During the campaign, a sharp decline in the price of cotton hurt Alexander, whose past support of the tariff law came back to hurt him, just as Crockett had long predicted. Both Arnold and Alexander also helped Crockett’s cause by largely ignoring him and focusing on each other. At one campaign stop, Gen. Arnold spoke and directed his remarks at Alexander as if Crockett were not even there. After a time, a large flock of noisy guinea fowls happened upon the scene and made such a clatter that the flustered Arnold had to stop talking until the birds could be driven away.9 Crockett recalled,
I let him finish his speech, and then walking up to him, said aloud, “Well, colonel, you are the first man I ever saw that understood the language of fowls.” I told him that he had not had the politeness to name me in his speech, and that when my little friends, the guinea-fowls, had come up and began to holler “Crockett, Crockett, Crockett,” he had been ungenerous enough to stop, and drive them all away. This raised a universal shout among the people for me, and the general seemed mighty bad plagued. But he got more plagued than this at the polls in August.10
That was exactly the folksy style that the crowds found so appealing. Crockett had become a seasoned campaigner who spoke the language of the voters. All of his speeches sounded much like the autobiography that he and Thomas Chilton would pen just a few years later, peppered with country expressions and his own peculiar brand of idioms and phrases. He was affable and did not seem to take himself too seriously. All of it worked in his favor. Crockett defeated both his opponents by a substantial margin. Arnold had 2,417 votes, Alexander received 3,646, and Crockett polled 5,868 votes, giving him a plurality of 2,222 votes.11
David Crockett, “the gentleman from the cane,” most comfortable, it seemed, hunting bears, appeared to be as strange a congressman-elect as there ever would be in American history. Some people, in fact, who recalled the seemingly impossible occurrence in 1811 when the great earthquake caused the Mississippi to run backward, were even more shocked by the news of Crockett’s election. Crockett himself may even have been surprised, though it might have been another instance of feigned modesty when, years after the election, he told a friend that “he never knew why the people of his district elected him to Congress, as it was a matter he knew precious little about at the time and had no idea what he would be called on to do when he arrived in Washington.”12
Early nineteenth-century pundits scratched their heads and wondered what had happened. The answer appeared clear. What had happened was that from the ranks of eligible voters, a huge number of white men—many encouraged by wives still almost a century away from being permitted to cast votes—turned out for Crockett. His vote count more than doubled the number of votes he had received just two years before, and, even more impressive, more than 12,000 voters cast ballots on election day, twice the number who voted in 1825. At least half of them supported Crockett.13 That is what made the difference—those hardscrabble farmers, squatters, stave makers, coon hunters, militia privates, storekeepers, tavern owners, and so many more. In their minds, and espousing early progressive sentiment, they were sending one of their own to Congress. At last they would have their own champion—and one without landholdings and aristocratic pretensions—fighting on their behalf. Crockett defined what it meant to be a populist—an advocate for the rights and interests of ordinary people. Flushed with victory in the autumn of 1827, Crockett felt invincible.
Just a few weeks after the election, Crockett surprised and delighted Elizabeth with a trip to her family home in North Carolina. His eldest son, twenty-year-old John Wesley, accompanied them. Their first stop was Nashville, a future state capital known as the “Athens of the South,” where a meeting was arranged with John Patton Erwin, a rising attorney and the son of Colonel Andrew Erwin and Jane Patton, from Elizabeth’s family in North Carolina. Not only did young Erwin have family ties to the Crocketts, he also was closely linked to noted statesman Henry Clay (serving as secretary of state under President John Quincy Adams), an intellectual who spoke seven languages fluently, drafted the Monroe Doctrine, and was an ardent foe of slavery. Erwin was the husband of Anne Brown Clay, the daughter of the Kentuckian who had become a force to be reckoned with in Congress and on five occasions tried but failed to become U.S. president.14
Erwin was puzzled by the newly elected congressman’s visit, for although his voting record did not always show it, Crockett still backed Old Hickory. The animosity between Clay and Jackson had only grown following the controversial 1824 presidential race, when Clay played a pivotal role in vanquishing candidate Jackson and sending his opponent, John Quincy Adams, to the White House. It was about then that Jackson began referring to Clay as the “Judas of the West.”15 Considering that Clay and Jackson so despised each other, a meeting between Crockett and Clay’s son-in-law might have been viewed as absolute betrayal by the Jackson camp. On the other hand, an ardent Jackson supporter asking for an introduction to Jackson’s chief nemesis may have aroused Erwin’s suspicions.
It turned out that Erwin had nothing to fear. Crockett explained that when he got to Congress he planned “to pursue his own course,” but he also looked forward to receiving wise counsel from proven political veterans such as the Honorable Henry Clay, a revered Kentucky lawyer first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1806. In a letter sent to Clay shortly after the visit, Erwin gave a rather blunt assessment of Crockett. “He is not only illiterate but he is rough & uncouth, talks much & loudly, and is by far, more to his proper place, when hunting a Bear, in a Cane Break, than he will be in the Capital.”16 But beyond the obvious and somewhat contrived frontier image, Erwin also offered a telling appraisal of Crockett’s strengths. “He is independent and fearless & has a popularity at home that is unaccountable,” Erwin wrote. “He is the only man that I know in Tennessee that could openly oppose Genl. Jackson in his District & be elected to Congress.”
From Nashville, the Crocketts moved on to eastern Tennessee and visited friends and family in the country where Crockett was raised. One of the stops was at the home of lifelong friend James Blackburn. Others came there as well, and Crockett told them old stories from the past and some of his best tales about the bear hunts, his escapade on the river, and the recent election. Many years later, John L. Jacobs, then in his eightieth year, recalled the day Crockett spent at Blackburn’s place.17 Jacobs was just a boy and had seen Crockett when he stopped to give Jacobs’s widowed mother the dollar he had borrowed from her husband.
“James Blackburn had a corn-shucking in my neighborhood,” remembered Jacobs.
There were many hands around the heap. We saw a fine gentleman riding toward the house. He alighted and went into the house, and made himself known, passed the usual compliments, then came down to the men around the heap of corn, gave a general shaking of hands with all the citizens, then turned up the cuffs of his fine broadcloth and went to shucking corn with the other hands. He worked on till dinner was announced, then ate his dinner and left for his home. That was the last sight I ever had of this wonderful man. I shall give you a description of Davy Crockett: He was about 6 feet high, weighed two hundred pounds, had no surplus flesh, broad shouldered, stood erect, was a man of great physical strength, of fine appearance, his cheeks mantled with a rosy hue, eyes vivacious, and in form, had no superior.18
The day after they left Blackburn’s home and returned to the road to North Carolina, Crockett experienced what was probably a recurrence of his malaria, which he described as “billes feaver” (bilious fever).19 Despite feeling poorly, he managed to finish the ride with Elizabeth and John Wesley. As soon as they arrived at her parents’ home in Swannanoa, South Carolina, Crockett was put to bed and a doctor summoned. The physician turned to a standard remedy of the time and bled the patient, which weakened him even more and forced him to stay bedridden for several weeks.
By November 6, Crockett had regained enough strength to witness a duel between his friend Sam Carson and Dr. Robert Brank Vance.20 Both men were from influential families in w
estern North Carolina, and they had been pitted against each other in heated political races. Carson had defeated Vance for a seat in Congress in 1825, and Vance had tried again and failed in 1827. Near the close of that heated campaign, Vance made serious accusations about the Carson family’s loyalty, even claiming that Carson’s father had been a cowardly Tory during the Revolutionary War. More insults flew, and soon a duel was arranged, as was the custom among southern gentlemen who felt their honor and reputation had been tarnished.
Crockett thought dueling was ridiculous, but he was loyal to his friends, and it was said that he even drilled Carson in pistol practice. Crockett also was in the small party that rode with Carson and his second to the dueling ground across the state line at Saluda Gap, in South Carolina, where dueling was still legal.21 There the frail Crockett watched as Carson and Vance marched off their aces, turned, and fired their pistols. Vance was struck mortally wounded and fell at first fire. He died at midnight. Before the smoke from the dueling pistols lifted, Crockett—somewhat revived by a burst of adrenaline—was on his horse riding off to spread the news. One of Carson’s daughters later wrote that “he rode his horse almost to death, beat his hat to pieces & came dashing up yelling ‘The Victory is Ours.’”22
Due to his prolonged recovery, Crockett did not have time to accompany his wife and son back to the family home in far western Tennessee. He would have to press on to Washington City in order to attend the December 3 opening of Congress. Elizabeth and John Wesley wished David well on his new adventure, and they departed the Patton home, taking with them three young slaves, parting gifts from her father.23
After some more bloodletting, Crockett also took his leave. He was sorry that he had not been well enough to enjoy shooting matches with his father-in-law at the “Target Tree,” a large oak near the Patton home where they blazed away at targets. Crockett, still racked with pain and fever, climbed on his horse and rode off. The newly reelected Sam Carson and his colleague Lewis Williams, a ten-year veteran of Congress, accompanied him. It was a grueling journey for a sick man, but Crockett’s companions kept him occupied with stories about what he could expect and what he should avoid in Washington City.
At last they arrived. Crockett and the others were directed to a neighborhood not far from Capitol Hill, where there were plenty of hotels and boardinghouses and an array of busy taverns. One of the popular choices on Pennsylvania Avenue was the McKeown Hotel, remembered as the place where “The Star-Spangled Banner” was first sung in 1814. Many visitors, including American Indian delegations from the far West, preferred the St. Charles Hotel. One of the city’s most prestigious hostelries was Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel. Each evening, Jesse Brown—“the Prince of Landlords”—presided over a table offering decanters of whiskey and brandy free to all guests. Some of the wealthier politicos could afford the sixteen-dollar-a-night hotel rates, but many congressman chose the more reasonably priced boarding houses, known as “messes.”
Crockett took a room at Mrs. Ball’s rooming house on Pennsylvania Avenue, located across the street from the Indian Queen. Here he would share meals and accommodations with several other congressmen from Virginia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Connecticut. Three members of the Kentucky delegation boarded at Mrs. Ball’s, including the honorable Thomas Chilton, a representative who would come to play a key role in Crockett’s future. Soon enough he would meet his fellow boarders, mostly all fellow members of Congress from across the land.
Almanac illustration with text. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)
PART IV
TWENTY-EIGHT
MAN WITHOUT A PARTY
CROCKETT WAS STAGE CENTER beneath a shining light. After yeoman political performances in Tennessee—where he honed and perfected his craft—the homespun forty-year-old found himself in the best theater of all: the nation’s capital. Here all sorts of forces and influences, such as a curious national press, a bevy of hack writers, and a gaggle of self-serving partisan politicians, waited in the wings. All of them recognized the unrefined backwoodsman’s raw magnetism and potential as a kind of political prop and populist mouthpiece. They saw that Crockett’s antics, eccentricities, and colorful style would propel him to national and eventually international acclaim and ridicule. Dealing with such attention required a willing participant with a healthy ego able to fend off critics and detractors. At the same time, it also meant that Crockett had to put up with some manipulation and allow his public image and persona to be molded and choreographed.
When he first arrived in Washington City to take his seat in the Twentieth Congress, many of his colleagues found that Crockett certainly possessed a natural charm but also often exhibited rather unconventional behavior. His conversations and speeches were peppered with his folksy and sometimes clever idioms and expressions, many of which seemed peculiar to others who came from the larger urban areas of the country. While it was true that Crockett had his share of quirks, many of his so-called eccentricities were blown out of proportion and exaggerated by political enemies both in the press and political arena. Contrary to many written accounts and most of the Crockett film portrayals, he did not go to Congress wearing a hunting shirt and coonskin hat, but turned out in the standard high collared coat, dress shirt, vest, and cravat of the time.
“I remember David Crockett well and always with pleasure,” recounted William L. Foster, whose father, Senator Ephraim H. Foster, had been a friend and associate. “He was very often a guest of my father, always a pleasant, courteous, and interesting man, who, though uneducated in books, was a man of fine instincts and intellect…. I never saw him attired in a garb that could be regarded as differing from that worn by a gentleman of his day—never in coonskin cap or hunting shirt.”1
No matter the wardrobe he chose, the robust backwoodsman in gentleman’s clothes puzzled his detractors and skeptics. Some of them seriously questioned if he had the intellect to survive the cutthroat world of Washington. They believed Tennessee would have been better served by having Crockett back at Reelfoot Lake.2
As it turned out, the question was not so much whether Crockett was ready for Washington but whether Washington was ready for Crockett. It is true that, during his three terms in the U.S. Congress, Crockett failed to get a single piece of legislation passed, even his beloved land bill for poor settlers and squatters. However, he emerged as a national celebrity, and served as an unwitting voice of and living symbol for a concept that, until nine years after Crockett’s death in 1836, did not have an official name—Manifest Destiny.
Influential magazine editor John L. O’Sullivan coined the name for this disputed political philosophy in an 1845 editorial when he wrote of “the right of our manifest destiny to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us…. This is our high destiny, and in nature’s eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it.”3 Manifest Destiny became a rallying cry throughout the nation for all of those who ardently believed that it was the exclusive right of the white population of America to invade, occupy, and settle all the land reaching westward across the continent to the Pacific shore. As cultural critic and historian Richard Slotkin noted, “men like Davy Crockett became national heroes by defining national aspiration in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust.”4
Yet at the same time, Crockett also symbolized the poor and downtrodden whom he had always stood up for throughout his life. He was not afraid to buck the system or oppose authority, including those at the top of the chain of command. In fact, it was Crockett’s inability to compromise that resulted in such a dismal showing when it came to getting his own pieces of legislation passed in Congress and enacted into law. His Scots-Irish stubbornness, frontier pride, and a tendency to speak directly, even if it came out as an insult, did not serve him well and often resulted in loss of votes and support in congressional committees and on the floor o
f Congress. Still, numerous hardworking settlers in his home district never lost faith in Crockett, and found their man in Washington endearing.
“Crockett emerged as a symbol of the dawning ‘Age of the Common Man,’” wrote Paul Hutton. “His generation, the first to face the future without the guidance of the Republic’s Founding Fathers, looked to the frontier for the regenerative values once associated with the revolutionary generation. Westerners like Crockett were the flag bearers of a ‘Manifest Destiny’ reaffirming that this new generation was the master of both the environment and its own future. The rise of the West—along with men like Jackson, Clay, Sam Houston, and Crockett—represented the triumph of American democracy and a final rejection of decadent European values of class and aristocracy.”5
Crockett had little notion that he was symbolic of anything when he first took up residence in Washington, although his confidence in himself increased daily as he became more comfortable with his new surroundings. Early in his first term, while still recovering from recurrent malaria, he dashed off a letter to his friend James Blackburn in Tennessee. After giving Blackburn a medical update, Crockett wrote, “I think I am getting along very well with the great men of this nation[,] much better than I expected.”6 It did not take long before Crockett’s opinion changed and much of his optimism disappeared.
“There’s too much talk,” he complained after just a short time in Congress. “Many men seem to be proud they can say so much about nothing. Their tongues keep working, whether they’ve any grist to grind or not. Then there are some in Congress who do nothing to earn their pay but listen day after day. But considering the speeches, I think they earn every penny, amounting to eight whole dollars a day—provided they don’t go to sleep. It’s harder than splitting gum logs in August, though, to stay awake.”7
David Crockett: The Lion of the West Page 22