Constituents had suggested the idea to him again and again during the canvass. He resented the farcical caricature of the Clarke Life, and grew weary of meeting people for the first time to find them amazed, as he put it, “at finding me in human shape, and with the countenance, appearance, and common feelings of a human being.”35 Moreover, by the time Clarke's Life came out again as Sketches, Crockett fully realized the income someone else was making on his story. “Justice demands of me to make a statement of facts to the american people,” he told a friend. “I consider no man on earth able to give a true history of my life.”36 Being largely the beneficiary of a false image, he wanted now to straighten the mirror, to give a truer reflection of himself. Crockett arrived in Washington a week before the first gavel, and may have been surprised to find that even people who knew him seemed not to recognize him. On the Capitol steps he encountered John Quincy Adams, now a representative like himself, and he had to identify himself to Adams before the ex-president knew who he was, even though Crockett had dined at his table in the White House but a few years before. When Adams congratulated him on his election, Crockett revealed just how much he appreciated the power of public information and opinion. His first call had been on Joseph Gales, urging him to announce his arrival in the city, and to publicize his address at Mrs. Ball's. Moreover, Crockett told Adams that he was going to share his rooms now with “Major Jack Downing, the only person in whom he had any confidence for information of what the Government was doing.”37 Within only a few days, Crockett went to the Washington Theater to see The Lion of the West for himself, with Hackett as Nimrod Wildfire, and when the audience learned that he was present, Crockett stood for a bow and applause alongside the actor.38 The influence of the Downing letters that he was reading, and the presentation of Paulding's play, was powerful. Moreover, while Crockett rejected the Clarke book's caricature, he openly chose to associate himself with Nimrod Wildfire by accepting bows with Hackett. Wildfire was eccentric, to be sure, but he stopped short of lampoon, and the audience's reaction to the character was not lost on David.
He took all this back to his rooms with him as he worked on his memoir. People who called on him in Washington that season found a man who “rarely, if ever, exhibited either in conversation or manner, attributes of coarseness of character that prevailing popular opinion very unjustly assigned to him,” said the noted painter John Chapman. “There was an earnestness of truth in his narrations of events, and circumstances of his adventurous life, that made it obvious,” Chapman continued, “and with all gentle and sympathetic play of features, telegraphing, as it were, directly from the true heart, overflowing with kind feeling and impulse, irresistibly dispelled suspicion of insincerity and braggartism.”39 But that was not the Crockett that the public wanted, and so he consciously decided to caricature himself just enough to suit popular taste, without offending his own. He would exaggerate his stories somewhat, use understatement and in some cases even fabrications and omissions, to mold his own image.
The appeal of the vernacular in the Downing letters impressed him with the need to consider the style of his writing as well as his substance, and he already had an impetus to try a hand at that kind of writing when Smith addressed that Downing letter to him after his election. Crockett had actually written a reply for the press in which he agreed to publish his observations on Washington, and moreover said he would write them in dialect to give them an appearance of “authenticity,” as he put it, though Crockett had gone on to joke that, of course, a backwoods vernacular was foreign to him.40
Nothing could have been more distant from the truth. In breaking down the old social distinctions, observed Tocqueville, “the continual restlessness of a democracy leads to endless change of language as of all else.” New words came into usage and old ones went out. “Democracies like movement for its own sake,” he believed, and that went for language as well as politics. “Even when there is no need to change words, they do so because they want to.” They used words indiscriminately. “The rules of style are almost destroyed,” the Frenchman saw, but though he would have abhorred such chaos in his own language, he saw it as rather charming in America. “Hardly any expressions seem, by their nature, vulgar, and hardly any seem refined.” Writing at the same time that Crockett began his composition, Tocqueville could have been describing the Tennessean himself when he went on to say that “individuals from different strata of society have brought along with them, to whatever station they may have risen, the expressions and phrases they were accustomed to use; the origin of words is as much forgotten as that of men, and language is in as much confusion as society.”41
Crockett had to be blind and deaf not to grasp the appeal of that sort of style. Almanacs, dramas, newspapers, traveling performers—all exploded into this new idiom by now. Anxious for their own distinctive characters and literature, American writers and readers wanted their own language as well. Having no native tongue, they turned American English into something new by their spellings, which represented back-woods pronunciation and idioms. Already publishers issued glossaries of “Americanisms,” virtual dictionaries of American English.42
Crockett had a few other aids as he contemplated his task. One of the books he owned was Franklin's Autobiography.43 Of course Franklin wrote without dialect, but in his story of a poor boy making good through humility, hard work, ingenuity, and honesty, Crockett could see a framework for his own book. If he needed help with the actualcomposition, his friend Thomas Chilton lived at Mrs. Ball's as well, and he was an experienced writer. The effect of the whole enterprise should be to present himself as he thought the public ought to see him, “as I really am, a plain, blunt, Western man, relying on honesty and the woods, and not on learning and law, for a living.”44 But already he was a bit disingenuous, for Crockett intended the work to be a commercial success and thus shaped himself to suit the popular appetite. For a man whose image rested heavily on the notion of his ignorance, David Crockett proposed to undertake a truly intimidating task. Having decided that he wanted to do it, however, he had to “go ahead.”
He worked steadily at his desk, and by early January 1834 was already well into the book. He expected to finish by the first week of February, promising friends a book that would be “just like myself, a plain and singular production.” He also believed it would be amusing, but most of all he knew it would sell. That, and repudiating the Clarke Life, occupied his mind uppermost. “I am poor,” he wrote a friend, “with a large family; and as the world seem anxious for the work, I know they would want me to have the profits of it.” He sent letters, some written for him by Chilton, to several cities to solicit interest from publishers for the copyright to the book, asking friends to “get your book-sellers and book-printers to send me their propositions.” By January 9 he already had several on his desk, but wisely he shopped around for the best offer.45
The work went quickly, though Crockett found himself busy enough with the affairs of the House. Still, he could miss a session from time to time, and must have worked many a long evening with his pen. He seemed preoccupied with the book's length, at first wanting it to run to 150 published pages, and then changing his mind and striving for 200 or more. The actual story he confined to little more than fifty thousand words, but still, unpracticed as he was at narrative writing, he must have taken two full months to complete the task, meaning he might have started as soon as he reached Washington. Throughout the writing he kept friends informed of his progress, expressing the hope that his book “may be of little prophit to me.” Once he started, he found that it went faster than expected, and moreover that he felt some natural flair for the work, with the result that by mid-January he revised his deadline and expected to finish in another ten days.46
When done with the manuscript, Crockett may not have realized exactly what he had achieved. To be sure, he had told his story. Pretending not to understand why the public so wanted to know about his life, he set about casting himself as almost the perfect d
elineation of the people's notion of the western common man. He grew out of poverty thanks to some inner strength of character that had nothing to do with the wealth and position of the East. He dwelled on his youthful hardship and determination, on overcoming one obstacle after another. He gave a third of the book to his life before the Creek War, presenting an unending portrait of confrontation with adversity. Another fourth of the book described the war itself, for the frontiers-man had to be a military man, and there more than anywhere else he bent the truth. He said nothing about having risen above the rank of private. The common man should not be an officer, even in the non-commissioned ranks. He included fabricated accounts of the Battles of Emuckfau Creek and Enotachopco Creek, and said he missed the climactic Battle of Horseshoe Bend while on furlough, when in fact he missed them all when he was between his two enlistments, for the yeoman volunteer must not be safely at home when his fellows met the foe in action. In describing the mutiny of some volunteers that Jackson put down, Crockett included himself among the mutineers, even though he was home at the time. Yet it served his purpose to show himself standing up against Old Hickory even in youth.
Another third of the book he gave over mainly to his long hunts and adventures between the war and his first election to Congress. But then his entire service of two terms in the House of Representatives received only one long paragraph, and not surprisingly since he had nothing to show for it and had achieved nothing for his constituents. The less said about his inept land bill management the better. Instead he simply presented himself in the pose he liked best, the lone warrior standing up against the evil combinations of Jackson and his henchmen. He finished writing on January 28 with a brief account of his recent election victory, and proclaimed that he was still a free man, ready to vote his conscience, and no tool of any party. “Look at my arms, you will find no party hand-cuff on them!” he declared, and then unable to resist his favorite invention, he wrote, “look at my neck, you will not find there any collar, with the engraving MY DOG. Andrew Jackson.”47
To be sure, he filled the book with current political allusions, disparaging and often strained puns and comments about Jackson and his cronies, and more than a few thinly veiled indications of his interest in the presidency. But he went far beyond this. This was America's first western autobiography, no figment of a writer's imagination, but essentially the real story of a real man. Unlike Seba Smith and Clarke and Paulding, all easterners, he did not have to strain and resort to caricature to write in the genuine vernacular, because he was himself the genuine article. Certainly he included phrases and folk expressions that did not originate with him—a few may have been borrowed from Clarke, who borrowed them from Paulding—but if not, still they were the sayings of his people, real even if exaggerated. Moreover, he wrote as he and the western people spoke, spelling phonetically just as he did in his private correspondence, with only a little exaggeration for effect. Throughout he made it evident that he wanted to be seen as a character, not a clown. What he succeeded in doing was capturing on paper the essence of the new national personality. By the illustration of himself in two hundred pages, he achieved what Tocqueville took two volumes to accomplish.
He gave everyone what they wanted: The East got a legitimate representation of the literary figure that so fascinated them, while the West got the pride and attention it craved, manifest in the story of one westerner who mirrored them all and rose to become a national figure without compromising their dearly cherished simple values. He took Franklin's Autobiography and moved it west, placed it in the new language of the new generation of Americans, mixed genuine events with the popular culture of current literature, and created a wholly fresh character in native literature, part man, part legend. And he did it with a species of ironic, self-deprecating wit that combined political satire with broad—but never bawdy—tavern-room storytelling. Regardless of how much of his wit originated with him and how much he simply absorbed from the people of his region, the fact that he set it down so effectively in his book was destined to have a profound effect on American humor. Amusing as they were, the exaggerated portraits of Smith and Clarke and Paulding and others were destined to last only as folklore, while their idiom itself would die in a generation as tastes changed. But Crockett's humor would last indefinitely, long after the public craze for the man himself waned, and take a prominent place in the evolution of distinctive American humor, and all for the simple reason that it was genuinely funny.48
On February 2 he got the offer he was looking for from the firm of Carey and Hart of Philadelphia, and he wasted no time in accepting the next day. Perhaps from overwork in the rush to finish the book, or maybe a recurrence of the old malaria, Crockett found himself almost incapacitated when he received their January 31 offer. Indeed, he had to have his friend Chilton draft his reply, as the Kentuckian did much of Crockett's correspondence during his illness. Like all first-time authors, he had no idea of the author-publisher relationship, confessing: “I am too ignorant of the business of printing, to pretend to give you any instructions about the manner of executing it.” But he then went on immediately to specify that the type must be large, with good leading and margins, in order to stretch the text to that seemingly magical two hundred pages or more. Chilton went over the manuscript for him making some corrections, and the final draft that Crockett sent to Carey and Hart was entirely in Chilton's hand, but Crockett insisted that the editors were not to change either spelling or grammar, “as I make no literary pretension.” Equally to the point, though unsaid, he realized that the book needed at least a little of the quaint spelling and speech of his people in order to appeal to the public demand. Moreover, if the publishers cleaned up his text, then it would not be him speaking. He already had the copyright, and sent that off along with his only copy of the manuscript.49
From the moment he heard of the publishers' offer, Crockett suffered the anxiety and impatience of the new author. Indeed, in his letter of acceptance he already began to ask earnestly when he would get his printed copies. Of course, part of his anxiety was purely monetary. He knew hundreds wanted to buy this book. A dealer in Louisville told him that over five hundred copies of the Clarke “counterfeit” had sold there, and Crockett felt those sales should have been his. He believed he could sell five hundred to the trade in Washington on his own. Moreover, even before having a signed contract—if there was one—he began calculating his receipts. He demanded copies of the printing and binding bills so he could estimate what the gross margin per copy would be, and received from Carey and Hart the generous offer of 62.5 percent of that margin as his share. He urged them to keep the manufacturing cost of the book low, so that the margin would be high. This new book was more than literature or vindication—it was income desperately needed.50
Further, Crockett could not in conscience take all of that promised percentage, making it the more important to him personally that the profits be high. Chilton gave him a lot more assistance than just copying the manuscript and correcting some errors and omissions. He helped some with the structure, “to clarify the matter,” as Crockett put it, though the style remained entirely David's own. Chilton also owned half of the copyright that Crockett sent with the manuscript, meaning that David most probably had sold a half interest in the proceeds of the book in return for Chilton's assistance, and quite probably some much needed cash in hand. Crockett now insisted that the publishers amend their agreement to guarantee Chilton a full half share in the royalties that would be due. In a revelation of just how sensitive David felt about anyone else being seen to speak on his behalf to the public, however, he also made certain that Chilton's name was not to appear anywhere in the book.51
With the good sense to promote his work before it appeared, Crockett wrote a preface to tease readers' interest and gave it to the press in February, and Carey and Hart, with the good sense to strike while interest soared, rushed the manuscript through press. In fact, within hours of receiving Crockett's acceptance of their offer, t
he publishers issued an advertising broadside on February 7 announcing that “it may interest the friends of this genuine Son of the West to learn, that he has lately completed, with his own hand, a narrative of his life and adventures, and that the work will shortly be published.”52 Apparently in the interest of time they bypassed the customary procedure of having Crockett read galley proofs to catch errors, but it may have been because they made changes they did not want him to see. There were not quite enough of his natural misspellings, and so they added some more. At the same time they toned down some of his account of the slaughter of the Creek women and children at Tallusahatchee in 1813, perhaps anxious not to allow Crockett to seem too violent or blood-thirsty. Carey and Hart may even have run the manuscript by some leading Whigs such as Sen. Thomas Ewing of Ohio, or Biddle, to get their views on changes or additions that might further the book's utility as a campaign biography, for that it certainly was in addition to everything else. If the Whigs did run Crockett against Van Buren in 1836, this book could be a major weapon in the fight.53
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