Senator John H. Eaton was made Secretary of War; a Calhoun supporter from North Carolina, John Branch, was given the Navy portfolio; Senator John M. Berrien of Georgia became Attorney-General; and William T. Barry of Kentucky was appointed Postmaster-General, after the incumbent, John McLean, refused to accept the policy of a clean slate in the department.  The appointments were kept secret until one week before the inauguration, when they were announced in the party organ at the capital, Duff Green’s United States Telegraph.

Everywhere the list caused consternation.  Van Buren’s was the only name of distinction in it; and only one of the appointees had had experience in the administration of national affairs.  Hamilton pronounced the group “the most unintellectual Cabinet we ever had.”  Van Buren doubted whether he ought to have accepted a seat in such company.  A crowning expression of dissatisfaction came from the Tennessee delegation in Congress, which formally protested against the appointment of Eaton.  But the President-elect was not to be swayed.  His ideas of administrative efficiency were not highly developed, and he believed that his Cabinet would prove equal to all demands made upon it.  Not the least of its virtues in his eyes was the fact that, although nearly evenly divided between his own followers and the friends of Calhoun, it contained not one person who was not an uncompromising anti-Clay man.

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.”