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 edi