96 a short history of the united states
editor of a leading Washington newspaper, and in its place there ap-
peared a rabble herd of the lowest society. “The President, after having
been literally nearly pressed to death & almost suffocated & torn to
pieces by the people in their eagerness to shake hands with Old Hick-
ory, had retreated through the back way or south front & had escaped
to his lodgings at Gadsby’s.”
Refreshments had been prepared for the reception, but each time
the waiters attempted to enter a room to serve the guests, a mob rushed
forward to seize the drinks. An orange punch, laced with hard liquor,
was pitched to the floor moments after being brought through the pan-
try door. Cut glass and china were smashed in the melee. The general
destruction had reached such a level that tubs of punch, wine, and ice
cream were finally taken to the garden outside in the hope that they
would draw the crowd out of the mansion. And it worked. Men dived
through the windows in hot pursuit, and children wrestled and fought
with each other in their effort to grab the ice cream and other refresh-
ments. In their distress on witnessing such behavior, women fainted.
“We had a regular Saturnalia,” exclaimed one congressman. The mob
was “one uninterrupted stream of mud and filth.... However not-
withstanding the row Demos kicked up the whole matter went off very
well thro the wise neglect of that great apostle ‘of the fi erce democracy,’
the Chairman of the Central Committee, which body corporate so far
from being defunct by the election of Old Hickory seems now to have
gathered fresh vitality and has I believe even taken the old man under
their parental guardianship.”
The Central Committee. It was a new age, a demo cratic age. Many
more people—that is, white males—had won the suffrage, and now
politicians formed committees to guide and direct them to the polls so
that large majorities could be built for favored candidates. Politics en-
couraged the use of parades and barbecues to attract public interest.
Hickory poles were erected in town squares to salute and celebrate the
accomplishments of the “Hero of New Orleans.” Newspapers were not
only a source of information about local, national, and world events and
a means of defining party doctrine, be it Democratic or National Re-
publican, but a way of assisting the formation of organizations to
advance the parties’ political goals. Hundreds of new journals had
appeared during the election of 1828 , so that about 600 newspapers