ebenezer and Abraham “moved to Dunstable about the year 1726. There John had five sons, John, Jacob, Temple, Edward, and Zebedee. John the second had two sons, John and Zebedee. Zebedee, the father of Amos, had nine sons.” “Amos Kendall was born on Sunday, the 16th day of August, 1789.”
• At Dartmouth (pp. 26-29): “In July of this year Kendall made a visit, in company with his classmate, Daniel Rockwood, to Windsor, Vt., West Parish, where lived a Mr. Cummings who married a sister of his father. They desired to ascend Ascutney Mountain, about three miles distant, and two young men, his cousins, consented to accompany them.” The students refused the cousins’ offer of horses and set off on foot “With a lunch and a bottle of rum”; on the summit they fell asleep, Kendall ran down an unexplored ravine and crawled under a fallen rock to reach a farmhouse, and the cousins carried Rockwood part of the way down: the students went back “satisfied that it is often bad policy in a hot day to walk six miles when one can ride four of them, and that rum is not always the safest restorative of exhausted strength.” On a later visit “One of the cousins claimed to be one of those fortunate mortals in whose hands the divining-rod would indicate unerringly the location of valuable metals.”
• After Commencement, 25 Aug 1809 (p. 40): “Mr. Kendall travelled on foot to West Windsor, and spent several days at the residence of his uncles, Cummings and Wilkins, whose wives were his father’s sisters,” and disgraced himself at a ball there by snatching a lady’s handkerchief in the middle of a contra-dance.