The first thing for Jackson to do after his inauguration was to select his cabinet.  It was not a strong one.  He wanted clerks, not advisers.  He was all-sufficient to himself.  He rarely held a cabinet meeting.  In a very short time this cabinet was dissolved by a scandal.  General Eaton, Secretary of War, had married the daughter of a tavern-keeper, who was remarkable for her wit and social brilliancy.  The aristocratic wives of the cabinet ministers would not associate with her, and the President took the side of the neglected woman, in accordance with his chivalric nature.  His error was in attempting to force his cabinet to accord to her a social position,—­a matter which naturally belonged to women to settle.  So bitter was the quarrel, and so persistent was the President in attempting to produce harmony in his cabinet on a mere social question that the ministers resigned rather than fight so obstinate and irascible a man as Jackson in a matter which was outside his proper sphere of action.

The new cabinet was both more able and more subservient.  Edward Livingston of Louisiana, who wrote most of Jackson’s documents when he commanded in New Orleans, was made Secretary of State, Louis McLane of Delaware, Secretary of the Treasury; Lewis Cass, governor for nineteen years of Michigan, Secretary of War; Levi Woodbury of New Hampshire, Secretary of the Navy; Roger B. Taney of Maryland, Attorney-General,—­all distinguished for abilities.  But even these able men were seldom summoned to a cabinet meeting.  The confidential advisers of the President were Amos Kendall, afterwards Postmaster-General; Duff Green, a Democratic editor; Isaac Hill, a violent partisan, who edited a paper in Concord, New Hampshire, and was made second auditor of the treasury; and William B. Lewis, an old friend of the general in Tennessee,—­all able men, but unscrupulous politicians, who enjoyed power rather than the display of it.  These advisers became known in the party contests of the time as the president’s “Kitchen Cabinet.”

Jackson had not been long inaugurated before the influence of the “Kitchen Cabinet” was seen and felt; for it was probably through the influence of these men that the President brought about a marked change in the policy of the government; and it is this change which made Jackson’s administration so memorable.  It was the intrusion of personality, instead of public policy, into the management of party politics.  Madison did not depart from the general policy of Jefferson, nor did Monroe.  “The Virginia dynasty” kept up the traditions of the government as originally constituted.  But Jackson cut loose from all traditions and precedents, especially in the matter of assuming responsibilities, and attempted to carry on the government independently of Congress in many important respects.  It is the duty of the President to execute the laws as he finds them, until repealed or altered by the national Legislature; but it was the disposition of Jackson to disregard those laws which he disapproved,—­an encroachment hard to be distinguished from usurpation.  And this is the most serious charge against him as President; not his ignorance, but his despotic temper, and his self-conceit in supposing himself wiser than the collected wisdom and experience of the representatives of the nation,—­a notion which neither Washington nor Jefferson nor Madison ever entertained.