Andrew Jackson (66 page)

Late February was quite cold, but March brought a break in the weather. March 4 dawned warm and springlike. The city awakened early when Jackson enthusiasts spontaneously fired cannons to herald democracy’s day. Spectators began streaming toward the Capitol grounds to claim seats and standing places for the inauguration ceremony. Jackson had spent the night at Gadsby’s House; at ten-thirty he reviewed a company of fifteen aging veterans of the Revolutionary War who had traveled to Washington to pay their respects. Now they insisted on escorting him to the Capitol.

Jackson and his white-haired guard drew a crowd along the way. The Marine Band struck up “Jackson’s March”—an air commemorating the Battle of New Orleans—as the general’s carriage entered the south gate of the Capitol grounds. Ten thousand people roared their approval when they caught sight of Jackson stepping out of the carriage; the roar faded only after he disappeared into the building.

The clock showed half past eleven as Jackson entered the Senate chamber, accompanied by the Committee of Arrangements and the marshal of the District of Columbia. He sat down directly before the desk of the secretary of the Senate. In the chair of the Senate was Vice President Calhoun, who had been reelected to that post as part of the Jackson triumph. Calhoun proceeded to administer the oath of office to the fourteen new members of the upper house.

Chief Justice John Marshall entered the chamber and sat to Jackson’s right. The associate justices followed Marshall and took their seats. The diplomatic corps—envoys from foreign countries—sat on Jackson’s left. Members of the House of Representatives filed in and filled the gallery on the west side of the Senate.

Promptly at noon Calhoun gaveled adjournment of the Senate and a procession to the east portico commenced. The crowd on the grounds, numbering perhaps fifteen thousand by now, had gathered below the portico, waiting intently to see their hero again. When Jackson emerged between the columns of the portico, the crowd erupted, louder than before. Their cheers rumbled across the grounds, joined shortly by twenty-four cannons booming the official salute.

Jackson remained standing before the crowd. He wore two pairs of eyeglasses: one currently on his eyes, the other—his reading lenses—thrown on top of his head. While the tumult lasted he conversed with Calhoun, on his left.

The crowd composed itself somewhat when John Marshall stepped forward to administer Jackson’s oath. Marshall’s voice was strong, Jackson’s almost inaudible. Only those standing very close could hear him pronounce the words specified by the Constitution. When he finished he took up the Bible on which he had sworn, raised it to his lips, and kissed it. Then he turned to the people and bowed, as a minister in a monarchy might bow to his sovereign.

The crowd strained to hear the president’s inaugural address. It lasted but a few minutes. He emphasized the popular nature of his victory, crediting the “free choice of the people” for his elevation. He promised to interpret the Constitution strictly. “I shall keep steadily in view the limitations as well as the extent of the executive power.” He would respect the rights of the states, “taking care not to confound the powers they have reserved to themselves with those they have granted to the confederacy.” In foreign affairs he would seek “to preserve peace and to cultivate friendship on fair and honorable terms.” He would strengthen the army, but he looked to the people for the ultimate safety of the republic. “The bulwark of our defence is the national militia, which in the present state of our intelligence and population must render us invincible as long as our government is administered for the good of the people and is regulated by their will. . . . A million of armed freemen possessed of the means of war can never be conquered by a foreign foe.”

H
ad the spectacle closed here,” Margaret Bayard Smith wrote, “even Europeans must have acknowledged that a free people, collected in their might, silent and tranquil, restrained solely by a moral power, without a shadow around of military force, was majesty, rising to sublimity, and far surpassing the majesty of Kings and Princes, surrounded with armies and glittering in gold.”

Margaret Bayard’s forebears were Federalist, but she had married a Republican just weeks before the first election of Thomas Jefferson. She moved with her husband, Samuel Smith, to Washington and for the next forty years observed the evolution of American politics. Till Jefferson died, the philosopher of Monticello was her favorite among American political figures, which disposed her to favor the people in theory but not always in practice. She socialized with Henry Clay and others of the Adams administration and shared their reservations about Jackson. She attended the inauguration out of curiosity, to see how the new president and his horde of followers would behave.

She was pleasantly surprised. “It was grand—it was sublime!” she wrote a friend regarding the ceremony at the Capitol. “Thousands and thousands of people, without distinction of rank, collected in an immense mass round the Capitol, silent, orderly and tranquil.”

But the tranquility and sublimity couldn’t be sustained in the face of the people’s enthusiasm for their hero. “When the speech was over, and the president made his parting bow, the barrier that had separated the people from him was broken down and they rushed up the steps all eager to shake hands with him.” Jackson obliged for a time, but the crush became too great. Only with difficulty was a path forced through the Capitol yard and down the hill to the gate that opened onto Pennsylvania Avenue. He couldn’t get through the gate. “The living mass was impenetrable,” Margaret Smith said. Eventually another path was opened and the president’s horse brought forward. He mounted the white stallion and commenced the slow march to the executive mansion. “Such a cortege as followed him! Country men, farmers, gentlemen, mounted and dismounted, boys, women and children, black and white. Carriages, wagons and carts all pursuing him to the President’s house.”

Public receptions at the mansion had been a feature of inaugurations since Jefferson’s day. Distinguished Washingtonians paid their respects to the new president and reconfirmed their solidarity as the governing class. Margaret Smith and most other veterans of the capital had expected a similar soiree this afternoon. But the crowd at the inauguration and in the procession behind the president on Pennsylvania Avenue suggested that something different was afoot, quite literally. Mrs. Smith refused to throw herself into the surging sea of democrats. She repaired to a friend’s nearby home, to let the crowd diminish. Yet the torrent persisted. “Streams of people on foot and carriages of all kinds, still pouring toward the President’s house,” she noted more than an hour later.

Not till three o’clock did she manage to work her way through the crowd into the mansion. She thought she had stumbled on the aftermath of a battle.

What a scene did we witness! The
Majesty of the People
had disappeared, and a rabble, a mob, of boys, negros, women, children, scrambling, fighting, romping. What a pity, what a pity! No arrangements had been made, no police officers placed on duty, and the whole house had been inundated by the rabble mob. . . . Cut glass and china to the amount of several thousand dollars had been broken in the struggle to get to the refreshments, punch and other articles had been carried out in tubs and buckets. . . . Ladies fainted, men were seen with bloody noses, and such a scene of confusion as is impossible to describe. Those who got in could not get out by the door again, but had to scramble out of windows.

After all her effort, Margaret Smith was disappointed at not meeting the president, who, having shaken some ten thousand hands, had escaped to his hotel.

The mob scene at the White House was what most people remembered about the inauguration. Even some Jacksonians were taken aback. “It was a glorious day yesterday for the
sovereigns
,” James Hamilton wrote wryly. “The mob broke in, in thousands. Spirits black, yellow, and grey, poured in in one uninterrupted stream of mud and filth, among the throng many subjects for the penitentiary.”

Those less favorably inclined toward the new president and the new democracy took a more skeptical view. Joseph Story, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, winced at what he called the “noise and tumult and hollow parade” of democracy’s hour, and he shook his head at the spectacle at the White House. “I never saw such a mixture,” he said. “The reign of King ‘Mob’ seemed triumphant. I was glad to escape from the scene as soon as possible.”

Yet even the skeptics couldn’t help perceiving that something remarkable had happened. Margaret Smith observed, “It was the People’s day, and the People’s President, and the People would rule.”

T
he first order of business for the Jackson administration was repairing the damage done to the White House by the overly enthusiastic friends of democracy. The second order of business, commenced almost simultaneously, was repairing the damage done to American liberty by the foes of democracy.

Such, at any rate, was how Jackson viewed his mission. His election, though not unexpected by the time it happened, turned the American political world on its head. Not since Jefferson’s victory in 1800 had there been a hostile takeover of the presidency, and no one expected Jackson to offer an olive branch like that put forward by Jefferson in his “we are all republicans; we are all federalists” inaugural address. A theme of the first Jackson administration would certainly be reform, after everything the Jacksonians had said about corruption in government. In time reform would mean all things to all people, and consequently nothing much to many, but to the Jacksonians it meant something specific. They were republicans before they were democrats, and a fundamental feature of republican thought in America, from the days of the Revolution, was an insistence on civic virtue. The revolutionaries of 1776 decried the corruption they saw in British politics: the perversion of government to the illegitimate pursuit of private gain. The rebels demanded independence lest the corruption cross the Atlantic and infect America. When the Jacksonians raised the cry of corruption against the Adams administration, they spoke against this background of revolutionary rhetoric and were so understood. The reform they demanded would stop short of a violent revolution—although after the sack of the White House some skeptics weren’t so sure—but it could hardly be less sweeping in its assault on entrenched power. The people had commenced the process by turning out Adams. The new president would continue the work by displacing the minions of the old regime.

H
e began with the State Department, the first of the executive agencies. For secretary of state Jackson chose Martin Van Buren of New York. Van Buren had helped deliver the New York vote to Jackson and in the process had confirmed a reputation for political sorcery. His enemies intended to insult him by calling him a “magician,” but his friends—some of them, anyway—took up the epithet and made it a mark of honor. His reputation as a climber didn’t diminish when he resigned the New York governorship after less than three months in office to become the senior member of Jackson’s cabinet.

Pennsylvania contributed the head of the Treasury. The state’s support had been crucial in Jackson’s election, but beyond this the new president wanted to brace himself for trouble with the Bank of the United States, headquartered in Philadelphia and a hotbed of holdover Federalism. Samuel Ingham couldn’t expect to bring the bankers around, but he might keep their animus from infecting the entire Keystone State.

Jackson turned to Tennessee, to his friend and protégé John Eaton, for secretary of war. Eaton’s qualifications mattered less than his loyalty, in that Jackson intended to act as his own secretary of war should hostilities—with Britain, Spain, or the Indians—resume.

John Branch of North Carolina became secretary of the navy, an office of government Jackson knew little and cared less about. The navy should grow, but slowly, and any honest person ought to be able to handle that. John Berrien of Georgia was named attorney general, and William Barry of Kentucky postmaster general.

Beyond his official cabinet, Jackson gathered a council of informal advisers. Unlike every previous president except Washington, Jackson had almost no intimates in the national capital upon his inauguration. (Washington had almost no intimates anywhere, being famously above mere mortals.) Jackson knew his cabinet secretaries, other than Eaton, by reputation alone. For this reason he turned for advice to men whose judgment and loyalty he had learned to trust during the long campaign. William Lewis of Tennessee stood first among the equals. Amos Kendall, an ardently pro-Jackson editor from Kentucky, came next. Duff Green, a Missouri transplant who now edited the fiercely Jacksonian
United States Telegraph
at Washington, and Isaac Hill, for years a lonely Jacksonian in New Hampshire, rounded out the clique. Andrew Donelson, the president’s nephew, surrogate son, and now personal secretary, was an ex officio member of the group.