By the time [Andrew] Jackson was sworn in on March 4, 1829, his followers . . . staged the most notorious inaugural party in American history . . .
Refreshments had been arranged at the mansion, but no one expected the crush of uninvited guests, and the police had not been alerted. The vast crowd was so cheerfully uncontrollable that Jackson's friends had to lock arms around him and physically push away the hands extended for him to shake . . . The hordes gradually thinned out, but by late afternoon, mobs of boys were still fighting and leaping with muddy boots on the damask chairs . . . The party might have gone on until dawn if servants had not lured the stragglers outside by carrying tubs of punch to the lawn.
It was a a gaudy kickoff for the Jacksonian era. The Jeffersonian Democrats were renaming themselves Democrats, while the last Federalists and other ant-Jackson factions were being called Whigs. Mocking the new president's intellectual limitations, those Whigs portrayed him as a donkey, but to Jacksonians that trusty and hardworking animal represented no slur, and they adopted it as their party symbol.