Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  Something beyond his control was happening to Crockett. In January 1829 William Moncrieff brought out a new play called Monsieur Mallett; or, My Daughter's Letter. Its most memorable character was Jeremiah Kentucky, portrayed to great popularity by the actor James Hackett. Moncrieff wrote the character in 1828, describing a bold, bragging frontiersman, a dynamic stump speaker and a U.S. representative, and of course “half-horse, half-alligator, with a touch of the steamboat, and a small taste of the snapping turtle.”18 At the time of writing Moncrieff may not even have known of Crockett or had him in mind. More likely he was influenced by the earlier tales of John Wesley Jarvis, who wrote stories of outlandish frontiersmen for popular amusement, and to feed the growing appetite for western characters. That same appetite accounted for the success of Moncrieff's play, which only whetted the public's taste for more. But then the distant reports in the South and the East and elsewhere of the stump campaign out in West Tennessee began striking a resonant chord. Perhaps there was more to Hackett's character than acting. A real, live Jeremiah Kentucky appeared to be stumping the canebrakes out there, a man who could feed the American hunger for its own distinctive character not on the theater boards but on the living stage of the world.

  Real life of another kind faced Crockett after his election. The months before the first session of the new Congress were filled with the usual round of acting as witness in petty civil matters at the Weakley court and fighting his own perpetual battle with debt. Three suits from creditors sat on the docket that fall, none of them resolved. Moreover, the gristmill seemed not to be working, and the marriage with Elizabeth was definitely breaking down. Once again the departure for Washington must have come as a relief, especially since for Crockett it amounted to a triumphal return after his defeat of the Polk forces.19 Now if only he could take that victory march to the House floor and carry the land bill with him.

  Typically Crockett wasted little time and went about his task the only way he knew how, head-on. The Twenty-first Congress convened on December 7, 1829, and through the entire course of the session Crockett struggled and maneuvered. At first he succeeded in getting the land bill removed from the Public Lands Committee, headed by Polk, and referred instead to a special committee that Crockett himself chaired, something he could not have achieved without the votes of the anti-Jacksonians in the House. The move to put Crockett in a position on the committee superior to Polk was obviously designed further to embarrass the squabbling Democrats. Crockett's committee debated for several weeks before it reported a revised version of the bill in January 1830, and meanwhile the Tennessee delegation's internecine fighting continued almost daily on the House floor as David tried repeatedly to get his original bill off the table for discussion, only to fail. Polk himself may have realized that he and his followers were going too far, and backed off slightly in the tenor of his opposition in order not to give the appearance that this whole business was no longer about the vacant land but about punishing Crockett. But it was too late for that, as almost every observer realized what really lay at the root of the argument: The fight over the bill had taken on a life of its own, becoming more important than the bill itself.20

  The revised bill that Crockett reported out of his committee made concessions he had been unwilling to countenance before, showing that he may have begun to realize the value of half loaves and compromise. They proposed to guarantee to the state enough of the vacant land to sell at a minimum of twelve and one-half cents per acre to make up the deficiency in the common-school fund. Those already occupying and improving squats would receive a preemption right for 160 acres at the same cost per acre, but with one year's credit to raise the money. And, perhaps most galling of all, the bill would recognize the claims of North Carolina warrant holders, even though it risked the displacement of not a few current occupants. Crockett made no secret of his disappointment in the final draft. “This is the Best provision I could make for the occupants placed as I was in the powar of a majority of the Committee against me,” he told his friends. “I was compeld to put up a claim and urge the propriety of it.” At least he believed that whole Tennessee delegation now backed the revised bill, with a fair chance of its passage. Still there was a note of sadness and defeat in his admission to his constituents that “this is the best that I could do for them.”21 Even then his foes in the Polk camp put out the story that Crockett tampered with the wording of the bill between what the committee agreed upon, and the final printed version.22

  In the end it was not enough. Discussion on the bill was postponed in April, and on May 3 it met defeat by 90 to 69. Crockett immediately moved for reconsideration, suggesting a revision of the occupants' terms, but in the process he almost alienated North Carolina's representatives by attacking their state's motives. In the end he was fortunate not to see his motion for reconsideration defeated but only laid on the table, where it would have to wait for the fall session. Yet the support of his delegation evaporated. In the tabling motion, only Cave Johnson stood with Crockett in opposition. It was a sobering conclusion, and Crockett wasted no time in letting his constituents know what had happened—and why, as he saw it. On May 7 he sent an open letter to the Jackson Gazette and made it clear that henceforth he declared his independence from the Tennessee delegation entirely. He would “set up shop” on his own.23

  Adding to his discomfiture, Crockett found his voice to be without influence on other matters of importance to him. One of the things that he shared with Henry Clay was an advocacy—though more restrained—of internal improvements, of the judicious expenditure of federal money on roads and canals to encourage interstate commerce, though like so many others he was really only interested in improvements that might benefit his own region. Crockett supported the bill for a National Road from Washington to New Orleans, proposing an amendment that it should terminate instead at Memphis in his own district, so that his constituents could “come in for snacks” at the pork barrel, but the House rejected his amendment and the bill.24 And when Jackson rejected a bill to build the Maysville Road in Kentucky, Crockett vainly voted to override a veto clearly aimed as a partisan blow at Clay. Though David's commitment to internal improvements was only lukewarm at best, it is not hard to see in the override his own reproach to Jackson for denying the will of the House. Moreover, Crockett seems not to have recognized the nuance in the president's position on improvements. Before his election Jackson favored them so long as they were chiefly for defense. Now, however, he had to reduce the national debt, and any expense not vital to security only deepened the nation's deficit. Crockett could see only that Old Hickory had reneged, assuming he had lied in order to curry votes.

  Crockett also did not understand the vital interconnection between internal improvements and the tariff, for it was tariff revenue that chiefly financed the government.25 He even proposed the abolition of the Military Academy at West Point because it, like the rest of the government, was funded chiefly by tariffs levied on goods that the poor like him had no alternative but to buy. Since only the sons of the wealthy and influential seemed to secure appointments to the academy, he charged that the tariff was a means to “pick the pockets of the poor to educate the sons of the rich.”26 Yet in supporting tariff-funded internal improvements, in effect he contradicted his own tariff position, which can only be interpreted as spiting himself to strike at Jackson. In March he had reaffirmed his support for the president: “To GEN JACKSON I am a firm and undeviating friend,” he declared. “I have fought under his command—and am proud to own that he has been my commander. I have loved him, and in the sincerity of my heart I say that I still love ‘him’; but to be compelled to love every one who for purposes of self-aggrandizement pretend to rally round the ‘Jackson Standard,’ is what I never can submit to. The people of this country, like the humble boatsman on the Mississippi, ought to begin to look out for Breakers!” he warned. “The fox is about: let the roost be guarded.”27 This last was a thinly veiled reference to the new secretary of state, M
artin Van Buren, the “fox.” Crockett detested the slick, pragmatic, cynical machine politician for whom winning an election justified any means. Now he held the cabinet position widely regarded as the last step before the presidency. At every turn since taking office, Jackson had dug the bedrock of Crockett's support from beneath his feet. By May and the vote on the veto override, Crockett no longer stood apart just from the leaders in Jackson's party. Now he labored in the throes of a break with Jackson himself, and feeling with it all the hurt, disillusionment, and even betrayal of a deceived lover.28 And like a suitor spurned, his pain slowly began to turn to resentment and then anger.

  It flared the brighter over Jackson's Indian Removal Bill, introduced on February 24. Crockett took no part in the debate on the issue, which proposed appropriating five hundred thousand dollars for the relocation west of the Mississippi River of several of the peaceful tribes from Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and Georgia. Crockett said not a word on it during the debate when it began on May 15, though by now his disillusionment with Jackson was well under way. The Clay forces savaged the bill and nearly defeated it, yet when it came to a vote on May 24 it passed by the narrow margin of 102 to 97. Crockett was the only man in his delegation to vote against the bill, standing alone now against his colleagues and his president, and even, as he well knew, against the wishes of many of his constituents, who viewed the Cherokee and allied tribes as a menace, and their tribal lands as fair game for squatter settlement.

  In fact the Indian Bill was so controversial that many a representative felt compelled to explain his vote, especially the several Democrats who opposed it, and Crockett was no exception, yet what he issued amounted more to a capsule biography and a vindication of his career. Quite possibly with the assistance of some of his new anti-Jackson friends, especially Gales and Seaton, Crockett penned a defense that showed very definite signs of being aimed at eastern opposition men as much as his own constituents. Granting that he knew no one within five hundred miles of his home who agreed with his vote, he justified it on the basis that the bill gave Jackson half a million dollars with no oversight or accountability. Moreover, in contrast to most of his constituents, he felt sympathy for “the poor remnants of a once powerful people” now being forced from their homes. However warlike the Creek and allied tribes may have been, as he well knew, those who survived were largely of the peaceful factions; and the Chickasaw of northern Mississippi and Alabama, who bordered his district, had always been the pacific friends of the white man and in treaty after treaty made way without violent complaint for the advance of American settlement. His conscience demanded that he stand for the right, even if it pitted him against his constituents, he said. He even appealed to a higher law and repeatedly proclaimed that though he stood in defiance of White House, Congress, and constituents, he could do naught else, because what he did was right. Someone, probably Crockett himself, sent a copy to the Jackson Gazette, hoping at least that it might contain the damage his vote would do him there. Significantly the copy indicated that Crockett delivered the speech in the House on May 24, the day of the vote. Within a few months it also appeared in a compilation of Indian Bill speeches published in Boston, but this time dated as if delivered on May 19.

  He never gave the speech at all, however. From first to last it was an obvious attempt to mollify his voters on the one hand and on the other to appeal to the Democrats, chiefly in the North, who voted in opposition with him. Some of them could be useful when his land bill came up again in the next session. And it cannot be denied that Crockett's vote, and naturally his apologia, would enhance his standing with those who seemed to be his true friends now, the embryonic Whigs. Besides all the political implications of the business, he also seems to have felt some genuine sympathy for the plight of the Indians. After all, he knew their situation: poor, despised, friendless, and now to be landless. The Indian Bill would do to them what the North Carolina warrants did to the Tennessee squatters, and while he undoubtedly entertained all the prejudices of his time and place, he could never fail to empathize with anyone who was poor, downtrodden, and helpless. That was in the simple generosity of his nature, one of those kinder elements that led so many to see in him a “natural” gentleman.29 Ever the egalitarian, David refused to countenance that one class enjoyed more entitlement than another.30

  Crockett was starting to find himself a growing celebrity in this session. His notoriety as an outspoken foe of the Jackson machines, in spite of his protestations of support for Old Hickory himself, made him an object of interest. In addition, as Jackson now revealed sides of his personality and attitudes unseen prior to this election, an increasing number of his old followers crossed the aisle to side with the Adams and Clay people in a new coalition. Crockett did not publicly proclaim a new allegiance, and of course he would have maintained in any case that he paid homage to no party, but people now widely saw him as having crossed the aisle as well. When he spoke the galleries in the House responded. “Crockett was then the lion of Washington,” said a man who listened to him speak against a relief bill for the widow of war hero Stephen Decatur. “I was fascinated with him.” Callers at Mrs. Ball's, where he continued to lodge, were likely to find him writing or franking large piles of letters as his correspondence grew.31“To return from the capitol without having seen Col. Crockett, betrayed a total destitution of curiosity,” proclaimed an 1831 newspaper, “and a perfect insensibility to the Lions of the West.”32 Something in the attention actually seemed to buoy him. Always preoccupied with his health, he felt better during this session than he had for some time.

  When Crockett went home at the recess, his Clay associations became increasingly apparent, just as the antiadministration forces showed growing awareness of his potential. For more than two years now he had enjoyed some acquaintance with Matthew St. Clair Clarke. There was nothing at all unusual or unseemly about it, for as clerk of the House, Clarke knew every one of the members. That he had close Clay-Adams connections meant nothing in itself. Outside the House debates, members of all sides freely and cordially enjoyed one another's company. Still, for nearly a year now Crockett had been close enough to Clarke to send regards to him when writing to Clarke's friends, so the acquaintance was growing, and Clarke was close to Gales and Seaton and other antiadministration men, and especially to Nicholas Biddle, president of the federally chartered Second Bank of the United States.33 Then, too, Bowie's old nemesis Sen. Josiah S. Johnston watched Crockett's progress in Washington with interest. Johnston, as thorough an adherent as Henry Clay ever had, paid particular mind to David's modest break with Jackson on internal improvements. During the summer he proposed to Clay that if Tennessee governor William Carroll, who also appeared to be a possible convert, and Jackson's foe former senator John Williams, could be united with Crockett to advocate internal improvements and Clay's protective tariff, “they may shake the state.”34 Getting any state behind Clay boded well for his so-called “American System” and his own presidential prospects in 1832, but getting Jackson's own home state to break with him on policy would be trebly damaging. Johnston undoubtedly met Crockett during the sessions, though nothing suggests that they became friends or that he made any special attempts to woo him. Interestingly, though, Johnston did have dealings and an acquaintance in 1830 with a Philadelphia publisher named Edward Carey, who took a special interest in books by and about public men.35

  Crockett returned for the second session by traveling overland, through Nashville and Knoxville, the Cumberland Gap, and north down the Shenandoah. He stopped along the way staying chiefly with anti-Jacksonian hosts, itself a sign of where he felt comfortable now.36 In Staunton, Virginia, he visited with Henry McClung, a friend of Houston's and himself an outspoken Adams-Clay man. No doubt they talked of the sad downturn in Houston's fortunes, and certainly money came up, for Crockett had to borrow five dollars to get him on his journey to Washington. Yet they also talked politics, and especially the “State of party” as Crockett called it. With all the
realignment of the Clay and Adams factions, now being joined by disillusioned Jacksonians, Crockett believed that the forces backing Clay stood virtually even with Old Hickory's. He may not have said that he counted himself now as actually anti-Jackson the president, but his break with the Jacksonians was clear. It only awaited a real test in Congress to see where the strength lay.37

  Crockett missed the opening of the session by a week and might as well have missed the whole sitting. In the first three weeks he tried twice to get the House to reconsider the land bill tabled in the last session and failed both times, though only by 92 to 89 on the second attempt. The forces did appear evenly divided now, for a shift of only two votes would have given him a majority (91 to 90). Crockett found hope in the narrow loss. Just hours later he predicted that “I do believe I will be able to get it up and pass it in spite of all their opposition before I leave here.”38 Meanwhile, all around him he saw change that looked more and more like the work of Jackson himself, prodded by the evil genius of Van Buren. When the Cherokee mounted a challenge to the Indian Bill in the Supreme Court, Jackson forces got up a bill to repeal part of the 1789 Judiciary Act so that the Court could not actually sit on the matter. Such tampering with the basic law of the land, and the balance of power, incensed Crockett. For the first time he now actually believed that he perceived Jackson himself behind the maneuvering, and moreover that it appeared to be a movement toward personal aggrandizement, a reach for dictatorial authority. “This is what we call going the whole hogg to nullify the whole powar of the Supreme Court of the united states,” Crockett fumed. “I do believe it is a political manuver of this adminestration,” he said, “which will destroy the whole powar of the genl government.” If that happened, he warned a friend, “thin we are no more a united states.” He believed that secession and even civil war could follow.39