Meanwhile a motley army of office seekers, personal friends, and
sightseers--to the number of ten or fifteen thousand--poured into
Washington to see the old regime of Virginia, New York, and
Massachusetts go out and the new regime of the people come in. "A
monstrous crowd of people," wrote Webster on Inauguration Day, "is in
the city. I never saw anything like it before. Persons have come five
hundred miles to see General Jackson, and they really seem to think
that the country is rescued from some dreadful danger." Another
observer, who was also not a Jacksonian, wrote[7]:

"No one who was in Washington at the time of General Jackson's
inauguration is likely to forget that period to the day of his death.
To us, who had witnessed the quiet and orderly period of the Adams
Administration, it seemed as if half the nation had rushed at once
into the capital. It was like the inundation of the northern
barbarians into Rome, save that the tumultuous tide came in from a
different point of the compass. The West and the South seemed to have
precipitated themselves upon the North and overwhelmed it....

"Strange faces filled every public place, and every face seemed to bear
defiance on its brow. It appeared to me that every Jackson editor in
the country was on the spot. They swarmed, especially in the lobbies
of the House, an expectant host, a sort of Praetorian band, which,
having borne in upon their shields their idolized leader, claimed the
reward of the hard-fought contest."

The 4th of March dawned clear and balmy. "By ten o'clock," says an
eye-witness, "the Avenue was crowded with carriages of every
description, from the splendid baronet and coach, down to wagons and