Jackson escorted Van Buren to the Capitol, for his inauguration, in a carriage widely celebrated as the “Constitution coach.” It was a present to the General from citizens of New York and was built out of timbers from the old war frigate _Constitution_, a picture of which was emblazoned on one panel. Van Buren discovered, before he had been long in office, that a thousand things which the people accepted without question from a military hero they were prepared to criticize in a civilian. Moreover, his son John, while in England some years before, had danced with the Princess Victoria and thus acquired the nickname “Prince John,” of which the enemies of the administration made use as a political cudgel, declaring that the whole family were aping the foreign aristocracy. Along came the financial panic of 1837, reducing thousands of well-to-do persons to poverty, and this was fatuously laid to Van Buren’s account when he stood for reëlection in 1840 against General William Henry Harrison, affectionately styled “Old Tippecanoe” in memory of one of his victories. Regardless of the fact that Jackson had refurnished the White House expensively for those days and then given entertainments which spoiled nearly everything spoilable, it was Van Buren who became the undeserving target for attack on the ground that he maintained “a royal establishment” in “a palace as splendid as that of the Cæsars, and as richly adorned as the proudest Asiatic mansion.” The stump orators harped on the use of gold and silver spoons at the White House table, and on the excessive number of spittoons distributed in the parlors and halls. Vainly did the President’s defenders show that the gold spoons were mostly plated ware, and that the spittoons, like the other furniture, were the property of the Government: the voters who ate their porridge from wooden vessels and threw their quids into boxes of sawdust were resolved upon putting into his place a man of different type. Henry Clay, passing the White House one day when a blaze broke out in the laundry, joined the firemen in helping to extinguish it, remarking jocularly to the President: “Though we are bound to have you out of here, Mr. Van Buren, we don’t want you burned out.”