Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  Wright responded to the moment without a word. He quickly drew and cocked a pistol and pointed it at Bowie's chest, and Bowie in almost the same instant grabbed a chair and held it in front of him to take the anticipated blast. They were at a standoff for a few moments, and then Bowie raised the chair over his head to strike at Wright. The other took advantage of the action and fired his pistol into Bowie's unprotected chest, striking him in the left side. The impact knocked the chair from Bowie's hands but failed to move him from his feet, and now he leaped on Wright, threw him to the floor, and began beating him furiously with his fists. If he had a pistol of his own, he may have forgotten it or it may have misfired. Instead Bowie used one hand and his knees to hold Wright immobile while he reached into a pocket with his other hand and drew out the clasp knife. He had raised it to his mouth and was pulling out the blade with his teeth when Wright's friends recovered from their shock and swarmed on Bowie, pulling him away. Dropping the knife, he sank his teeth into one of Wright's hands, biting down with such force that when the men roughly dragged him off, he left one of his teeth in Wright's finger. All that saved Bowie was the arrival now of friends of his own, who interposed themselves between him and Wright's people and carried Bowie upstairs to the room he usually occupied when in town. Once they regrouped, however, Wright and the others started to follow, but when they saw the trail of blood on the stairs, they concluded that Wright had wounded Bowie mortally and left the hotel. What they saw in fact was blood from Bowie's mouth where the tooth came out.

  On examination, Bowie discovered just how lucky he had been, though the fiery pain in his jaw suggested otherwise. Wright's pistol was either too small or improperly loaded to inflict more than a painful wound. Moreover, the bullet may have been deflected by coins in his vest pocket, leaving little else than a very severe bruise and perhaps a fractured rib. It confined him to his room for a few days, but that was all. Out on the streets of Alexandria, Wright and his friends cooled down, and in any case sentiment ran against him for drawing and firing on a man who was initially unarmed. The Louisiana Messenger expressed one more time its outrage on the way men went about armed and so speedily resorted to dirks, knives, and pistols when anger exploded. Meanwhile, in his room at Bailey's, James Bowie nursed his pains and reflected bitterly on the unreliability of pistols and the fact that his cowardly foe lived only because the time it took to open his clasp knife with his teeth gave Wright's friends their opportunity. He resolved that he would never again lose those precious moments in a fight, nor would he allow his fondness for fine dress to leave him unarmed. He would make a leather scabbard for his hunting knife and keep it on his belt, and he told his brothers that he would “wear it as long as he lived.” Having skirted the periphery of violence for so long, even threatening it on others, at last Bowie felt it himself. If ever there was a next time, he would be ready.89

  7

  CROCKETT

  1829-1831

  All his friends admit that he is somewhat eccentric, and that from a deficit in education, his stump speeches are not famous for polish and refinement—yet they are plain, forcible and generally respectful.

  Jackson Gazette, AUGUST 15, 1829

  At least one thing remained constant in David's life: He had to borrow seven hundred dollars to settle his accounts and get home from Washington.1 At least some of the money he no doubt intended to apply to his reelection campaign, for no sooner did he set foot in Tennessee again than he took to the hustings, and this time somewhat on the defensive. He had failed to get his land bill through as he had boasted. Worse, the colleagues he had alienated in his own delegation now openly charged him with being the agent of the bill's death on the table. Somewhat disingenuously Crockett began trying to counter that charge with his constituents the very day of the tabling motion, sending an open letter for publication in which he argued that he had hoped that the death of the Polk version of the bill would have brought his colleagues around to his own. The fact was, of course, that events moved out of his control and left him looking very much like his own worst enemy, and by extension an enemy of the interests of the poor people of West Tennessee.2

  Moreover, the only real accomplishment of his term in Congress had been getting a new postal route established in his district, a small achievement at best.3 At least he did wisely keep his district advised of what he was doing, even when there was really nothing to tell, and in common with all representatives he took advantage of the free frank to send copies of his speeches—the printed, not spoken, versions—for circulation among his constituents.4 On arriving in Weakley County on March 15, he remained scarcely two weeks before setting off on an almost monthlong sweep through the district.5 Already the Polk forces sought to damage him with the same kind of ridicule used in the anonymous National Banner story about the Adams dinner, now hammering him for breaking with the convention of waiting to be asked to run. They ran in the Jackson press an announcement lampooning Crockett, over the signature of “Dennis Bruldrugery.” In it a caricature of Crockett nominates himself to run, since no one else would back him—which was true so far as the Jackson Democrats now were concerned. “I can offer without any solicitation, as many others do, and pretend that every body has persuaded them,” said the item. “I shall always find a set of veteran topers, who will sell both body and soul for good liquor. Let alone their votes.”6

  The prospect of a hard campaign did not daunt him in the least. Crockett was back on home soil now, among people whose ways he understood. Bolstered by the best health he had enjoyed in years, he thundered through the district day after day, his performances on the stump almost immediately forcing out one would-be opponent. That gave the Polk forces to understand that it would take a more concerted effort to beat him, and so they put up Pleasant Miller, a former U.S. representative and strong supporter of preemption rights for occupants on the vacant lands. But Miller almost immediately broke with them and with Jackson himself, and pulled out. John W. Cooke took Miller's place, and took full advantage of the ammunition no doubt put out by the Polk machine to paint Crockett as a man sleeping with the enemy and abandoning the interests of Tennessee. During one of their meetings on the stump, Crockett responded in kind by laying some heavy—and fictitious—charges against Cooke, who bristled and told the crowd he could prove Crockett a liar and would do so at their next meeting. When they appeared before a crowd again, Crockett saw the men Cooke had brought to refute his charges, and when he arose to speak first pointed out the witnesses and said Cooke really did not need to bring them, for he freely admitted that all his charges had been lies. “Fellow citizens, I did lie,” he said. “They told stories on me, and I wanted to show them, if it came to that, that I could tell a bigger lie than they could. Yes, fellow citizens, I can run faster, walk longer, leap higher, speak better, and tell more and bigger lies than my competitor, and all his friends, any day of his life.” The crowd roared with laughter and applause, and Cooke, both enraged and deflated, simply decided to drop out of the race, muttering that “if a man can get five hundred votes for telling a lie, and one thousand for acknowledging the fact, an honest man may well be off!”7

  By the middle of April, when Crockett visited Nashville, all three opponents had evaporated, and in their place, and no doubt at the urging of Polk and others, Colonel Alexander entered the lists once more. The prospect did not daunt Crockett, so inflated with his success thus far that he expected he would “back out” Alexander too, or else beat him by a five-thousand-vote majority. “So say the people,” he averred, an expression he sometimes used to mask his own expectations. Moreover, from the way Crockett freely used Polk's name in reference to the land bill, he made it clear that he felt his real opponent was not Alexander but Polk, and in mid-April in Huntington he forthrightly charged on the stump that Polk had presumed to speak and act for the district in spite of Crockett's being its elected representative, suggesting even that Alexander had been in collusion with him following his defeat by Crockett in 1827.8 Thou
gh James K. Polk was a man certainly not reluctant to scheme, Crockett always seemed to see conspiracy in any opposition, especially if it succeeded.

  This time he was right, however, for the Jackson forces, unquestionably led or abetted by Polk, Lea, and others, used every trick available. Besides the “Bruldrugery” lampoon, they sent the press fictitious letters from supposed district residents avowing a preference for Polk's version of the land bill. Going further, they slurred Crockett at every opportunity, and from the stump and in the broadsheets accused him of drunkenness, adultery, gambling, and worse—the same sort of charges apparently wielded by the hapless Cooke.9 Of course, when it came to rough-and-tumble campaigning, they were playing Crockett's game, as Cooke learned to his sorrow, and the more outlandish charges refused to stick.

  Crockett also wisely kept his attacks confined to Alexander and, by extension, his presumed managers like Polk. All the while he continued to campaign as an ardent supporter of Andrew Jackson himself, and there is little to suggest that Crockett was being disingenuous. All of his problems were with Polk, the Tennessee delegation, and the state legislature. He and Jackson had never crossed words, Old Hickory to date had done nothing to break faith with him, and Crockett saw a very clear distinction between attacking Jackson's machine and striking at Jackson himself. David Crockett grew to political awareness during the so-called Era of Good Feeling, when there were no real parties with national platforms, but only loose factions, often coalitions, centered around leaders. The loyalty was to a man, not a faction, and he did not recognize that now with the coalescence of many of those factions into a powerful new movement, things had changed. Loyalty to a leader was not enough. To survive, a politician must be loyal to the group as well, including swallowing some unpalatable men and ideas for the greater good of the whole.

  The growing discipline and organization of the Democrats gave them the White House in 1828, and very soon the Clay and Adams factions of the National Republicans, and anti-Jackson forces from the Democrats, would learn the lesson of that discipline by forming their own new party, soon to be called the Whigs. Just then the Jackson forces were trying their best to make Crockett an object lesson—the first in American politics—of the price to be paid for the sin of breaking ranks. Crockett seemingly felt no anger at Jackson for letting it happen, any more than he expected that Old Hickory held against him his dispute with Polk. In Crockett's mind his follower-leader relationship with Jackson was an altogether different issue from his split with the legislature and the congressional delegation of Jackson's own state. With almost childlike naïveté, he simply did not grasp that the two were inevitably a part of the same dynamic. Soon enough Jackson himself would show him that they were.

  As usual, Crockett charmed the people on the stump. There were the same pranks and jokes, the same speeches larded with peculiar expressions that brought a laugh. His awakening to religion—never sufficiently developed to be called a conversion or rebirth—made him the more attuned to the deep simple convictions of many of the people, and to their expectations of sobriety and reverence in their elected officials. One night a lay preacher read him the Twenty-third Psalm, with its resonant verses of shepherds, green pastures, and the valley of the shadow of death. Its reference to a table prepared “in the presence of mine enemies” may have struck Crockett as a particularly apt description of his position in the Democratic Party just then, for when he heard it he felt deeply moved. “He did not make a very good Christian of me, as you know,” David said afterward, “but he has wrought upon my mind a conviction of the truth of Christianity, and upon my feelings a reverence for its purifying and elevating power such as I had never before felt.”10

  Crockett seemed to know instinctively the right combination of backwoods persona and gentleman politician to adopt with his constituents, so that he always seemed respectable, as a statesman should be, yet never ceased to be quite recognizably one of them. When he appeared at a corn shucking at his friend James Blackburn's home, the crowd there saw “a fine gentleman” ride up, dressed in a good broad-cloth suit. But when he dismounted he took off his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and commenced shucking corn and kept at it until the call for dinner.11 As he put it himself, he needed to show his people that “Congress had not made me too proud to go to see them.” He always had several twists of tobacco in one saddlebag, though if his determination to give up liquor still held, the other bag may not have contained a jug as in days gone by. Sometimes he met with a constituent who put up an argument, or who had voted for him last time but broke with him now over the land bill or other matters. Crockett remonstrated politely and used every trick of cajolery to change his mind. Faced with one adamant voter, he realized that if “this man should go to talking he would set others to talking, and in that district I was a gone fawn-skin.” His solution was to admit his error in whatever the matter might be and confess it and his conversion in his stump speeches in that vicinity.12 The admission cost him little and may not necessarily have been disingenuous in every case, but it would have the effect of confining talk on the subject to that locality—or even of bringing it to a complete stop.

  Crockett even launched a modest counterattack against his real foes. In April he observed signs that Polk, Lea, and Marable might face stiff competition for reelection themselves, and it gave him joy. To pay them back for the trouble they sought to cause him, he made a brief trip through Marable's district, no doubt speaking on behalf of the challenger, Cave Johnson, and then visited Polk's district, where he boasted sarcastically that he had “done what little I could for him.” Of course to Polk and the others this only further confirmed Crockett's apostasy, and their conviction of his treason would have been cemented if they had known that during the campaign he corresponded with Gales and Seaton to keep them abreast of affairs in the Tennessee canvass. One additional matter he reported to them was his visit with Tennessee governor Sam Houston in Nashville on April 16, the very day that Houston resigned after a humiliating estrangement from his wife. The two were at least passingly acquainted already, and now Houston confided to Crockett that he intended to go west to the Arkansas Territory and live among the Cherokee who had raised him.13

  Crockett remained confident throughout the campaign. By late May he still expected to trounce Alexander by 5,000 votes, and though he proved to be over-optimistic, still the actual returns in August gave him 6,773 to Alexander's 3,641.14 Crockett quite rightly looked on it as a vindication of his behavior, and an utter repudiation of the Polk forces and their vindictive campaign against him. Certainly he looked, if anything, stronger than before. Two years earlier almost 12,000 men voted for the three candidates, and 49 percent of them went for Crockett. In 1829, however, there were 1,400 fewer voters, only two candidates, and yet David garnered 64 percent of the tally. While Alexander's count remained virtually the same, Crockett picked up nearly a thousand voters. News almost as good came when he learned that Johnson had beaten Marable, and that Pryor Lea's contest was so close that it required a recount, though Lea narrowly won in the end. Polk, however, handily held his seat. Thus, while Crockett seemed stronger than before, the polling wounded his enemies, not mortally to be sure, but enough to convince him that his was the true course as ratified by the people. The message seemed clear: He had but to continue in his honest, independent path, redouble his assaults on Polk and the rest, and he must surely prevail.

  There is no question that people—Whig and Democrat alike—kept an eye on this Tennessee race. In his district it was seen as a vindication of his essential decency and character. “All his friends admit that he is somewhat eccentric,” said his local press, “and that from a deficit in education, his stump speeches are not famous for polish and refinement—yet they are plain, forcible and generally respectful.”15 During the campaign, when Crockett called on Ephraim Foster, onetime private secretary to Jackson during the Creek War and now a legislator starting to drift toward the Whigs, he left the impression of “a pleasant, courteous
, and interesting man, who, though uneducated in books, was a man of fine instincts and intellect, and entertained a laudable ambition to make his mark in the world.” Foster's son recalled on those visits that “he was a man of a high sense of honor, of good morals, not intemperate, nor a gambler. I never saw him attired in a garb that could be regarded as differing from that worn by gentlemen of his day.”16

  Crockett's election attracted sufficient nationwide notice that two years later it was still being spoken of when Tocqueville came to the United States. “Two years ago the inhabitants of the district of which Memphis is the capital sent to the House of Representatives in Congress an individual named David Crockett,” he wrote, “who has no education, can read with difficulty, has no property, no fixed residence, but passes his life hunting, selling his game to live, and dwelling continuously in the woods.”17 Yet the image Tocqueville depicted was misshapen, elements of truth exaggerated into fiction. Crockett had some education, he certainly could read, and he had both property and a fixed residence. As for dwelling in the woods and selling pelts to live, his days of the long hunt were over and had been for several years when the Frenchman wrote in 1831. Clearly the people who talked to that foreign visitor told him of a different David Crockett than the man in the broadcloth suit who proved himself a competent legislator in Murfreesboro, ran—or at least owned—a gristmill in Weakley County, and managed, however foolishly, to stymie even the powerful forces of Polk.