A platform had been erected over the steps of the east wing, and on it was a table holding a Bible. The distinguished officials of the time were seated around this table, and beneath it the crowd pushed and scrambled and struggled for place within hearing. Instantly there was silence. The slender, almost boyish figure of our President approached the table, and with bared head under the falling snow stood for a moment surveying the crowd.
His face was pale, and his countenance wore an expression of weary sadness. When he took the oath he did not, as is the custom, use the word "swear." Placing his left hand on the Bible without raising the book, he raised his right and, looking upward, "affirmed" that, God helping him, he would be faithful to his trust.
There were tears in his voice, but it was musical, and his enunciation was clear and distinct.
Only two months before, his only child, a beautiful boy of thirteen, had been killed in a railroad collision—killed before his parents' eyes! His address began, "My countrymen! It is a relief to feel that no heart but my own can know the personal regret and bitter sorrow over which I have been borne to a position so suitable for others rather than desirable for myself."
The public does not tolerate the intrusion of a man's personal joys and griefs into his official life. However willing the world may be to sympathize, it considers this indicative of a mind lacking fineness and delicacy. To keep one's inner self in the background should be the instinct, and is surely the policy, of every man and woman who aspires to popularity.
There were many who quickly criticised this unfortunate sentence of the President. The Whig journals sneered at it as "a trick of the orator to awaken personal interest before proceeding to unfold his public policy." But he had the sympathetic tears of many of his audience.
His address went on to discuss the annexation of Cuba—a dream which lasted through many subsequent years. The Pearl of the Antilles was ardently coveted as a pendant to our chain of states, but she will never belong to us, unless as the result of more misfortune. The President then pledged himself to the never dying Monroe Doctrine, prayed appealingly for the preservation of our Union, and touched upon the troubled questions which, despite all our wars and sufferings, are not yet fully settled. And then, amid cheers and shouts and salvos of artillery, he was driven to his new home, and it was all over.
Three days after the inauguration the Cabinet nominations were sent to the Senate. Mr. Marcy was to be Secretary of State; Mr. Guthrie, Secretary of the Treasury; Jefferson Davis, of War; James Dobbin, of the Navy; Robert McClelland, of the Interior; James Campbell, Postmaster-General; Caleb Cushing, Attorney-General—four men from the North, three from the South. These, then, with their families, were to lead the social life of Washington for four years. The Executive Mansion, shrouded in gloom, could never become a social centre.
We had the honor of knowing well the three most distinguished of these men, Mr. Marcy, Mr. Davis, and Mr. Cushing.
Mr. Marcy, the best-known member of the Cabinet, strong, honest, and an adroit politician, was a man of rugged and abrupt manners, yet a great favorite with the ladies. We at once became keenly interested in his initial proceedings. He was sternly democratic in his ideas. Absorbing as were the cares of his department, exciting and menacing as were the questions of the hour, he inaugurated his official life by settling matters of dress and etiquette—so far as they related to the presence of American envoys at foreign courts. President Jackson had been supposed to be democratic, but he was a bloated aristocrat beside Mr. Marcy. Jackson had rejected the prescribed court dress,—embroidered cuffs and cape, white breeches, gold knee-buckles, white silk stockings, gold shoe-buckles, chapeau-bras, cockade, eagle, white feather, and sword. Alackaday, that we should have lost all this bravery! Jackson decreed no cape at all (such a friendly fashion to laden shoulders), no embroidery except a gold star on the coat-collar,—but breeches and modest buckles, a sword, a chapeau-bras with eagle and cockade.