Jackson’s election in 1828 was a foregone conclusion from the moment he reappeared as a Presidential candidate; and, immediately upon the announcement that he had won an electoral vote a good deal more than double that of Adams, Washington became the Mecca of a hundred pilgrimages. By the fourth of March, 1829, the city was so crowded with worshipers of the President-elect that they overflowed the inns and boarding-houses, and many were obliged to live in camp. Half the men wore their trousers tucked into their boot-legs, and not a few carried pistols openly in their belts. The hickory emblem was in evidence everywhere: men wielded hickory canes and staffs, women wore bonnets trimmed with hickory leaves and necklaces composed of hickory nuts fancifully painted, and scores of horses were driven with bridles of hickory bark. Like his father, Adams did not attend the inauguration of his successor; he withdrew to a hired dwelling on the heights north of the city and kept to himself till the flurry was over. Probably Jackson did not regret his absence, for the campaign had been surcharged with bitter personalities, into which the name [Illustration: _Bladensburg Duelling-Ground_] of Mrs. Jackson was remorselessly dragged. Mrs. Jackson had died since election day, and the General believed her death the direct result of calumny. Madison had set the fashion, and Monroe and Adams had improved upon it, of having a formal escort to the Capitol on the way to inauguration. Jackson, however, refused to follow custom. As the only militia organization in the city was under command of a colonel who hated him, he had no military display, but walked down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue with only a body-guard composed of veterans of the War of the Revolution, then a half-century past. For any lack of enthusiasm on the part of the resident population, that of the visiting Jacksonians more than compensated. All the way the General and his little party were so surrounded by a yelling, cheering crowd that they could advance only at a snail’s pace. To watchers on Capitol Hill he was distinguishable from the mob by being the one man in the midst of it who walked bareheaded.