American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett

by Buddy Levy

  The union also marked the development of a kind of split personality in Crockett, a conscious construction of the dual nature of his persona. He understood that it was the bear hunter from the canebrakes who managed to get elected, but Crockett felt the tug of the gentry, the need to be accepted by his peers, and, ironically he wanted to be like the very people he despised and criticized. Chilton’s assistance in the formal writing refined Crockett’s voice, grammar, punctuation, and spelling, smoothing out his rough edges, at least superficially.

  It isn’t difficult to understand why Crockett would have felt compelled to appear slightly more refined, given the company he was keeping. Among these was Duff Green, an eclectic renaissance man (variously a surveyor of public lands, a lawyer, and an editor and publisher) who had purchased the United States Telegraph in 1825, was politically well-connected and powerful, and was increasingly chummy with John C. Calhoun of South Carolina (Calhoun’s son would eventually marry Green’s daughter).20 Green had recently been appointed public printer, a position awarded by the House, replacing Joseph Gales, who returned to his post as publisher the Washington National Intelligencer. Joseph Gales and his partner William Winston Seaton were brothers-in-law and enemies of the Jacksonians, and on Crockett’s arrival in Washington, still spewing party rhetoric, he had called them “treasury pap Sucking” editors. Crockett wrote this lovely epithet to a friend before he had ever met the men, and he would later get to know both Gales and Seaton well; Seaton referred kindly to Crockett as an “odd but warm-hearted old pioneer.”21

  Seaton, like Chilton, tightened and edited Crockett’s speeches for publication in Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates in Congress. The Clerk of the House at this time was the recently reelected Matthew St. Clair Clarke of Pennsylvania, with whom Crockett also struck up an acquaintance. And finally there was James Polk, an aggressive Presbyterian delegate and a remarkably quick learner with an uncanny knack for the legislative process and the intricacies of political posturing.22 Crockett had no way of knowing, of course, that his contemporary and fellow delegate would rise to greatness, eventually to be elected governor of Tennessee, Speaker of the House, and ultimately President of the United States, and earning the nickname “Young Hickory.” For now, he was simply someone to squabble with over the land bill.

  And squabble they would. Initially, the views of the two men were somewhat in concert concerning public lands, and in fact Crockett was a member of a select committee, chaired by Polk, formed to deal with the state of Tennessee’s request to cede lands in the Western District to the state, which would inject any profits from their sale into “common schools” rather than colleges or universities. Crockett stood behind this notion, especially regarding common schools over universities; he contended that the children of West Tennessee farmers and squatters would be unlikely ever to tromp their muddy work boots inside a university.23 Crockett believed that should the vacant lands ultimately be offered up and sold, it would be at prices the poor squatters might be able to afford. He soon came to understand that the state had other intentions, as did other members of Congress.

  On April 24, after Polk debated the issue within the committee and had done some independent research as to the relative worth of the vacant Tennessee lands, he rose to speak for the bill when the House finally agreed to open up discussion on it. Polk’s position was concise and simple: the state of Tennessee had been shorted significant public lands—the so-called “set aside” lands left over from the 444,000 acres provided for when it seceded from North Carolina in 1806. The infamous North Carolina warrants claimed all but 22,000 acres, and the bulk of what was claimed was the best available ground. It wasn’t fair, Polk argued.24 Crockett offered an enthusiastic second, adding that much of the remaining ground was low-lying, prone to flooding, and so thickly timbered as to render it devoid of worth. “The low ground or bottoms, contiguous to the streams in this western division, are frequently from one to two miles in with; but an important reason why they neither are, nor can be, valuable, is . . . that they are usually inundated. This I know to be fact personally, having often rowed a canoe from hill to hill.”25 Some heated discussion ensued, Polk essentially deferring to Crockett and allowing him the limelight on the issue. Crockett concluded emphatically and with a touch of emotion: “The rich require but little legislation. We should, at least occasionally, legislate for the poor.”26 His appeal was that the bill would finally allow these poor farmers to own their own property, the squatters being a class of people that Crockett felt should be compensated for their courage. Crockett considered squatters “the pioneering advance guard of the American nation . . . that in return for their services they were entitled to the plot of land which they had improved, and on which they made their homes.”27

  However eloquent his entreaties, they fell on the deaf ears of the Adamsites, who on May 1 managed to get the bill tabled until the second session, which would not begin until the following December. They feared making special provisions for Tennessee, and wondered if it might create a domino effect, with other states falling in behind. Crockett was indignant, insulted, and frustrated with the pace of the process. On May 10 he tried a different tactic, requesting that the Committee on Public Lands ponder donating 160 acres to each and every settler in the Western District, including improvements made upon the land. It was a bold, if last-ditch, attempt, but again Crockett was skirted, as the session adjourned without addressing his suggestion.28

  The emotional malaise of Crockett’s failure to get movement in Congress was compounded by his physical maladies, which had returned during the session on at least three occasions. Neither he nor the doctors who attended him could have known that the illness they diagnosed as “pluricy” (pleurisy) was actually malarial relapse, coupled with probable pneumonia, and to counter it they “took two quarts of blood” from him, diminishing his condition even more. He felt so ill and weak that he remained in Washington City after the close of the session, trying to recover for the journey home.

  When he finally did make it home, he was met with the wrath of a wife now worn threadbare by taking care of literally everything—from the mundane domestic duties to the more complex and tedious bookwork and business affairs—without a stitch of help from her husband. To make matters worse, though he was fairly well compensated in his job at around $8 per day, he arrived back in Gibson County nearly penniless, having paid a $250 debt to Marcus Winchester. Debt would never be a stranger to Crockett, and he immediately had to borrow more money when he sold his Gibson County place to finance a newer, bigger spread to the north, in Weakley County, and hired men to fabricate a new gristmill, this one run by horse-power.29 Crockett spent the remainder of the summer and fall on these projects and others necessary to move his family into the new place and get it and the 225 acres up and running. There remained little time for hunting, and he idled at the new farmstead, Elizabeth all the while tongue-lashing him for his drinking and poor business acumen, which she attributed to his lack of religious conviction. Crockett must have slunk around the place like a scolded dog with his tail between his legs, promising her he would try to improve himself, because by the time the second session came around on December 1, 1828, Crockett was a man with new convictions. Actually, he was a week late, arriving December 8, the beginning of the second week.30 His tardiness remained unexplained, though he certainly could have been detained visiting relatives and stopping to see friends in Nashville along the way. At any rate, Crockett intimated in a letter to George Patton that he was going to mend some of his ways, including swearing off spirits stronger than cider, and even making allusions, however vague, to religious conviction. He would need all the strength he could muster against the hostilities he was about to receive from his opponents in Washington.

  Things grew complicated as soon as the session started. On November 25, 1828, the Nashville-based National Banner and Nashville Whig ran the story about Crockett’s coarse behavior at the Executive Mansion while he dined with Presi
dent Adams and four other dignitaries, citing his uncouth claim that the waiter was trying to steal his food and that he had drunk the water from all the finger bowls. Nurturing a backwoods reputation was one thing, but these blatant lies were another matter entirely. Crockett was outraged, and he immediately enlisted two prominent Republicans, James Clark and Gulian Verplank, to write statements of retraction in the papers attesting to the falsity of these accounts and assuring that Crockett had behaved with perfect and gentlemanly propriety. “I would not make this appeal,” he assured them, but “I have enemies who would take much pleasure in magnifying the plain rusticity of my manners into unparalleled grossness and indelicacy.”31 The two men, close allies of Clay and ardent Whig Republicans in opposition to Jackson, agreed to pen the letters, which they did, the retractions appearing in the National Banner after January 9 and 23, 1829.32

  Crockett may have saved some face among his colleagues, but the damage was already done, and many of his constituents, aware of his colorful behavior and antics, found the accounts of his decorum plausible, if slightly embellished. Readers of the newspapers understood partisan apparatus in place, and were quite accustomed to lampooning, but certain images, despite their relative truth or falsity, were hard to shake, and these stuck. Already the papers had run exaggerated stories of the new representative from Tennessee who claimed he could “wade the Mississippi, carry a steamboat on his back, and whip his weight in wild-cats.”33

  Crockett was in the midst of being penalized and lampooned for the very boasts that he had employed to such salutary effect in the stump speeches that got him elected. The Nashville Republican of January 27, 1829, published right on the heels of the retractions by Clark and Verplank, claimed that “Col. Crockett, a member of Congress from this state, arrived at Washington City on the 8th day of Dec. and took his seat. It was reported before his arrival there, that he was wading the Ohio towing a disabled steamboat and two keels.” The jargon and vernacular that he had honed, the conscious construction of his aura, were already posing problems for him in Washington. He would need to attend to his image, that was for certain, to rein in the flatboat drawl and show a more gentlemanly countenance. Or at the very least, temper it in specific contexts.

  Crockett’s behavior during the second session heralded a changed man, one even more fiery and independent than before, with new personal convictions perhaps foisted upon him by a spouse losing her patience. The messiness in the papers had peeved him, and made him a trifle paranoid, too, for it wasn’t precisely clear who could have orchestrated the mudslinging and manipulated the press. The obvious culprits were the National Republicans, on the surface his opposition, but two of their party had agreed to write retraction letters. It seemed unlikely that the insults and lies would have been spearheaded by the Clay-Adams contingent, who were perhaps considering wooing the gullible Crockett over to their side when the time was right. Whoever it was, Crockett would need to be looking over his shoulder more often in the coming sessions.

  In early January, Crockett presented a formal amendment to Polk’s land bill, stubbornly including a resolution that the government would provide 160 acres to anyone who settled on vacant Western District land, and produced improvements, on or before April 1, 1829. Polk and others warned Crockett that it went too far and would never pass. Crockett, reveling in his contradictory, even obstinate nature, went ahead, generating a circular (with the help, as was becoming custom, of Gales and Seaton) to his constituents and delivering a rousing if uncharacteristically formal speech on the merits of his proposed amendment. He referred to his people in ennobling language, calling them “hardy sons of the soil, men who entered the country when it lay in a state of native wilderness; men who had broken the cane, and opened in the wilderness a home for their wives and children.”34

  Impassioned as his speech and circular were, his delegation opposed him, suggesting a compromise, but Crockett would not budge. Polk began to become suspicious of Crockett, wondering if he might not have another agenda altogether, one that pandered to the Republicans. There was little overt evidence of this, though Polk had observed Crockett in public fraternizing with enemy factions of prominent Whigs. Crockett, driven by a combination of hubris and political naïveté, was marooning himself. His amendment took immediate criticism, and while the experienced and erudite Polk attempted to soften the measure by including a provision that the lands be ceded to the state, Crockett balked at this last feature.35

  Delegates Pryor Lea and John Blair of East Tennessee came out nettled, taking firm positions against Crockett, and subsequently each member in turn spoke out against Crockett’s amendment. Crockett’s bullheadedness turned pathetic when he offered to trade votes with members of his delegations straight across: anything they wanted him to vote for in exchange for a yes vote on his version of the land bill. Polk viewed this action as deceitful, commenting of Crockett, “He associated himself with our political enemies, and declared . . . he would vote for any measure any member wished him to vote for, provided he would vote for his foolish amendment against the original bill.”36

  Crockett appeared desperate. For nine days heated argument raged, and then it waned. The slim chance of being passed that the bill had had in its original incarnation, was now gone. Polk placed the blame for the bill’s failure squarely on the shoulders of Crockett, whom he suspected of being coddled by Adamsites and “opporated [operated] on by our political enemies.” The vitriolic Polk, convinced that Crockett has betrayed his own party, went on to attack vigorously:

  The cause of its defeat is to be attributed in great degree to the course taken by our man Crocket . . . You may suppose that such a man under no circumstances could do us much harm . . . but in this instance many of the Adams men . . . seized upon the opportunity to use Crockett, and to operate upon him through his measure, for their own political purposes . . . Rely upon it he can be and has been operated upon by our enemies. We can’t trust him an inch.37

  Polk added a personal attack on Crockett’s inability to speak in “measured language,” citing this as a reason that he could not understand the remarks he made “against his own state.”38 On January 14 the bill was tabled in a vote of 103 to 65. It was a defeat from which Crockett derived misguided pleasure, thinking its failure might pave the way for him to introduce in a future session his own, reconstructed version.39 Crockett was deceiving himself, however, and things would get worse before they got better. Polk had fair reason to believe rumors circulating about Crockett’s inclination to vote Gales and Seaton in the upcoming election for House printer over Democrat Duff Green.40

  Crockett was getting a real taste of business-as-usual in Washington. His own party affiliations, or those tenuous links he had managed to establish, were unraveling around him. His constituents, swayed by published materials that showed Crockett being lured from the Democrats, now had cause to doubt his intentions, and whether he had their best interests in mind. Pryor Lea followed Polk’s lead and continued to attack Crockett, intimating that he’d deserted his delegation and was sleeping with the enemy. The argument got ugly, the papers spanning the region running particularly effusive and lively exchanges between the two men. Crockett took particular offense to some of Lea’s charges, finally calling him “a poltroon, a scoundrel, and a puppy,” and challenging Lea to a duel or a fight when they next crossed paths.41 The public tête-à-tête unraveled into something of a circus, with no verifiable winner in the verbal skirmish. But an already frustrating and unproductive session had drawn to a close, with Crockett doubtful of his abilities to persuade his delegates and insecure about his own effectiveness.

  But above all Crockett’s optimism always shone through, despite the circumstances, and he was heartened by his improving health. Though he received devastating news from home that his niece, Rebecca Ann Burgin, had been killed in a tragic accident at Crockett’s mill (her head crushed by oxen), he maintained his pledge to Elizabeth to swear off hard alcohol, and was quite obviously moved enough by t
he event to reconsider his own behavior:

  I have altered my cours in life a great deal sence I reached this place and have not tasted one drop of Arden Spirits sence I arrived here nor never expect to while I live nothing stonger than cider I trust that god will give me fortitude in my undertaking I have never made a pretention to religion in my life before I have run a long race tho I trust that I was called in good time for my wickedness by my dear wife who I am—certain will be no little astonished when she gets information of my determination.

  Crockett added in the same letter to George Patton, in reference to his niece, his heartfelt and honest condolences, relating how much he cared for the young girl: “I thought almost as much of her as one of my own I hope she is this day in eternal happiness where I am endeavoring to make my way.”42 Crockett’s references to religion, and to his pride in staying on the straight and narrow, suggest that Elizabeth gave him some ultimatums before he left for the session. He would mend his ways as he could, curtailing his consumption so as to remain in control, even if he never quit altogether. And the language in his letter to Patton reveals that, for all his bravado, Crockett had a sensitive, vulnerable streak.