According to custom, the inaugural program came to an end with a reception at the White House; and arrangements were made to entertain a large number of guests.  Police control, however, proved wholly inadequate, and when the throng that followed the President up the Avenue reached the executive grounds it engulfed the mansion and poured in by windows as well as doors, until the reception rooms were packed to suffocation.  Other guests, bidden and unbidden—­“statesmen and stable-boys, fine ladies and washerwomen, white people and blacks”—­continued for hours to besiege the doors.  “I never saw such a mixture,” records Judge Story; “the reign of King Mob seemed triumphant.  I was glad to escape from the scene as soon as possible.”  The President, too, after being jostled for an hour, very willingly made his way by a side entrance to the street and thence to his hotel.

A profusion of refreshments, including barrels of orange punch, had been provided; and an attempt to serve the guests led to a veritable saturnalia.  Waiters emerging from doors with loaded trays were borne to the floor by the crush; china and glassware were smashed; gallons of punch were spilled on the carpets; in their eagerness to be served men in muddy boots leaped upon damask-covered chairs, overturned tables, and brushed bric-a-brac from mantles and walls.  “It would have done Mr. Wilberforce’s heart good,” writes a cynical observer, “to have seen a stout black wench eating in this free country a jelly with a gold spoon at the President’s House.”  Only when some thoughtful person directed that tubs of punch be placed here and there on the lawn was the congestion indoors relieved.  When it was all over, the White House resembled a pigsty.  “Several thousand dollars’ worth of broken china and cut glass and many bleeding noses attested the fierceness of the struggle.”  It was the people’s day, and it was of no avail for fastidious Adamsites to lift their eyebrows in ridicule or scorn.

Those in whom the establishment of the new order aroused keenest apprehension were the officeholders.  A favorite theme of the Jackson forces during the late campaign was the abuses of the patronage, and the General came into office fully convinced that an overhauling of the civil service would be one of the greatest contributions that he could make to his country’s welfare.  Even if he had been less sure of this than he was, the pressure which office seekers and their friends brought to bear upon him would have been irresistible.  Four-fifths of the people who flocked to Washington at inauguration time were seekers after office for themselves or their friends, and from every county and town the country over came pleas of service rendered and claims for reward.  But Jackson needed little urging.  He thought, and rightly, that many of the incumbents had grown lax in the performance of their duties, if indeed they had ever been anything else, and that fresh blood was needed in the government employ.  He believed