David Crockett: The Lion of the West

by Michael Wallis

  Despite Crockett’s explanation, some historians have taken exception with this account. They claim that, while Crockett may have had some empathy for the Indians and their plight, his opposition to the legislation was mostly driven by his growing relationship with the eastern Whigs and his mounting hatred of Jackson.

  “Some have cast doubts as to the sincerity of David’s efforts on behalf of native Americans citing his eagerness to fight in the Creek War in 1813,” points out historian Joe Swann. “But when one reads the Creek War section of the Narrative it is not difficult to see that David saw the insanity of war and the cruelty of men charged with its prosecution. He knew his stand was contrary to the feelings of his constituents back home but David was very bull-headed and felt he was morally right.”15

  Other historians, including James Atkins Shackford, contended that Crockett never delivered a speech protesting the Indian Removal Act during debate on the floor of Congress. Whether or not Crockett actually delivered the speech, a report was published in 1830 showing that his prepared remarks about the measure were entered in the records of the House of Representatives, some five days before passage of the bill.16 This document, written in third person, stressed that Crockett “would never let party govern him in a question of this great consequence.” It goes on to explain that Crockett had “many objections to the bill—some of them of a very serious character. One was, that he did not like to put half a million of money into the hands of the Executive, to be used in a manner which nobody could foresee, and which Congress was not to control. Another objection was, he did not wish to depart from the role which had been observed towards the Indian nations from the foundation of the government. He considered the present application as the last alternative for these poor remnants of a once powerful people. Their only chance of aid was at the hands of Congress. Should its members turn a deaf ear to their cries, misery must be their fate. That was his candid opinion.”17

  Crockett also said that he considered the removal measure “oppression with a vengeance,” and he found that intolerable. His speech against the Indian Removal Act also was published in the Jackson Gazette twice in June 1830. In February 1831, he issued a sixteen-page letter to the voters in his congressional district in which he shared his views on several key issues of the day.18 Included in the letter are several pointed complaints about the performance of President Jackson, such as “my heart bleeds when I reflect on his cruelty to the poor Indians. I never expected it of him.”

  By that time Crockett had long abandoned the Jackson ranks and his own congressional delegation. His stand against the Jackson and Polk forces on Indian Removal and the Tennessee vacant land issue would prove costly. Crockett must have seen the proverbial writing on the wall even before he returned home and launched his reelection campaign in the spring of 1831. The break with the popular Old Hickory did not play well on the western frontier of Tennessee, nor did all the time Crockett was spending with Yankee Whigs.

  “I found the storm had raised against me sure enough,” Crockett wrote of his 1831 homecoming between sessions of Congress, “and it was echoed from side to side, and from end to end in my district, that I had turned against Jackson. This was considered the unpardonable sin. I was hunted down like a wild varment [sic], and in this hunt every little newspaper in the district, and every little pin-hook lawyer was engaged. Indeed, they were ready to print any and every thing that the ingenuity of man could invent against me.”19

  Crockett’s enemies were even more determined to see his defeat. His opponent, handpicked by Jackson and the Democratic leadership, was William Fitzgerald, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer and judge from Dresden, the seat of Weakley County, and a loyal and prominent Jacksonian. From the start of the campaign, it was apparent that Crockett faced not only Fitzgerald but also the entire Jackson machine, including Martin Van Buren, a former U.S. senator and governor of New York who became Jackson’s secretary of state and then replaced John C. Calhoun as vice president in Jackson’s second term of office from 1833 to 1837. Crockett had always looked at Van Buren with a jaundiced eye and usually called him “the little Red Fox,” or “the Magician,” two of the nicknames ascribed to the urbane and squat little man who also was an adept and clever political operator.20 Crockett believed Van Buren manipulated Jackson and was mainly interested in advancing his own career and agenda. Even before his break with Jackson was complete, Crockett wrote, “I am still a Jackson man, but General Jackson is not; he has become a Van Buren man.”21

  The campaign of 1831 was ugly from start to finish. Jackson wanted Crockett out of office and said so many times. In an April 23, 1831, letter to his friend Samuel Jackson Hayes, the president wrote: “I trust, for the honor of the state, your Congressional District will not disgrace themselves longer by sending that profligate man Crockett back to Congress.”22

  With Jackson’s backing and the support of Polk’s political machine, Fitzgerald made great inroads into Crockett’s base of voter support in the district. Editorial coverage seemed to favor Fitzgerald. The Jackson Gazette, at one time politically neutral, not only threw its support to Fitzgerald but also published many smear stories about Crockett filled with the recurring lurid accusations of his supposed rampant gambling and drinking escapades. In endorsing Fitzgerald, the newspaper first took a swipe at Crockett. “He can’t ‘whip his weight in wild cats,’ nor ‘leap the Mississippi,’ nor ‘mount a rainbow and slide off into eternity and back at pleasure’…but this we believe, that Mr. Fitzgerald will make a better legislator; that he will far excel Col. Crockett upon the floor of Congress, as the Col. does him in the character of a mounte-bank,” the popular word at the time for a charlatan or trickster.

  One of the Fitzgerald camp’s favorite dirty tricks was to spread word of where Crockett was going to appear but not inform Crockett. Then, when he failed to show up, Fitzgerald or one of his backers would speak to the crowd and tell them that Crockett was afraid to appear.23

  Finally, over the long summer of 1831, Crockett became so frustrated by the barrage of lies that he made a fateful mistake. He stopped relying on his good humor to win votes and instead allowed his anger to take over, putting out the word that if Fitzgerald made any more false charges he would receive a good country thrashing.24 On a scorching July afternoon at a joint appearance in Paris, Tennessee, Fitzgerald was scheduled to speak before Crockett, who was present with a large number of his partisans. Fitzgerald was well aware of Crockett’s threat, and when he rose to address the large crowd, he placed an object wrapped in a handkerchief on the table. Fitzgerald began his remarks by explaining that all the charges made against Crockett were true, and that he was going to repeat them despite Crockett’s threat of violence. He began his stock stump speech, and when he reached the part where he heaped insults on his opponent, Crockett, as promised, rose from his place in the audience and began advancing on Fitzgerald. When Crockett was just a few feet from him, Fitzgerald reached down and pulled a pistol from the handkerchief, leveled it at Crockett’s chest, and warned that if he took one more step forward it would be his last. Fitzgerald’s action was so sudden and unexpected that a surprised Crockett stopped. He briefly hesitated and turned around and retreated into the crowd. Word of the incident at Paris became the chief topic of discussion throughout the district. It did more to damage Crockett’s reputation than all the outlandish newspaper stories, chicanery, and other ploys combined.

  It was hardly a surprise that Crockett was defeated in the August 1831 election. According to official returns, Fitzgerald received 8,534 votes to Crockett’s 7,948. Despite Crockett winning the majority in seventeen of the eighteen counties of his district, Madison County voters—and the Jackson Gazette—put Fitzgerald over the top, with 1,214 votes to just 429 for Crockett. It was close enough for Crockett to contest it, but the 586 margin of votes held.25

  Only a few days after his defeat, Crockett declared in a letter, “I would rather be beaton [sic] and be a man than be elected and be a little puppy
dog.”26 Crockett’s other consolation in defeat was the gift of time. He would be able to get out of debt, or at least try. He could hunt bears, see about family needs, and mend the broken political fences on the home front with the voters upset about his support of the Cherokees. And, most of all, there would be time to watch the Crockett legend expand.

  THIRTY

  LION OF THE WEST

  AFTER SAILING INTO the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island, in May of 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, the renowned French historian and political scientist, began his tour of the United States to both study the prison system and observe American democracy in action. During nine months of traveling from the East Coast to the Mississippi River, Tocqueville filled fourteen notebooks with his observations and interview notes from more than two hundred Americans he met along the way, and his recollections are particularly germane to this story.

  “Europeans think a lot about the wild, open spaces of America, but the Americans themselves hardly give them a thought,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. “The wonders of inanimate nature leave them cold, and, one may almost say, they do not see the marvelous forests surrounding them until they fall beneath the ax. The American people see themselves marching through wildernesses, drying up marshes, diverting rivers, peopling the wilds, and subduing nature.”1

  Tocqueville’s visit came at a time of great upheaval and change in America’s political system, with the birth of the Democratic Party under Jackson’s leadership and the rise of the anti-Jackson Whigs. The young nobleman, from an aristocratic family that had managed to survive the French Revolution, marveled at “the constant agitation of parties,” and the necessity for party candidates to “haunt the taverns, drink and argue with the mob” in order to attract votes. The lack of a hierarchical social order, so different from Europe, particularly impressed the more patrician Frenchman. When he entered the House of Representatives in Washington City, the effete Tocqueville was “struck by the vulgar demeanor of that great assembly.” He observed, “One can often look in vain for a single famous man. Almost all the members are obscure people whose names form no picture in one’s mind. They are mostly village lawyers, tradesmen, or even men of the lower classes. In a country where education is spread almost universally, it is said that the people’s representatives do not always know how to write correctly.”2

  One of the more curious specimens Tocqueville encountered was one of those Americans marching across the wilds—Monsieur David Crockett of Tennessee. Unfortunately, Crockett was no longer in Congress at the time of Tocqueville’s visit to that august body in Washington, or the Parisian would have beheld someone most memorable. It is not unlikely, given the fact that he never mentioned him, that the two men ever met, but once Tocqueville got to Tennessee, it is evident that he heard plenty about Crockett. Tocqueville’s daily diary notes about the “gent from the cane” were both succinct and telling, and describe something that would never have happened in France. “Two years ago the inhabitants of this district of which Memphis is the capital sent to the House of Representatives in Congress an individual named David Crockett, who had received no education, could read only with difficulty, had no property, no fixed dwelling, but spent his time hunting, selling his game for a living, and spending his whole life in the woods.”3

  Tocqueville’s description of Crockett was not far off target. In late 1831, following his loss to William Fitzgerald in the congressional election, Crockett’s political and personal prospects appeared to be slim to none. After so many years of being absent and generally derelict in his duties as both husband and father, Crockett realized that his marriage was in a shambles and his relationship with much of his family strained. Back in the spring of 1830, as he prepared to break from the Jacksonians, political obligations had prevented him from attending the marriage of his son William to Clorinda Boyett, followed just four days later by the nuptials of his eldest daughter, Margaret (Polly), to Wiley Flowers.4 A growing circle of Whig cronies, especially Thomas Chilton, the Kentucky congressman who lived in Crockett’s Washington boardinghouse, received more of his time and attention than Elizabeth and their children.

  Earlier in 1831, Crockett had been sued yet again by one of his creditors. As a result of the legal action, he sold his house and twenty-five acres of property in Weakley County to his stepson, George Patton, who needed a place of his own after marrying Rhoda Ann McWhorter.5 Crockett pocketed $100 in the transaction and then a few months later sold Patton a ten-year-old “Negro girl named Adaline” for $300, to pay off another past-due debt. Just below his signature on the deed and the bill of sale for the slave girl, Crockett wrote, “Be allways sure you are right then Go, ahead.”6 This marked the first-known written record of Crockett’s famous credo, which would become closely linked with his name in the last years of his life and well beyond.

  Soon after his election loss, Crockett was forced to “go ahead” and sell off the rest of his property to cover campaign debts and living expenses. He then leased a twenty-acre tract of heavily forested land adjoining the low grounds of the South Fork of the Obion. Before he signed the six-year contract, Crockett promised Dr. Calvin Jones, the wealthy physician who owned the Carroll County land, that he would make improvements by clearing for crop fields; building a cabin, smoke house, and stables; digging a well; and setting out some fruit trees.7

  Elizabeth, Crockett’s wife, had reached her limit. She could no longer tolerate Crockett’s behavior—all the hunting, excessive drinking, and his chronic pattern of abandoning his family. The ebullient public person contradicted the reckless personal one. She packed up and moved with those children still at home to Gibson County to reside with Patton kinfolk. “She had endured enough of Crockett,” wrote William C. Davis, in Three Roads to the Alamo. “Relations with David remained amicable but distant. Perhaps it seemed fitting. His constituents had abandoned him, and now so had his wife.”8

  Elizabeth briefly returned to Buncombe County, North Carolina, to visit other family members, including her father, Robert Patton, now a widower. When she returned to Tennessee, her father decided to go back with her and take up residence on some of the land he still owned there. Shortly after arriving, the prosperous yeoman farmer purchased another 1,200 acres and distributed the land among his five daughters and sons-in-law living in the area.9 Described as “a sturdy Presbyterian” and a “fond and beneficent parent,” Patton only lived in Tennessee for about a year; he died on November 11, 1832, and was buried on a bluff overlooking the Obion River.10 The elder Patton maintained his fondness of Crockett, despite the conflict between his son-in-law and daughter. Crockett always addressed Patton as “Father,” and it was no surprise that both Crockett and George Patton, a son of the deceased, were named as executors of Robert’s last will and testament drafted just prior to his death.11

  Throughout 1832, Crockett lived a solitary life at the cabin he built on the leased land, dabbled a bit in farming, and took to the canebrakes and thickets as often as possible, his hounds the uncomplaining companions his wife could no longer be. Occasionally visitors and family stopped for a visit, and he made a few forays out in the district and further just to stay connected to political friends and allies.

  Guided solely by his natural instincts, Crockett had become, in the words of Shakespeare, the wise fool. From his failures, he learned not to fear the contempt and derision of others but to mock his enemies as well as himself. He recognized that, in many instances, the untutored could penetrate to more profound truths and insights than those burdened with learning and convention. Crockett embodied the Shakespearean truth, “The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”12

  Ironically, while Crockett contemplated his future and continued, almost single-handedly, to reduce the black bear population in West Tennessee, his star was rising higher and higher back east. Tantalized by the many newspaper accounts, most of them outrageous and exaggerated tales planted by political opponents and seldom denied by Cro
ckett, the press and the public, as if he had become a broadsheet celebrity, clamored for more. Crockett was clearly missed. His rapidly growing audience of fans and followers hungered for his return to the limelight of Jacksonian society. There was a steady buzz about Crockett from the plush Indian Queen Hotel in Washington City, where lobbyists treated lawmakers to lavish meals, to the phalanx of steamboats flanking the docks on the tawny Mississippi at St. Louis.

  One newspaper, lamenting Crockett’s absence from Congress, labeled him “an object of universal notoriety” and went on to report that “to return to the capitol without having seen Col. Crockett, betrayed a total destitution of curiosity and a perfect insensibility to the Lions of the West.”13 Prior to the last election, a man in the galleries of Congress who had heard the Tennessean speak from the floor flatly stated, “Crockett was then the lion of Washington. I was fascinated with him.” Others who knew Crockett believed, however, that perhaps “Sly Fox of the West” would have been a more appropriate moniker.

  The American public had no knowledge of the private Crockett and his lifelong struggle to rise above his station and remain debt free. They saw only the Crockett that appealed to them—the new kind of American who embodied the most attractive qualities of the literary heroes created by James Fennimore Cooper and Sir Walter Scott.

  Crockett’s growing fame was further demonstrated on April 25, 1831, when a farce in two acts, written by James Kirke Paulding and entitled The Lion of the West, or a Trip to Washington, opened at the Park Theater in New York, the largest city in the nation and America’s theatrical capital.14 Within moments of the opening-night performance, it became apparent that the drama’s peculiar hero, Colonel Nimrod Wildfire—decked out in buckskin clothes, deerskin shoes, and an outlandish wildcat-skin hat—was none other than David Crockett, the original gentleman from the cane.