Duff Green

Duff Green (born Aug. 15, 1791, near Frankfort, Ky., Virginia Colony—died June 10, 1875, Dalton, Ga.) was a U.S. political journalist, and an influential member of Pres. Andrew Jackson’s inner advisory circle, the “kitchen cabinet.”

After serving in the War of 1812, Green became a government surveyor and mail contractor in Missouri, where he also served in the state constitutional convention (1819) and in the state legislature. As editor of his St. Louis Enquirer, he supported Jackson for president (1824). In 1826 he established the chief journalistic organ of the Jacksonian Democrats, the Washington, D.C., United States Telegraph, and was appointed printer to Congress after Jackson’s election (1828). Green broke with Jackson in 1831, however, to support John C. Calhoun.

In 1840 he supported the Harrison–Tyler ticket editorially. After Pres. William Henry Harrison’s death (April 1841), Pres. John Tyler appointed Green unofficial representative to England, where his political writings were widely read. Returning in 1844, Green founded a New York paper, The Republic, which advocated free trade, road construction and other internal improvements, civil service reform, and Western expansion.

Though he opposed secession, Green sided with the Confederacy and contracted his iron-works with it. Late in life he wrote books and pamphlets on economic issues and tried to recover railroad interests he had lost to the Crédit Mobilier in 1864.