Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  When the campaign began in the summer of 1825, Crockett no doubt trusted to his tried and proved electioneering style for a time, though he soon found that he did not have the money to buy the drinks and the twists of tobacco, or the wherewithal to afford appearances in eighteen county towns. Neither did he as yet have any influence with the sparse press in the district, chiefly the two papers in Jackson. In addition, cotton prices ran unusually high that year, and the profit realized by the growers in his area helped to alleviate their previous anger at Alexander over his tariff vote, for the high tariff also protected cotton. Alexander did not fail to take credit for the windfall.5

  Then, in the June 18 Jackson Gazette, Overton came out against Crockett. Writing under the pseudonym “Aristides,” he challenged David for seeking to change the court days without considering the interests of his constituents, most of whom took some trouble to make a day to come to the seat to do their legal business. At the same time Crockett's stand on the militia brigade attracted his fire, for it would have denied West Tennesseans whatever positions and benefit came from having a brigade enlisted in their own population. For all the effort Crockett invested in the legislature to serve his constituents, Overton was able to make a case from these two measures that the “gentleman from the cane” paid little mind to their interests.6 Crockett tried to respond by pointing out that the militia matter was not his fault, and in fact that a clerical error explained his failure to oppose the bill, but the explanation did not stick. Indeed, for three months he attempted to counter the “Aristides” charges, an effort that seemed to have little impact on the voters.7

  In fact, nothing did. “I might as well have sung salms over a dead horse,” he later said of his arguments against Alexander and Overton. In the end Alexander “rather made a mash of me,” he said, though in fact the vote showed a close race, Crockett polling just 267 fewer votes than Alexander, out of 5,465 cast. It made a very creditable showing for a first attempt, especially considering Crockett's financial handicap and the opposition of the Overton forces. But the defeat stung bitterly, and more than he was ready to admit. Years later he claimed that he lost by only 2 votes instead of 267, which he certainly knew to be untrue, and implied that his loss by even that tiny margin might have been due to a dishonest count.8 Clearly Crockett's skin was far too thin for politics, and moreover in this first defeat, as in others to follow, he compounded being a poor loser with the insecurity of his class. Alexander's victory was just one more page in the long history of conspiracy and corruption among the upper classes as they tried to grind the upright, honest, and independent yeoman into subservience. Crockett could never see personal slight or defeat in any other light.

  Typically he needed victories to assuage his loss; to salve his own wounds he must inflict wounds on others, and the bears of West Tennessee paid. He briefly worked at building two flatboats, intending to fill them with barrel staves that he would take to market, but as soon as the bears were fat he took to the wilderness, and after a good series of kills tried to return to his other work but found that “I at length couldn't stand it any longer without another hunt.” In the end the long hunt lasted almost without interruption into the spring of 1826, and Crockett claimed to have single-handedly killed 105 bears, 47 of them in the last month alone.9 It was a savage tally, even though Crockett exaggerated the number. In fact he took closer to 80 bears that season, and not by himself but in company with a party of several.10

  Certainly they did not waste the bears, for Crockett's vivid recollection of every kill included salting the meat and packing it home for consumption. Still, no other hunt of his life resulted in such a degree of killing, and no other remained so vividly in his memory. When he wrote his autobiography eight years later in 1833, he devoted fully one-tenth of it to this winter hunt, as if somehow to erase the painful memory contained in the two sparse paragraphs he gave to his failed congressional campaign. It took several tons of bear meat hanging in the smokehouses of Crockett and his friends to restore the wounded pride caused by his rejection at the polls.

  Only in the spring did Crockett really concentrate on his barrel stave project. Somehow he had hired a couple of men to do the work of splitting and finishing the staves while he was at his hunt, and by spring nearly thirty thousand of them lay packed on the flatboats. As soon as the flow of the rivers allowed, Crockett and his associates put off into the Obion. On each of the flats, or “broadhorns,” as they were called, they built a small cabin in the center where the off-watch man could eat and rest out of the elements, and the trip proved to be not unpleasant for a time. Crockett always delighted in new country, a bit of exploration and adventure, and, it seemed, an excuse to get away from home. But he bargained without the broad Mississippi. When the Obion emptied into the great river, Crockett saw something that stunned him and terrified some of his hands, for none of them had ever beheld such a stream, and none knew how to manage the flats on something that big and powerful.

  He decided to lash his two flats together, but it only made them more difficult to handle, and when they tried to make land on their first night out they could not. Other experienced boatmen they passed urged them simply to keep on through the night, and so they did. With the river high, the current took them along at something around eight miles an hour, so that a few hours before dawn, they were only a few miles above Memphis. Crockett himself was off watch, having decided they could do nothing but let the current take them as it pleased, and went into one of the cabins to warm himself at a fire. Ruminating there over what appeared to be yet another bad turn in his fortune, he did not hear the distant sound of a rhythmic crashing in the water. Ahead of them lay what boatmen called a sawyer, a huge driftwood tree snagged in the bottom mud, its trunk pointing upstream. Sawyers rose out of the water in response to the current until their weight in the air countered the water's resistance, and then they crashed down again, repeating the process endlessly until eventually they washed away.

  Crockett did hear his hands outside running to the sweeps when they spied the sawyer, but it was too late. The trunk came down right in the middle of the joined flats, breaking them apart, and then he felt another great shudder as the boat he was on ran broadside into a raft of driftwood caught at the head of an island just beyond the sawyer. The swift current pushed the flat with Crockett on it under the driftwood, and as he struggled to get out of the cabin hatch, the water came pouring in. The only other exit was a small window on the side of the cabin, too small to crawl through, but he stuck out his arms and yelled for his friends, and they dragged him out—though the tug ripped away his clothing and a fair bit of his skin in the bargain—and then leaped for safety onto the driftwood.

  “I was in a pretty pickle,” Crockett later recalled. The two rafts passed down either side of the island locals called the “Old Hen” or “Paddy's Hen-and-Chickens,” and then Crockett saw the one he had been on simply disappear for good beneath the driftwood. They sat out the night there in the middle of the river, cold, hungry, and with Crockett bleeding from several serious abrasions. Worse, all their work, and his prospects for some immediate substantial cash, disappeared with the current. Yet somehow his salvation from certain death put not only this loss but the defeat at the polls in a new perspective. “I felt happier and better off than I ever had in my life,” he remembered, “for I had just made such a marvellous escape, that I had forgot almost every thing else.” To his eternal credit, and despite the unseemly pique and small-mindedness that he could show when hurt or disappointed, David Crockett never lost his essential good cheer and natural gentility for long. He would always be an optimist.

  The next morning a passing boat saw the miserable, shivering Tennesseans on their island and picked them up. Apparently word of the mishap had reached Memphis earlier that morning, for when the boat with a nearly naked Crockett and friends pulled up to the wharf at the foot of the city, scores of spectators lined the bluff. Among them stood Maj. Marcus B. Winchester, who ran a clothing and
dry goods store. Seeing Crockett's special plight, Winchester ran to his store and returned with a pair of trousers to spare the foundling's modesty, taking him back to his store later and fully outfitting him. Within minutes Crockett wore a new suit of clothes and warmed himself beside a welcoming fire after a hearty meal. In a couple of hours, fired inside by a little of the “creater,” he appeared on the streets of Memphis, where he and his companions found themselves rather lionized for having survived their ordeal. Gratitude meant a lot to Crockett, and he never afterward forgot Winchester's generosity or spoke of him in any but admiring terms.

  He should have been grateful, for in its way this accident, which Crockett would have regarded as providential, proved to be the remaking of him. Indeed, more than once in his life he found a kind of rebirth in disaster. In this case it was the meeting with Winchester, who took an instant liking to the bruised and shivering fellow huddled by his fire. Crockett soon began to entertain him with his jokes and stories, some of them no doubt of his pranks during his election campaigns, and he and Winchester parted a few days later as fast friends. Likewise, Crockett achieved a species of popularity in Memphis itself, thanks both to his wit and good humor, and also the entrée that Winchester could provide to other men of influence. When Crockett left, Winchester sent him on his way with some money in his pocket, and Memphis sent him off with his confidence in his ability to win friends renewed.11

  Before going home, Crockett and a companion boarded a steamboat—the first he ever rode—and went downriver as far as Natchez, hoping to find some remnant of the flats and the thirty thousand staves, but all he found were reports that one of the boats had been seen drifting by. He may even have been coincidentally on the same boat that brought James Bowie back that spring from his first trip to Washington, but if so neither took notice of the other. Finding his errand a fruitless one, Crockett gave up and returned upriver, finally reaching the Obion and Gibson County in late spring or early summer, after almost nine months of nearly constant absence.

  Once more the land and Elizabeth could not hold him. His revelation on the driftwood raft, followed by his reception in Memphis, may have changed his mood after his humiliation the year before, but in his renewed good spirits he only fastened his resolve more steadfastly on redeeming himself by erasing the injustice of defeat at the polls with a victory. Major Winchester probably encouraged Crockett to make another try against Alexander in the 1827 election, and that support made it easier for David to do what he surely always wished anyhow: He would run again. His decision in the matter already made, the quandary over funding evaporated when Winchester sent for him to come to Memphis early in 1827, and there made Crockett the loan of one hundred dollars or more to meet the costs of the drinks and the circulars and the many nights' lodging at inns during the campaign. Moreover, Winchester frequently did business in a number of the courthouses in the district, and he promised to speak in Crockett's behalf with his influential friends at every opportunity, as well as to advance him more money as needed.12 His help could be crucial, for the Ninth Congressional District was the second largest in the entire United States, with well over twenty thousand voters and a huge expanse of territory for a candidate to cover.

  Given that boost, Crockett went into the contest with a confidence that he lacked in 1825, and spurred by the extra advantage that Gen. William Arnold of Jackson also entered the lists, far more likely to take votes from Alexander than from Crockett. A veteran of three stump races now, Crockett was undeniably a skilled campaigner. He took onto the platform with him not only a well-honed arsenal of jokes and stories and tricks, but also an understanding gained by experience of which issues to evade and which to address. He squarely positioned himself as the friend of the poor and repeatedly hammered on his vacant-land stand. He played on his own lack of education, even exaggerating his ignorance, and thereby catering to his own and the voters' latent suspicion of high learning when he stressed his opposition to using public funds from those lands to build colleges for the sons of the rich, and his support for the common-school movement. Over and over he made the contest not one of candidates or ideologies but of poor against rich. By voting for him, the men of West Tennessee would be expressing loyalty to their class; in endorsing his independent spirit they would be asserting their own. It was an approach being seen elsewhere in the late 1820s as the expanded franchise finally opened almost universal white male suffrage, and with it the accumulated aspirations of the common man. Though neither Crockett nor anyone else at the time would have recognized the concept, he was establishing himself as a pioneer populist in America, a position heavily weighted with latent power.13

  Crockett also further developed his own persona, entirely conscious that as much by accident as design, he had cast himself earlier in a role that attracted the voters. He spoke the speech of his people, with a drawl and a way of chewing words that turned “crop” into “crop.” He took advantage of his ear for frontier vernacular and liberally larded his speeches with quaint expressions like “horn” for a glass of liquor, and “stand up to my lick-log, salt or no salt,” as a way of saying that he did his duty. He even began to embellish his pronunciation, intentionally using ungrammatical words, like “know'd” instead of “known,” when he saw that they drew a smile from the voters. He had always had a good ear, and had traveled more than enough in his youth and manhood to acquire a host of idioms and expressions that salted his speech.

  Then there was his affability. However much he may have adopted an exaggerated pose on the stand, he projected a basic and genuine gentility. People liked him, and he adapted with ease to the tenor of those around him. He could sense their expectations of him, smoothly catch their mood on introduction, and then succeed, said one, in “agreeably confirming preentertained opinions in reference to himself.”14 He calculated what he said carefully for effect, and more by instinct than by cunning seemed to know that these backwoods voters were looking for a new type: an identity springing from themselves that represented the new America; a generation that, like a child, was ready to move out on its own and declare its independence from its Founding Father parents. Washington, Jefferson, and John Adams had been the types of their time, but the last of their ilk, James Monroe, left the presidency early in 1825, and Jefferson and Adams both died in 1826, just months before this canvass. Their era died with them, and so did Yankee Doodle, and these new Americans sought a replacement in their own image of themselves. Andrew Jackson fitted the mold in large degree, yet even he was tainted by a kind of frontier aristocracy, as well as by his stunning ability to create mortal enemies through a willfulness that exceeded even Crockett's. But by the time of this canvass in the backwoods of West Tennessee in 1827, David Crockett was coming to realize that he made rather a nice fit indeed.

  Crockett gave the appearance of quite firmly aligning himself with Jackson during the canvass, endorsing his candidacy for the presidency in 1828. “I was,” he said later, “without disguise, the friend and supporter of General Jackson, upon his principles as he laid them down.”15 At a Fourth of July stump meeting, he was more than outspoken. “Jackson is a hero, but Crockett is a horse,” he toasted. “Here is to General Jackson in the next presidents chair, loco Crockett in his seat in Congress, and loco Alexander in the corn field.”16 Crockett's “loco” was an extremely early, perhaps even seminal, usage of a term that years later came to define more radical Jackson supporters, and others who observed this campaign applied it to him as liberally as he did himself, though its origin is lost.17“You have heard of the celebrated Loco Crockett, ” an observer of the campaign wrote to a friend in North Carolina, “‘who can whip his weight in wild cats,’ ‘jump higher, fall down lower and drink more liquors than any man in the State.’”18

  Quite evidently Crockett had added something else to his campaign arsenal, for now he adopted the outlandish hyperbolic brag-and-boast of the Mississippi flatboatman as part of his personal idiom. Not only did he make the voters smile with his cl
aims of whipping wildcats, but he may have gone further, claiming he could “wade the Mississippi,” even “carry a steam-boat on his back.”19 He did not originate such expressions as these and other like claims to being “half-horse and half-alligator,” for they had been commonplace among the Kentucky flatboatmen on the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers for twenty years or more. Crockett quite probably heard such during his 1826 river trip, if not before, and simply brought them inland and added them now to the character he consciously constructed to entertain his audiences and cajole their votes.20

  Of course there were the usual pranks and jokes on the stump. For one thing Crockett amused himself by keeping the source of his money for drinks a secret, which no doubt put his opponents off guard. For another, he took full advantage of the tendency of his opponents to ignore him as being of no consequence, while they flayed at each other. That gave Crockett the opportunity to dodge issues—on which Alexander and Arnold surfeited their audiences—and instead make points with his wit. He never tired of telling of the meeting at which a flock of clucking guinea fowl interrupted Arnold again and again, until he stopped his speech to shoo them away, giving Crockett the opening to comment to the crowd afterward that while Arnold may have ignored him in his speech, certainly the birds did not, for they were chanting “Crockett, Crockett, Crockett” until he quieted them.21 Crockett's son John accompanied him on at least one stump tour in March, and confidently told friends at home in a flurry of slang that “the old hook is a going ahead electioneering. I think the old fellow will come out in the gunter.”22