After teaching for a while Blaine left Kentucky and went to Philadelphia to study law.  While there he taught for a short time at the blind asylum and also wrote for the newspapers.  He soon, however, was irresistibly attracted to the State of Maine, and left his native State for a home in the community with which his name is now indissolubly connected.  It is somewhat remarkable that this ambitious young man should have gone East instead of West, choosing a State which the young men were fast leaving—­one whose population in the last forty years has increased very little.  He is, indeed, almost the only man who has gone East in the last half-century and risen to any prominence.

Mr. Blaine went to Maine in 1853, and soon afterward married Miss Stanwood, whose family are well known in New England.  Through their influence he soon found an occupation in journalism, and until 1860 was actively engaged in editing at different times the Kennebec Journal and the Portland Daily Advertiser.  He retained a part ownership in the Kennebec Journal until it began to hamper him in his political career, and then he sold out.  A friend has said of him as a journalist:  “I have often thought that a great editor, as great perhaps as Horace Greeley, was lost when Mr. Blaine went into politics.  He possesses all the qualities of a great journalist:  he has a phenomenal memory; he remembers circumstances, dates, names, and places more readily than any other man I ever met.”

Wielding a strong, vigorous, aggressive pen, Mr. Blaine soon made its power felt among politicians.  He went to Maine at a time when the Whig and Democratic parties were breaking up.  Previous to 1854 the Democratic party had governed the State for a quarter of a century, but its power was broken in the September election of that year, through a temporary union of the anti-slavery and temperance elements.  In 1855 the different wings of the new party were well consolidated, and in the famous Fremont campaign of 1856 they carried the State, electing Hannibal Hamlin governor by twenty-four thousand majority.  Mr. Blaine, during all these exciting times, did not by any means confine himself to writing political leaders.  He took an active part in politics, attending Republican meetings throughout the State, and soon made himself one of the recognized Republican leaders in Maine.  Of this period of his career, the late Governor Kent, of Maine, who himself stood in the front rank of public men in his State, once wrote as follows:—­

“Almost from the day of his assuming editorial charge of the Kennebec Journal, at the early age of twenty-three, Mr. Elaine sprang into a position of great influence in the politics and policy of Maine.  At twenty-five he was a leading power in the councils of the Republican party, so recognized by Fessenden, Hamlin, the two Morrills, and others, then, and still, prominent in the State.  Before he was twenty-nine he was chosen chairman of the executive committee