Scarcely did Crockett commence his term at the Fourteenth General Assembly before he got devastating news from Lawrence County. His mill was finally in operation on Shoal Creek, though with Crockett so much absent either hunting, electioneering, or as now in the legislature, Elizabeth Crockett oversaw most of the real work. Being a large woman, she could handle the task, and having a good business sense, she managed the enterprise better than her husband anyhow. But now late summer storms swelled the banks of the Tennessee River and its tributaries, including Shoal Creek, and in a sudden flash flood, the waters carried away both the grist- and powder mills, leaving only part of his dam, the millrace, and the twenty-by-twenty-four-foot log house where the Crocketts lived.19 The message from Elizabeth, when Crockett received it, stunned him. “I may say,” he recalled, “that the misfortune just made a complete mash of me.” With his gristmill gone, he could not even continue to operate the distillery, which depended on corn from the mill.
On September 29 he secured a leave of absence from the legislature and hurried back to Lawrence to survey the damage, but there was nothing to be done. Elizabeth pragmatically told him they should simply settle their debts as best they could from their surviving property and start over. Debt was an old acquaintance to Crockett, of course, but his rigid innate honesty would not let him do as so many others in his situation had done for generations. He could not simply pack his family and what money he had and move on. To Crockett any debt became a matter of honor. When he left his former home in Jefferson County in 1811 and moved west, Crockett owed John Jacobs one dollar, yet throughout the ensuing years he never forgot that obligation. In the spring of 1821, when he took that string of horses to North Carolina for sale before commencing his stump campaign, Crockett and the herd passed through Jefferson, and he stopped at the Jacobs house on Mossy Creek. Ten years had passed, but after introducing himself to Mrs. Jacobs, he gave her a silver dollar, in spite of her efforts to refuse the money. “I owed it and you have got to take it,” he told her.20 Now he would do the same. He would sell his remaining property and use the proceeds to redeem the debts left by the mill. He believed it “better to keep a good conscience with an empty purse, than to get a bad opinion of myself.”21 David Crockett always valued that “good opinion” of himself highly, sometimes above all other things, regardless of the personal cost.
Crockett returned to Murfreesboro on October 9 to finish out the session, and despite his anguish over his misfortune, he remained active and engaged. Even before going home to Lawrence, he voted for Carroll in the legislature's ballot for the governorship, and Crockett's support may in some way indicate that he also favored the movement to nominate Jackson for the presidency in 1824, since Carroll promoted Old Hickory's candidacy. He also joined other Carroll supporters in voting to call a constitutional convention. Though it failed, consistently thereafter he supported every successive attempt, his hope no doubt being that among other reforms, the underrepresented western half of the state would receive a proper apportionment of assemblymen, and that tax reform would mean levies on the value of land rather than on simple acreage. A revised constitution might also attempt to deal with the matter of vacant lands, though the decision on that issue lay chiefly in Washington.
In his day-to-day votes on the assembly floor, Crockett gave little real indication of being either a party or a policy man, though whatever position he took, whether against the suppression of gambling or in opposition to divorce, he assumed it forcefully. And he did show that he could take a position on an issue when it no longer stood to affect him. He actually introduced a bill to define the boundaries of Hickman County and permanently fix the county seat in Vernon, and months later presented a petition from the citizens of Hickman to the same end. The legislature decided differently, voting to move the seat to Centreville, but Crockett emerged from the ballot a winner in both camps. He had finally sided with Vernon, appeasing its supporters, but the verdict of the legislature made Centreville happy and inclined not to hold his opposition against him. Had Vernon won with his support, he might have lost his Centreville following entirely.22
The first session of the Fourteenth General Assembly adjourned on November 17, and Crockett could look back on his service in it with some pleasure. For a freshman assemblyman he had been active and outspoken, and if he took with him any agenda at all, he certainly made efforts to represent the interests of men like himself, the poor white settlers of western Tennessee. Indeed, as a result of that, he encountered in Murfreesboro probably for the first time in his life a substantial and considered condescension from the more moneyed and propertied men of central Tennessee. He probably always bore something of a grudge against the affluent, the educated, the aristocrats from the old established families, the kind of men who had run state and local government in the United States for a generation. These were the prejudices of his class, and he would have been unusual not to share them. The behavior of some of the other legislators in the assembly only reinforced his feelings.
No nickname or sobriquet seems to have applied itself to Crockett as yet, and in his own transactions he invariably signed himself as “David,” a small formality at best, but perhaps a sign that he could stand on his dignity as well as the next man, regardless of his station in life. Anyone who ridiculed that station invited Crockett's wrath or, worse, his wit. In debate one day Crockett made his point and sat down, only to see James C. Mitchell, a well-to-do lawyer from McMinn County, arise to speak in opposition. In doing so he referred to Crockett not by name but rather as “the gentleman from the cane,” meaning the sparsely settled hardscrabble canebreak country of western Tennessee. Mitchell intended nothing at all by the remark, but when others in the house chuckled at the reference, Crockett saw in it a slur on the lowly station of himself and his constituents, and immediately his hackles rose. He tried but failed to pursue the point in debate, and then confronted Mitchell outside the chamber and demanded an apology. Mitchell earnestly denied any wish to insult or offend Crockett. He had simply referred to Crockett as being from the cane in the way he would refer to another member as being from the mountains, or from across the Tennessee, but the explanation did not erase Crockett's wounded pride. He knew his poverty, the rudeness of his life, and his own unpolished speech and manners. Indeed, he made capital of them, taking an almost aggressive pride in the fact that however modest his attainments, they came without benefit of name or wealth but entirely from his own hard work. Yet beneath that veneer or pride he concealed a lifelong embarrassment and frustration, and a compelling desire to be accepted as a gentleman—in short, to rise very close to the station of those whom he appeared to despise. It was the eternal frustration of the poor, and in Crockett it left a sensitive spot so touchy that any irritation, real or imagined, inevitably begged a response.
In the assembly hall Crockett dressed in what he had, nothing better than homespun shirt and trousers, and perhaps a leather hunting jacket or at best a modest woolen coat. Mitchell and most of the more affluent members, by contrast, dressed like lawyers, in pantaloons or knee breeches, waistcoats, cutaway coats, and shirts with fancy cuffs and cotton ruffles at their collars. The contrast between them and the poorer members like Crockett was stark enough to embarrass without words. Following his encounter with Mitchell, Crockett happened on a lost ruffle dropped in the street in Murfreesboro. It matched the style worn by Mitchell almost exactly, and Crockett's revenge quickly came to mind. The next time Mitchell spoke in the House, Crockett arose immediately afterward. At his neck he wore the ruffle, and the stark contrast of the stylish bit of foppery topping his rough country garb sent the assembly into an uproar of laughter. Mitchell himself simply left the room, and thereafter Crockett eschewed the ruffle but accepted the sobriquet of “the gentleman from the cane” as a badge of honor for himself and his rude backwoods constituents.23
If Crockett relished his victory over Mitchell, the thrill dissipated quickly enough when he returned to Lawrence County and the reality of
having to start his home all over again. Joined by his son John Wesley and a neighbor, he started off west to look for yet another place to make yet another new start. During his session in the legislature Crockett had helped give birth to new counties in the western part of the state, including massive Carroll County, extending from the Tennessee to the Mississippi. Now he rode nearly 150 miles northwest to the Rutherford fork of the Obion River, and there he saw a patch of ground that looked likely. No neighbors would crowd him, the nearest being seven miles distant. He found the wilderness so untouched that he had to fell trees across some of the swollen creeks in order to cross by holding fast to the trunk while he waded. Ten years before, it had been a normal deep forest, but the massive New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-13 inundated the area, creating Reelfoot Lake and making some of the ground impassable. Yet the country all around teemed with game, and he could not resist turning his exploration for land into a hunting trip.
It was country made for Crockett. Here in this wilderness there were no aristocrats, and wealth meant nothing. Moreover, this was the environment in which his natural gifts flourished. Here he felt like an aristocrat. With the exception of his stiff pride in spite of his poverty, Crockett took nothing so seriously as he did his prowess at hunting. Indeed, he showed considerable particularity just in the manner of his dress for the hunt. He wore a linsey-woolsey hunting shirt, dyed a faded brown by soaking in boiled nutshells. Moccasins on his feet quieted his tread, while leggings above them kept his trousers from flapping or catching on brush as he silently stalked prey. At his belt he wore everything that he needed, and assigned a specific place for each article. A tomahawk rested on his left hip, while a sheathed butcher knife balanced it on the other, within easy grasp for his right hand. His bullet pouch and powder horn hung from straps over his left shoulder, dangling beside the knife. Crockett took great care to make certain that no article could get in the way of speedy access to any of the others.
About his actual weapons “the gentleman from the cane” showed just as much particularity. He wanted no ornamentation, no brass or silver inlays on the stock of his rifle, for such things could cause an unwelcome reflection of sunlight that might spook game. As for the knife, he set great store by it. “A single bullet may settle up a buck or bear into a right sort of fix to finish him with a ‘butcher’ and give no sign, as the rifle does by crack and smoke, of your whereabouts,” he explained, “especially if some skulking red-skin or vagabond should be upon your tracks for mischief.” The knife, he averred, “did its work as noiselessly and surely, as well as being a mighty saver of lead and powder.”24
However else he might fail in life, on the hunt he was always a success. In fact his entry into politics was only a sort of extension of his ventures into the wilderness, for bagging an office was in its way a hunt, just like bagging a bear. Moreover, Crockett did not walk alone in his endless stalks in the woods and the ever greater number of his kills on this and other trips. A whole generation of poor men like him at the edge of the frontier hunted continually, not just for food but for the satisfaction, the validation, of the kill. They lived in a society with no established aristocracy, in which skill at the craft of the frontier established its own hierarchy—with no skill more decisive than hunting. The man who killed the most deer or bear or wolves achieved a station above his peers. Men boasted of taking staggering numbers of animals, killed solely for the sake of the killing and its enhancement of their social standing.
In fact Crockett and the hunters were not unlike the land speculators. Each sought to exploit the wilderness for their own betterment. A speculator rose by using stealth to capture more land than his peers, just as Crockett's harvest of the wildlife of the forests elevated his prestige. One bested other men and the government; the other conquered nature. The land mattered no more to a speculator, who would never live on it, than the deer and bear meat did to Crockett, who could never eat all that he killed. The United States of the time was a nation at war, pitting the common man against the forces of privilege and preferment on the one hand and the resources of the continent on the other. With game as with land, enough to live on was not enough. With his extensive kills Crockett seemed to need more than just enough, for each one reaffirmed his prowess, and that in turn assured his sense of himself as a man. When he looked through the cloud of smoke from his rifle and saw the deer fall in the glade or the bear from a tree, he knew he was a success. It is just possible that for Crockett the moment of the kill erased for a few minutes the memory of poverty, misfortune, debt, and all his life's failures, whether by chance or his own doing. If so, then like a narcotic the hunt briefly erased memories of what he preferred to forget, yet as with a narcotic the effect did not last and had to be repeated again and again. Winning an election gave the same thrill, and the same temporary relief, and better yet, on the hustings Crockett could see the approval in the faces and the votes of the crowd. Crockett—like the hundreds of thousands in his wake—needed the conquest itself and for its own sake in order to feel whole.25
In his trek in the Obion country, Crockett killed deer and elk in abundance, leaving them behind to be collected later as he continued his stalk. Though adept with his rifle, his success lay more in his woodcraft than his accuracy, for the best hunter got close enough to his game without detection that even an indifferent shot must strike home.26 So enamored was Crockett of this wilderness experience that he stayed through the winter, though such may have been his intent from the time he left Lawrence County. When he finished with his initial hunt, he returned to the land he liked and began building a cabin and clearing fields, though he held no title to the property. He would simply be an occupant for the time being, hoping in time to acquire title either through purchase or simply by squatting long enough. He planted corn in his field but found he had no time to enclose it with a rail fence—though there seemed plenty of time for more hunting. “During that spring I killed ten bears, and a great abundance of deer,” he later recalled. Indeed, for the rest of his life he exhibited a prodigious memory of almost every kill: where and when and what he shot. While speculators made tavern boasts of their extensive titles, Crockett expounded the tally of his kills.27
Finally he had no choice but to leave this scene of his success and return to the Lawrence of debt and failure. In his absence the creditors had set in motion that relentless and universal litigation found all across the spreading American West. He must have paid some of his accounts beforehand, but still nearly three hundred dollars in outstanding suits awaited him, and though he challenged a few, the court found in favor of the creditors on most.28 In the end the court ordered his land seized and sold to satisfy the judgments, adding humiliation to failure. Perhaps, then, Crockett felt relieved on his return to Lawrence to find a summons to a special session of the legislature called by Governor Carroll. That, at least, would take him from this scene of woe and back to Murfreesboro on July 22, when the session convened.
Once again in the capital, Crockett revealed that he took the business of being a representative seriously, and if he did not stand out among his peers, certainly he should have given his constituents every satisfaction. Much of the session was spent on minor matters, boundary issues and the like, and Crockett cast his vote time after time in favor of relief for the poor like himself, even on a bill he introduced to provide relief for a free black. He consistently favored reform of abuse, whether in his support of the continuing—but unsuccessful—attempts to call a constitutional convention or in his opposition to a bill that would have reversed the prohibition of fees paid to justices of the peace for certain actions. He had seen the latter abuse in action before he became himself a justice of the peace. The victims called it “fee-grabbing,” and so far as Crockett was concerned “there is no evil so great in society—among the poor people—as the management and intrigue of meddling justices and dirty constables.”29
The reform Crockett really wanted to see related to the land, of course. In fact Carroll called
this special session in part to push for an extension of the deadline for holders of the old North Carolina warrants to present their claims, but Crockett vigorously opposed such a measure and only voted for it in the end after the Senate passed the extension and it became evident that the House must follow. His motive was transparent, of course. Any North Carolina warrant disallowed because of a passed deadline meant that much more western Tennessee land available to poor squatters like himself by their occupancy claims. It seems not to have occurred to him that the warrant holder might also be a poor man in need of cheap land, or else his view of the plight of the poor did not extend beyond himself and Tennesseans like him. This state's land, like its game, was foremost for Tennesseans to capitalize on. North Carolina should take care of its own.
If there was any doubt of this, his stand for the August 21 report of the education committee clearly defined his position. The committee proposed that the legislature call on the state's congressional delegation in Washington to press for an act giving this assembly power to sell vacant land in the eastern half of the state to raise money for education. It was not, of course, the education that interested him, for he may already have felt suspicious of state-supported schools and colleges. He wanted to see that vacant land put on the market, at bargain prices, for the poor and landless, and he happily voted along with the majority for the resolution, though nothing came of it. Interestingly enough, Crockett also supported the use of state funds to encourage the establishment of ironworks and manufacturing concerns. Having tried his hand at industry in a small way, it seemed consistent to him that government should assist the small rural manufacturer. Moreover, given the nature of the mineral deposits in Tennessee, most of the ironworks would be in his part of the state.30
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