A History of the American People

cobblers and gin cocktails, slings made with various spirits, juleps, snakeroot bitters, timber
doodly, and eggnogs. Most politicians lived in boarding houses, most of them decorous, a few
louche. But there were already hostesses who set the tone which was oligarchical, elitist, and
essentially Virginian Ascendancy.
To Jackson, then, it was a hostile city and he arrived there President-elect, on February 11,
1829, a sad and bitter man. Early in December his wife Rachel had gone to Nashville to buy
clothes for he new position. There, she picked up a pamphlet defending her from charges of
adultery and bigamy. Hitherto the General had concealed from her the true nature of the smear
campaign waged against her honor, and the shock of discovery was too much. She took to her
bed and died on December 22. To his dying day Jackson believed his political enemies had
murdered her and he swore a dreadful revenge. He put up at Gadsby's Boarding House. He was
not alone. From every one o the twenty-four states his followers congregated on the capital,
10,000-strong army of the poor, the outlandish, the needy, above all the hopeful. Washingtonians
were appalled as these people assembled, many in dirty leather clothes, the 'inundations of the
northern barbarians into Rome.' They drank the city dry of whiskey within days, the crammed
the hotels, which tripled their prices to $20 a week, they slept five in a bed, then on the floors,
spilling over into Georgetown any Alexandria, finally into the fields. Daniel Webster wrote: I never saw such a crowd here before. Persons have come 500 miles to see General Jackson and they really seem to think the country has been rescued from some general disaster.' But most wanted jobs. Clay joked sardonically about the momentwhen the lank, lean, famished forms,
from fen and forest and the four quarters of the Union, gathered together in the halls of
patronage; or stealing by evening's twilight into the apartments of the president's mansion, cried
out with ghastly faces and in sepulchral tones, "give us bread, give us Treasury pap, give us our
reward!”
The inaugural itself was a demotic saturnalia, reminiscent of scene from the early days of the
French Revolution but enacted against a constitutional background of the strictest legality. It was
sunny and warm, the winter's mud, 2 feet deep in places, beginning to dry. By 10 A.M. vast
crowd, held back by a ship's cable, had assembled under the East Portico of the unfinished
Capitol. At eleven, Jackson emerged from Gadsby's and, escorted by soldiers, walked to the
Capitol in a shambling procession of New Orleans veterans and politicians, flanked by hacks, gigs, sulkies and woodcarts and a Dutch waggon full of females.’ At noon, by which time 30,000 people surrounded the Capitol, the band playedThe President's March,' there was a
twentyfour-gun salute, and Jackson, according to one critical observer, Mrs Margaret Bayard
Smith, bowed low to the People in all its majesty.' The President, with two pairs of spectacles,
one on top of his head and other before his eyes, read from a paper words nobody could hear.
Then he bowed to the people again and mounted a white horse to ride to his new mansion, Such a cortege as followed him,' gasped Mrs Smith,countrymen, farmers, gentlemen mounted and
dismounted, boys, women and children, black and white, carriages, waggons and carts all
pursuing him."
Suddenly, to the dismay of the gentry watching from the balconies of their houses, it became
obvious that the vast crowd in its entirety was going to enter the White House. It was like the
sansculottes taking over the Tuilleries. A Supreme Court justice said those pouring into the
building ranged from the highest and most polished' tothe most vulgar and gross in the nation-
the reign of King Mob seemed triumphant.' Soon the ground floor of the White House was
crammed. Society ladies fainted, others grabbed anything within reach. A correspondent wrote to
Van Buren in New York: `It would have done Mr Wilberforce's heart good to see a stout black