Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  Something else may have encouraged the people of Lawrence to entrust adjudication of their affairs to Crockett. For all the play and sham about him as he told his stories and played the odd prank, there was no true guile in the man. He was exactly as he seemed: He said what he thought and meant what he said, a truly honest man. Years later, as he looked back on these days, he took pride in the fact that “my judgments were never appealed from, and if they had been they would have stuck like wax.” Of course, the judgments were not his alone, but those of a court of magistrates like himself. Mostly they decided in disputes about debt, such as how much one man owed another in a questioned sale of pork. In his role as an individual justice of the peace Crockett also certified bills of sale of slaves and sometimes adjudicated damages in suits. Occasionally he had to issue a warrant to the constable to bring a debtor before the magistrates, or for someone accused of theft or changing the earmarks on another party's hogs. If Crockett and his peers found such malefactors guilty, they could even impose a sentence of whipping.8

  His magisterial duties occupied little of Crockett's time, in fact, but his entry into public awareness brought him to the attention of other community leaders, who suggested in the winter of 1818 that the lieutenant from the Franklin County militia seek a higher office in the militia being organized for Lawrence. State law required every county to enlist one or more regiments and to elect their officers, and a man named Matthews approached Crockett with the suggestion that he announce himself as a candidate for major and at the same time support Matthews for the lieutenant-colonelcy. The proposition itself suggests that within only a few months of moving to the county, Crockett enjoyed sufficient public esteem that his support was something worth having. Crockett announced himself as a candidate, but when Matthews held a cornhusking frolic to be attended by most of the settlers in the area, intending to do a little electioneering himself, the Crockett family also came and David learned that he would be running against Matthews's son, who would obviously get his father's support regardless of any promise made to Crockett. He confronted Matthews with the story, and Matthews confessed, adding—as if it would mitigate things in some way—that his boy “hated worse to run against me than any man in the county.” Typically Crockett resorted to wit and irony for his revenge. He said that Matthews need have no fear: Crockett would not run against his son but would run against him for the colonelcy instead. With wonderful good grace, Matthews offered his hand, they shook, and then both returned to the frolic to make speeches—for Crockett probably his first public address. He kept it short, announced why he had changed his sights from major to colonel, and then quipped that “as I had the whole family to run against any way, I was determined to levy on the head of the mess.”9

  That speech typified virtually every electioneering address he would make for the rest of his life—a bit of self-deprecation, a bit of prankish frontier wit in which the tables were turned on an opponent, and a modest protestation that he did not seek the office but rather that it sought him. In fact his contest itself set a pattern, at least in the way Crockett saw his public service. When someone else suggested or offered that he should seek office, he accepted out of naive belief in the integrity of the offer. Then he found himself deceived, but rather than withdraw, he confronted his deceivers and exposed their actions in defense of his own, winning the election by gaining the sympathy of the voters.10 Indeed, for the rest of his public life, Crockett perceived—and presented—himself as the honest man put upon by deceivers, yet who triumphed through virtue—his own and the public's.

  Crockett won the election, and on March 27, 1818, he took office as lieutenant colonel of the Fifty-seventh Regiment of Militia. Though Crockett held the commission no more than a year or so, the title of “Colonel” stayed with him the rest of his life. Soon he added to it other titles in Lawrence County, including town commissioner of Lawrenceburg, court referee, and road commissioner. For the next two years he adjudicated in land disputes, took censuses of voters and taxpayers, oversaw the improvement of county roads, and performed whatever small tasks came the way of a rural functionary. None of it paid him much, nor did it take onerous amounts of time from the working of his farm, though he would hardly have minded if it had.

  Despite his repeated attempts to find more and better land, David Crockett never had a taste for farming. The monotony of the plow and the soil wearied him. He needed the excitement of the hunt, whether for new land, deer and bear, or elective office. Interestingly in a man so guilelessly truthful with others, he seems never to have been honest with himself about his nature. To the end of his days he would keep seeking new land. It was always the next farm that he would contentedly settle and work, never the one he was on. In his defense, he was hardly unique. “An American will build a house in which to pass his old age and sell it before the roof is on,” observed Tocqueville a few years later.

  He will plant a garden and rent it just as the trees are coming into bearing; he will clear a field and leave others to reap the harvest; he will take up a profession and leave it, settle in one place and soon go off elsewhere with his changing desires. If his private business allows him a moment's relaxation, he will plunge at once into the whirlpool of politics. Then, if at the end of a year crammed with work he has a little spare leisure, his restless curiosity goes with him traveling up and down the vast territories of the United States. Thus he will travel five hundred miles in a few days as a distraction from his happiness.11

  Crockett was simply one of a generation of men with a spirit in their feet telling them: “Go.”

  In Lawrence County, Crockett did at least try to drive some roots deeper than a plowshare. No doubt using Elizabeth's eight hundred dollars and borrowing more, he began building a kind of rural industrial complex on Shoal Creek, including a water-powered gristmill, a whiskey distillery, and another mill for grinding charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter to manufacture gunpowder. The whole cost of the concern ran to nearly three thousand dollars, but the work proceeded slowly, hampered by his own short funds. By October 1820 he was already in debt, with the mill not yet in operation, but he expected to start grinding in the coming spring.12 Moreover, by the measure of this back-woods community, Crockett, poor as he was, enjoyed some measure of prominence thanks to his several small offices and his very visible, if slowly growing, mills and distillery. In 1821 the voters would go to the polls to elect an assemblyman, representing Lawrence and neighboring Hickman Counties, to the legislature. Friends urged Crockett to seek the seat. Certainly he could use the income. Better yet, if he could not admit to himself that he was no farmer, he unhesitatingly confessed that he enjoyed the bustle of the hustings, entertaining the voters with his brand of wit and repartee, and the approbation of the voters when they gave him their ballots. He agreed to run and thereafter looked back on late 1820 as the moment when “I just now began to take a rise.”13

  Crockett had resigned his post as justice of the peace the year before, and in January 1821 he gave up his office as a town commissioner in Lawrenceburg, all to concentrate on his bid for the legislature.14 In February he announced his candidacy but then left for almost three months, driving a herd of horses to North Carolina when he should have been at home electioneering. Only in late May or June did he return and begin to canvass the district. It was, he said, “a bran-fire new business to me,” but regardless of his protestations he obviously relished taking the stump. “It now became necessary that I should tell the people something about the government, and an eternal sight of other things that I knowed nothing more about than I did about Latin.”

  He went first to Hickman County, and there learned that the hottest issue at the moment was a drive to move the county seat from Vernon to Centreville. If there was any doubt that Crockett possessed some of the skills of the politician, he soon showed himself gifted with a native grasp of the statesman's art when he avoided taking a stand on either side of the issue. In fact, through much of his early political career Crockett studio
usly avoided committing himself on most issues, and as he showed at the first big stump speaking meeting of the campaign, he even went so far as to declare himself utterly ignorant of anything connected with government.

  People of the frontier mixed their politics with their fun, the two being inseparable in any case, since campaigning often afforded the best entertainment in the backwoods. Organizers announced a squirrel hunt on the Duck River in Hickman, a competition between Crockett's supporters and those backing his opponent, in which the side returning with fewer scalps had to pay for the general dinner and drink. Crockett himself put his gun to work, and at the end of the hunt his side counted the majority of pelts. They all gathered at Centreville for the festivities.

  After the eating, but before the drinking got into full sway, the candidates spoke, and when Crockett rose he tried to present himself as a complete novice, notwithstanding that he had spoken at least once when campaigning for the militia commission in Lawrence. In fact he pretended that he did not want to speak at all, though he undoubtedly knew from the outset that this was the very purpose of the event. He well understood the prevailing ethic of American politics and easily adopted the disingenuous guise of the reluctant candidate. When he did stand to speak, he told the audience that he wanted their votes, and then began to expound on his position on the issues confronting them, when he either realized that he actually had nothing to say or more likely decided to continue declining to take any stand at all for fear of losing as many votes as he won. As he would do for years to come, he resorted to wit and stratagem to divert the crowd. He went silent “as bad as if my mouth had been jam'd and cram'd chock full of dry mush.” The voters stared at him in wide-eyed, open-mouthed wonder as he struggled to speak. Finally he told them his problem. He felt like the man found thumping the top of a barrel, who said there had been some cider in it a few days before, and he was trying to see if any remained but couldn't get to it. Well, there had been a “little bit of a speech” in him a few days earlier, said Crockett, but now he could not seem to get to it.

  The ruse worked perfectly. The crowd roared with laughter, and that gave him confidence to go on to other rough stories that only won the listeners even more. Knowing that his opponent would get to speak after him, though, and worried that the man would show up the complete lack of substance in his speech, Crockett concluded by saying that he felt keenly thirsty and suggested that the voters join him at the whiskey stand. Most of them did, leaving his opponent speaking to a largely empty field while Crockett continued his storytelling at the liquor barrel. In the entire episode Crockett sold himself to the voters, while never risking alienating one of them with an unwelcome opinion on the subject of the county seat.

  The next day, Sunday, Crockett went to Vernon, whose residents felt rather differently on the courthouse issue than did his audience in Centreville. Again he simply dodged. “I found I could get either party by agreeing with them,” he said, “but I told them I didn't know whether it would be right or not, and so could't promise either way.” When asked to speak the following day along with candidates for Congress and the governorship, Crockett had to agree, but though he later claimed that his nerves nearly got the best of him, in fact he already knew exactly what to do. The candidates for the bigger offices spoke first, and at considerable length, so that when it came time for the legislative aspirants to make their mark, the crowed had grown restive and jaded. Crockett sensed their mood and gave a repeat of his Centreville performance. He said not a syllable about politics but simply told amusing stories, then quickly finished. “I found I was safe in those parts,” he said, and never bothered to campaign in Hickman County again.15

  Crockett learned more than just how to duck the issues in his earliest stump meetings. He also became acquainted for the first time with leaders of real prominence. At the Vernon meeting he met William Carroll and Edward Ward, both seeking the governorship. Each stood close to Jackson, though Old Hickory and Carroll were especially so, and Crockett would have found the latter especially to his liking. Ward lived the life of an aristocrat, but Carroll came of modest antecedents and played them for all they were worth in his campaign. He had made rather than inherited his money, he had fought in the Creek War, and he knew how not to assume airs when face to face with the common man. In short, he was Crockett, only with a higher reach. Moreover, in 1821 the common man was beginning his rise, like Crockett himself, as an expanding, newly franchised electorate reacted against the aristocratic and moneyed classes that had dominated state houses and Washington alike until then. Carroll and Crockett were a part of the same phenomenon, as hundreds of thousands of new voters across the South and Southwest sought candidates like themselves.

  When voters went to the polls in August, they gave Crockett a two-to-one majority against his forgotten opponent. That fall, early in September, he set out for Murfreesboro, then the state capital. The road took him east first to Pulaski, in neighboring Giles County, where he met a man nine years his junior whom he already knew as an attorney occasionally practicing in Lawrence County. James Knox Polk was seemingly everything that Crockett was not. He came of a good family, had a university education, and boasted a prosperous practice. The two decided to ride together to Murfreesboro, as Polk had secured appointment as clerk to the state senate, and possibly another assemblyman from Giles accompanied them. Along the way Polk, a true politician with a considerable command of issues and current affairs, expressed to Crockett an opinion that the coming session of the legislature might likely make some considerable changes in the state's judiciary. The comment took Crockett by surprise. “Now so help me God,” he later said, “I knew no more what a ‘radical change’ and a ‘judiciary’ meant than my horse, but looking straight into Mr. Polk's face as though I understood all about it, I replied, ‘I presume so.’” That said, he took pains to keep his distance from Polk for fear he would be forced to reveal his ignorance, or so he claimed. In fact he may have told the story later chiefly to use as a metaphor for his quite genuine departure from Polk on substantive issues a few years later.16

  David Crockett took his seat in an elected assembly for the first time on September 17, 1821, and the next day found himself assigned to the Committee of Propositions and Grievances, one of the glamorless minor assignments that went to freshmen legislators. He would make little impression in the ensuing weeks of the session, but when he cast his votes he finally revealed some bedrock policy beliefs, and not surprisingly they proved to be very close to home. A week after taking his seat he cast his first vote in favor of relieving delinquent citizens in his region from owing heavy penalties for overdue property taxes. Three days later, and despite all his protestations of ignorance of the law and government, he introduced a preamble and resolutions to reform the manner of issuing land-grant surveys in order to prevent a few men from monopolizing the best property, and in the following weeks carefully guided it into the form of a bill in both House and Senate that eventually became law. However much the pose of bumpkin suited his purpose when seeking votes from those who were truly ignorant of the forms of governing—and suspicious of those who knew too much—he revealed a ready grasp of parliamentary procedure. At the same time, by his bill and his votes he showed that making public land available to the poor like himself was already a firmly rooted idea with him when he took office. Like his honesty and frank manner, and his inborn views as a poor white, such a position, once adopted, he could never yield.

  In fact Crockett almost certainly came to Murfreesboro with his land reform resolutions already well thought out and perhaps even drafted, evidence that despite his claim that he had never read a newspaper, he certainly knew something of public affairs. The public lands in western Tennessee had been an issue for some years, actually dating back to the time when the state itself belonged to North Carolina. During the Revolution the Old North State incurred heavy debts and afterward issued land warrants to its veterans to reward them for their service. In ceding Tennessee to the United S
tates, North Carolina required that all those warrants be honored when presented. In 1806, with Tennessee now a state, Congress started meeting those warrants in its eastern half, reserving the western part where Crockett lived as public domain. But the warrants outstripped the available land in the east, and that, combined with fraud and forgery, quickly made a confused mess of affairs. Finally the Congress opened the west, too, to satisfy the warrants. By this time, however, quite a number of squatters already lived on some of this land, with improvements made at their own expense, yet a warrant holder could present his claim, have it surveyed on the squatter's land, and order his eviction.

  Crockett was equally interested in occupancy claims, for under old law in Tennessee if a man lived without disturbance as a squatter on a claim for seven years, he could declare it his if he could provide any sort of legal claim, such as a bill of sale, even if the seller himself had not owned proper title. In 1816 the state supreme court ruled that the occupant must have an unbroken chain of pure title back to the original grant, but in 1819 the legislature overrode that. Crockett himself tried to acquire three hundred acres in 1820 when he bought two occupants' claims in Lawrence County, and in this session he must have watched with keen interest as the state supreme court reviewed the legislature's 1819 action, early in 1822 deciding in favor of the rights of the occupant.17 Ironically David Crockett never felt much attachment to any of his several small holdings, and left them seemingly without reservation, but the idea of anyone being forcibly removed from property, even if it was not theirs, aroused his ire. His bill to reform surveying would be only his first volley at land practices.18