While the President-elect was holding his conferences, with the mysterious Major Lewis going in and out at Gadsby’s and playing with the destinies of men, and the streets were seething with an incongruous crowd shouting their “Hurrah for Jackson,” Jackson was remaining coldly aloof from the occupant of the White House. He had carried to Washington a bitter resentment against Adams and his personal lieutenants, because of the dastardly attacks upon the woman then buried at the Hermitage. He made no call of courtesy, and Adams was stung to the quick. Especially painful to the old Puritan was the thought that he had been considered capable of a vulgar assault upon the good name of a woman. After much struggling with his pride, he made the first advance by sending a messenger to Jackson to inform him that the White House would be ready for his occupancy on the 4th of March. “He brought me the answer,” Adams records, “that the General cordially thanked him, and hoped that I would put myself to no inconvenience to quit the house, but to remain in it as long as I pleased, even for a month.”[142] A few days later, Adams sent his messenger to say that his packing might require two or three days beyond the 3d, and Jackson replied that he did not wish to put him to the slightest inconvenience, “but that Mr. Calhoun had suggested that there might be danger of the excessive crowds breaking down the rooms at Gadsby’s, and the General had concluded, if it would be perfectly convenient to us, to receive his company at the President’s house after the inauguration on Wednesday next.” Whereupon Adams “concluded at all events to leave the house on Tuesday.”[143] Thus the closing days of his Administration must have been bitter, indeed, to the proud old Puritan of the White House. Deliberately ignored by his successor, tortured by the thought of the treachery of McLean and others, the co-workers of his régime, depressed, embittered, or in hiding, he appears to have been utterly forgotten by the society of the capital as well as by the general public. Justice Story observing his isolation was moved to write in bitterness to a friend that he had never “felt so forcibly the emptiness of public honors and public favor.” Certainly no generous sympathy was felt for him by his triumphant foes. When, on the last Sunday before the inauguration, the pastor of the President’s church unhappily selected for his text, “What will ye do on the solemn day?” one of Jackson’s courtiers, who had attended the services, hurried back to Gadsby’s, and the company assembled there went into gales of laughter, and agreed that it would be, for some, a “solemn day.”