American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett

by Buddy Levy

  While Crockett hurried to compile the central text for the book and continued dumping it on Clark for editing, only one political certainty remained clear to him: any reelection chances he might have for the coming August hinged entirely on his ability to bring forward, and then pass, the notorious land bill. On December 27, he announced with empty optimism that

  I expect in a few days to be able to Convey the good news to my District of the passage of my occupant land Bill it is the first Bill that will Come up and I have no fears of its passage every member from Tennessee that I have talked to Says that it will pass if So it will Bless many a poor man with a home.19

  This hollow claim proved insincere, for though on December 9 Crockett had in fact put forth a motion to make his land bill the first order of business for the following day, long speeches on prior matters kept discussion of his bill from reaching the floor. On January 7, Crockett pleaded urgently in a last-ditch effort to get his land bill on the docket, knowing that the end of the term loomed just a few short months away, and nothing in the slow-turning wheels of Congress should have given him confidence.

  Frustrated and disgusted, he turned his complete attentions to finishing his portion of the tour book, and this he delivered by January 21, remarkably quickly. Although Clark worked fairly quickly as well, Crockett had been right in his prediction that his editor would not be able to keep up. To further slow the process, just after receiving Crockett’s materials Clark fell dreadfully ill, but even in his sickly state he assured Crockett that he would finish his work as soon as he was physically able to sit up. In the meantime, Crockett wrote to Carey & Hart suggesting the title An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East in the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Eight Hundred and Thirty Four. At the same time, Crockett hedged a bit on claiming personal authorship of the book, and instead wondered if a disclaimer of sorts might be appropriate, suggesting that the title page state “written from notes furnished by my self ” rather than their original suggestion “written by my self.”20 Crockett showed a good bit of conscience here, as he realized that many careful readers would know that the book was ghostwritten and heavily supplemented by reproductions of previously published materials. In the end, Carey & Hart ignored his request, no doubt driven by the potential of better book sales if it included, as did his Narrative, “Written by Himself.”

  While he waited nervously for Clark to deliver and for Carey & Hart to hurry the book to press, Crockett schemed up yet another book idea. He certainly preferred his role as author, traveling celebrity, and notorious backwoodsman to the terminal tedium of the legislature, with which he was now beyond disenchanted. He wrote a quick letter to his publishers proposing a book on the sly fox himself, Martin Van Buren. Carey & Hart were rightly skeptical, fearing Crockett’s known wrath toward the man might lead him to write something overly scandalous. The last thing they needed was a lawsuit brought against them by someone as powerful as Van Buren—that would be very bad for business. But Crockett assured them he would stick to the truth. He determined to spend the winter writing “little vans life” and promised “what I write will be true.” But he also added with foreshadowing that the work would be venomous: “I’ll do it; and if when you read it, you don’t say I’ve used him up, I’m mistaken, that’s all.”21

  The project was ambitious if foolhardy, but by now Crockett believed he could profit from writing, which would now give him an opportunity to rail against the very man he might conceivably face in a presidential election in 1836. Why not start the sparring now? There was at least some residual anti-Van Buren sentiment, for as a party they viewed him as dangerous and potentially harmful to the country. He represented sprawling government, but worse, “lawlessness and violence that bred fear and anger around the country.”22 Crockett echoed their sentiments even louder, exclaiming “I have sworn for the last four years that if Vanburen is our next President I will leave the United States I will not live under his kingdom.”23 Then he added, alluding to a move he’d been thinking about since his conversation with Sam Houston back in April, that rather than submit to a government run by Little Van, the sly fox, Crockett would escape “to the wildes of Texes,” where living under foreign Mexican dictates would offer “a Paradice to what this will be.”24

  But politically, Crockett was grasping at straws. He tried numerous times to get his land bill on the floor, failing miserably. He was reduced, as he had been during the previous session, to wild rants and digressions, violent outbursts concerning the despotic administration. His efforts to bring his pet bill to the floor bordered on desperation. He had forwarded a bill to improve navigation on his district’s rivers, and that too summarily disintegrated. Even his Whig supporters who had courted him during the tour and contemplated running him for president, cooled toward Crockett. No doubt Crockett’s instability, his failure to prove malleable, and his constant debts concerned them. Still, they had yet to settle on a nominee, and Crockett hadn’t been entirely ruled out. His anti-Jackson rants would continue to serve them, and it pleased them when he swamped his district with anti-Jackson writings. Crockett kept the heat on, smearing both Jackson and Van Buren as he could, futilely struggling to have his land bill heard, and contacting Augustin Clayton about collaborating on the Van Buren book. It was a busy, desperate winter.

  In March, An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour . . . hit the bookshelves. The book had none of the wit, charm, or authentic voice Crockett had achieved in his Narrative, and though the Whig press lauded the work, the general public, and more particularly, Crockett’s growing readership, saw the book for what it was: political propaganda.25 Sometimes satirical and reading like a travelogue, the work failed to strike the necessary chord in its audience precisely because it lacked Crockett’s true voice. Though in their original agreement William Clark was to have assumed the role that Chilton took in writing the Narrative,26 in the end Crockett’s narrative voice became subsumed by Clark’s and by the replication of news articles and speeches, resulting in an unimpressive political tract that Carey & Hart would have difficulty unloading.27 Clark proved to be but a shadow of the ghostwriter that Chilton was; Chilton saw the virtue and nuance in letting Crockett do the talking. The sales Crockett had dreamed would alleviate his financial woes would remain just that, a dream.

  But he had suffered worse setbacks, and there was still the scathing Van Buren book to come, so Crockett held out a glimmer of hope. Even in the face of disintegrating support from the inside (certain Whigs who had sided with Crockett previously began to jump ship, leaving him marooned in this session), Crockett retained a degree of bravado as to his own prospects. Although by now he privately doubted that anyone would have the strength to defeat Van Buren in 1836,28 that did not mean he couldn’t be defeated four years later. In a tongue-in-cheek letter conceding that the next president would likely be Van Buren, Crockett wrote: “Let the next president come from the North; and then I go with all my heart for a Southwest president, the time after; and that president shall be myself.”29 He wasn’t ready to give up just yet, and both recent books, financially and politically motivated, indicated his intention to remain in the game. With an eye on the future, Crockett signed a letter with much of the rest of the Tennessee delegation, asking Senator Hugh Lawson White to run for the Democratic nomination against Van Buren. It made sense, since White was a popular and powerful Whig, and as a fellow Tennessean, his candidacy stood to embarrass Jackson.30 Believing Van Buren unbeatable, Crockett must have figured White was an ideal scapegoat, the sacrificial lamb.

  The first order of business would be to retain his congressional seat, and that was no guarantee. Though his fame would secure him a decent number of votes in the coming August elections, his activities in the session had yielded him nothing to hang a campaign on. He continued to pen open letters to constituents in his district, using the forum to proffer anti-Jackson slurs which, though by now redundant, still had an impact on voters.

  By now Crockett knew that
his opponent would once again be Adam Huntsman, the shrewd fellow Creek War veteran. Huntsman was a formidable foe, a bright and clever man with a decent sense of humor and sharp political savvy. Crockett figured the race would be tough, but he remained confident, as he always did, in his chances at victory, and he certainly liked politicking a lot more than politics. “I see they have got out A. Huntsman,” he wrote, leveling his competitive gaze on his opponent, “I [am] of the opinion I will beat him.”31 The fiery yet sensible Huntsman had his own feelings on the subject, which he shared in a letter to his friend and confidant James Polk, mockingly referring to Crockett, as he had in his Chronicles, as “Davy of the River Country”:

  I begin to believe I can beat Davy . . . I have been in all the counties but one in this District and Crockett is evidently losing ground or otherwise he never was as strong as I supposed him to be. Perhaps it is both. If my friends take anything of a lively interest in it I think my prospects are as good as usual. He is eternally sending Anti Jackson documents here and it has its effect. If he carries his land Bill it will give him strength. Otherwise, the conflict will not be a difficult one.32

  Almost as though he could hear those words, Crockett made one last-ditch effort to secure his coveted bill. Four times during the session he attempted to have it heard, and each time he was denied. He endured the same old rhetoric, the same politicking, the same excruciatingly protracted speeches that he had submitted to time and time again, and it ultimately became more than he could bear. On February 4 he tried vainly to terminate a long discussion regarding the Alexandria Canal in order to bring up his land bill, concluding from the painful length of the speeches that Washington was “a better place to manufacture orators than to dispatch business.”33 For the next two weeks he rose again and again, disgusted and almost pleading, but always some other business took precedence. On February 20, Crockett delivered his last recorded speech in the halls of Congress, and fittingly, it was a final stab at passing his doomed bill. It failed to even rise to discussion.34 Disillusioned, even disgusted, Crockett would have been quite happy to see the session come to a close so that he could leave Washington and its pontificators and head back to Tennessee, then out onto the campaign circuit for one more go-round. Though even electioneering was becoming rote and redundant, he still preferred it to the charade that he considered Washington to be.

  But heading home in June, Crockett must have been restless and uneasy. His political independence, his proclamations that “I am no man’s man” and that “I bark at no man’s bid. I will never come and go, and fetch and carry, at the whistle of the great man in the white house no matter who he is,”35 had succeeded in ostracizing him in Washington, and even if such protestations were true (for indeed, to the very end he did vote his conscience), they had begun to ring a bit hollow in the expectant ears of his Tennessee brethren. He had less than three months to win over a dubious voting public, one that would seek explanations for his blank congressional record. The one trump card Crockett hoped might gain purchase was an allegiance he had formed with Seba Smith, perhaps cemented at their meal together during Crockett’s book and speaking tour. Smith started a new magazine called the Downing Gazette, a single-sheet news weekly featuring the missives of Major Jack Downing discussing political issues of the day.36

  Throughout the summer, the Downing Gazette published a series of letters offering political banter between Major Jack and Crockett, with the hope of giving Crockett a campaign bounce from their content, which echoed sentiments, themes, and commentary found elsewhere in Crockett’s writings.37 But the Downing Gazette was published in Portland, Maine, and its distribution was limited to the Northeast, plus any copies managing to trickle west. The exchanges probably failed to find readership as far southwest as Crockett’s district.38

  At about the same time The Life of Martin Van Buren, Hair-Apparent to the “Government” and the Appointed Successor of General Jackson hit the shelves. Augustin Clayton, initially a vehement opponent of the Second Bank (he later flip-flopped when he managed to procure a $3,000 loan from the bank)39 wrote the bulk of the book, with Crockett lending very little, mainly his name to the text and a shared scorn for the subject. The book lacked even the humor of the Tour, and Carey & Hart found its content questionable enough to publish it under a spurious imprint called Robert Wright, keeping their own names well out of it. The extended, venomous rant abused Little Van viciously, accusing him, among many other things, of being a dandy and a fop: “He is laced up in corsets such as women in town wear, and, if possible, tighter than the best of them. It would be difficult to say, from his personal appearance, whether he was a man or a woman, but for his large red and grey whiskers.”40

  The book possessed none of Crockett’s mischievousness or fun, its tone instead violent and mean-spirited, and though the Whigs found it devilishly droll, it failed to have much of an impact on the Crockett campaign. In the end he was left to do what he did best, go out amongst his people and tell them what he thought they wanted to hear. But by now he was becoming slightly unsure of just who they expected to see, and perhaps more troubling, he may have begun to experience a crisis of identity. The brash and outspoken champion-of-the-downtrodden approach had been played out, and with his own dalliances among the country’s elite well known, his “I’m one of ya’ll” claim would be a hard sell. He had said in the opening lines of his Narrative, “Most of authors seek fame, but I seek for justice.” Perhaps now he had cause to wonder. Having achieved no justice through legislature, what was it that he still sought? What drove him to continue electioneering, keeping himself in the limelight? Could it be the delicious, addictive drive toward fame, which he called “that fickle, flirting goddess”?

  Crockett understood that Adam Huntsman was no slouch as a campaigner, and that it would require a strong effort to defeat him. Huntsman also came into the race with the public backing of both Polk and Jackson. The Jacksonians kept Huntsman’s campaigning coffers flush, while Crockett stumped on a minuscule budget. The Jackson camp plied the press with negative stories about Crockett, including charges, not all false, that he had exaggerated his mileage expenses in his trips to and from Washington, had used franking for personal gain, and most damning of all, that he had failed to achieve any significant legislation in three terms in Congress.41

  Crockett had stumped and politicked enough not to go down without a scrap, and one trickster ploy, clever and pure Crockett, nearly ruined Huntsman and showed that Crockett never lost his sense of humor. During the Creek War, Huntsman had been badly wounded, one of his lower legs requiring amputation, and from then on he had worn a wooden leg, which served as a reminder of his devotion to his country and allowed him to run on his war record. As often happened, rival candidates billeted together while campaigning, and Crockett and Huntsman spent a night together at the home of a devout Jackson man who just happened to have a beautiful daughter. Late in the evening, with everyone sound asleep, Crockett grabbed a wooden chair and clomped noisily to the daughter’s door, which he rattled and knocked on. When she awoke screaming, Crockett placed one foot on the lower rung of the chair, and, holding its backrest, hopped loudly across the wooden floorboards, clomping loudly back to the room he shared with Huntsman, a known rake. Crockett dove into bed, pulled the covers to his chin, and fell into a deep, feigned snore. Having heard the commotion, the farmer rushed in, immediately assuming that Huntsman’s peg leg had made the stamping noise across the breeze-way. The farmer threatened to kill Huntsman, until Crockett finally managed to calm the enraged father. The ploy won Crockett the man’s vote and some of his friends’, and completely embarrassed Huntsman.42

  The ploy allowed Crockett to remain optimistic, even overconfident. With little more than a month to go in the election, Crockett exclaimed of his opponent: “I have him bad plagued for he don’t know as much as me about the Government,”43 adding that he felt confident he would glean twice as many votes as his competitor. Crockett politicked in a frenzied fashion, accepti
ng offers to every stomp-down, dinner, or reaping in the region, maintaining his infectious grin and patented jargon everywhere he went. Near election day he harkened back to an early threat, stating unequivocally “If I don’t beat my competitor I will go to Texes.”44

  Crockett promised to write his publishers and his Whig supporters as soon as the results of the August 6 elections were known, and he honored his claim with a long and telling letter on August 11, by which time the final tally was in. The race was tight, with Crockett picking up 4,400 votes to Huntsman’s 4,652. Sour, even bitter, and suspicious that the voting had been rigged, Crockett accused bank managers of offering a healthy $25 per Huntsman vote (a rumor Crockett had heard going round). “I have no doubt that I was Completely Raskeled out of my Election,” he wrote, adding, as was his style, a high-minded commentary on justice and righteousness, which he may well have believed: “I will be rewarded for letting my tongue Speake what my hart thinks . . . I have Suffered my Self to be politically Sacrafised to Save my Country from ruin and disgrace and if I am never again elected I will have the gratification to know that I have done my duty.”45

  The loss burned into Crockett like a brand searing a cow’s flank, and, a sore loser in the best of times and now smarting from an election he considered fixed, he was nearly out of options. Washington no longer wanted him, and now it seemed, shifty vote or no, neither did West Tennessee. His familial relations were civil, but he no longer shared a bed with Elizabeth, and to add biting insult to the painful injury of election loss, her relatives accused him of misconduct in the administration of her father’s will, which hurt his feelings deeply and festered into a familial falling-out, though nothing came of legal consequences. Still, he likely felt doubly rejected by both friends and family.46