A History of the American People

wench eating a jelly with a gold spoon in the president's house.' Clothes were torn; barrels of
orange punch were knocked over; men with muddy boots jumped on damask satin-covered chairs' worth $150 each to see better; and china and glasswareworth several thousand dollars'
were smashed. To get the mob out of the house, the White House servants took huge stocks of
liquor onto the lawn and the hoi polloi followed, black, yellow and grey [with dirt] many of them fit subjects for a penitentiary.' Jackson, sick of it all, climbed out by a rear window and went back to Gadsby's to eat a steak, already a prime symbol of American prosperity. He declined, being in mourning, to join 1,200 citizens at the ball in Signor Carusi's Assembly Rooms, a more sedate affair, ticket only. The scenes at the White House were the subject of much pious moralizing at Washington's many places of worship that Sunday, the pastor at the posh Unitarian Church preaching indignantly from Luke 19:41-Jesus beheld the city and wept
over it.’
Then came the rewards. One of Van Buren's sidekicks, Senator William L. Marcy, responding
to the weeping and gnashing of teeth as the Old Guard were fired, told the Senate that such
removals' were part of the political process, adding,To the victors belong the spoils of the
enemy.’ The phrase stuck and Jackson will always be credited with bringing the spoils system
into federal government. Mrs Smith wrote bitterly of the expulsions: so many families broken up-and those of the first distinction-drawing rooms now dark, empty, dismantled.' Adams protested:The [new] appointments are exclusively of violent partisans and every editor of a
scurrilous and slanderous newspaper is provided for.' It is true that Jackson was the first
president to give journalists senior jobs-Amos Kendall for example got a Treasury auditorship.
But Jackson partisans pointed out that, of 10,093 government appointees, only 919 were
removed in the first eighteen months and over the whole eight years of the Jackson presidency
only 10 percent were replaced. Moreover, many of those sacked deserved to be; eighty-seven had
jail records. The Treasury in particular was full of useless people and rogues. One insider
reported: a considerable number of the officers are old men and drunkards. Harrison, the First Auditor, I have not yet seen sober.' One fled and was caught, convicted, and sentenced. Nine others were found to have embezzled. Within eighteen months Kendall and other nosy appointees discovered $500,000 had been stolen, quite apart from other thefts at the army and navy offices and Indian contracts. The Registrar of the Treasury, who had stolen $10,000 but had been there since the Revolution, begged Jackson to let him stay. Jackson:Sir, I would turn out
my own father under the same circumstances.' But he relented in one case when a sacked
postmaster from Albany accosted him at a White House reception and said he had nothing else to
live on. He began to take off his coat to show the President his wounds. Jackson: Put your coat on at once, Sir!' But the next day he changed his mind and took the man's name off the sackings list:Do you know that he carries a pound of British lead in his body?' Jackson's appointments
turned out to be no more and no less corrupt than the men they replaced and historians are
divided on the overall significance of bringing the spoils system to Washington.
Two of Jackson's appointments turned out disasters. The first was the selection of Samuel
Swartwout as collector of customs in New York, which involved handling more cash than any
other on earth, $15 million in 1829. His claim to office was that he had backed Jackson in New
York even before Van Buren. But he was a crooked old crony of Burr, who gambled on horses,
stocks, and fast women. In due course he fled to Europe, taking with him $1,222,705.09, the
biggest official theft in US history, worse than all the peculations of the Adams administration
put together.