David Crockett: The Lion of the West
Page 37
16 John Wesley Crockett (1807–1852) studied law, was admitted to the bar, and established a law practice in Paris, TN. He held numerous local and state offices before being elected as a Whig to the Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Congresses, serving the same district his famous father had represented earlier. John Wesley served in Congress from 1837 to 1841 and was next elected to be the attorney general for the ninth district of Tennessee, and served from 1841 to 1843. In 1843 he moved to New Orleans and became a commission merchant as well as a newspaper editor. He returned to Tennessee in 1852 and died there that same year. He was buried in Paris, TN.
17 Davis, “A Legend at Full-Length,” 171.
18 Ibid., 173.
19 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 164.
20 Ibid., 163, 166.
21 Ibid., 167.
22 Ibid., 167–68; 309, n. 19. James C. Kelly and Frederick S. Voss, Davy Crockett: Gentleman from the Cane, An Exhibition Commemorating Crockett’s Life and Legend on the 200th Anniversary of His Birth, Published by the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, City of Washington, and the Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, 1986, 28–29.
23 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 309, n. 19.
24 Jones, In the Footsteps of Davy Crockett, 181.
25 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 169.
26 Ibid., 170.
27 Levy, American Legend, 216.
28 Adam R. Huntsman Biographic Sketch, Adam Huntsman Papers, 1835–1848, Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, TN. The collection is made up almost entirely of correspondence written by Huntsman to his friends and political allies. Most of the letters were written to James K. Polk, then governor of Tennessee. In these letters Huntsman has written entirely of politics, the progress of his party, and the campaigns of the candidates. Many of the letters refer to Crockett, defeated by Huntsman in 1835. The majority of the letters were written from Jackson, TN, where Huntsman resided.
29 Adams Sentinel 9, no. 6 (November 26, 1834).
30 Crockett letter to Charles Schultz, December 25, 1834, Gilder-Lehrman Collection, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.
31 Jones, In the Footsteps of Davy Crockett, 178.
32 Ibid., 178–79. Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 119.
33 Jones, In the Footsteps of Davy Crockett, 201.
34 Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo, 399.
35 Levy, American Legend, 227.
36 Crockett letter to Carey and Hart, August 11, 1835, Crocket Vertical File, Maryland Historical Society.
37 Charleston Courier, August 31, 1835.
38 National Gazette and Literary Register, Philadelphia, PA, December 29, 1825. “There are now four vacancies in the senate of Missouri; that the legislature convenes in January next, and the acting Governor has failed to issue writs of election…. Col. McGuire has resigned, Mr. Carr has removed from the State, Mr. Brown is at Santa Fe, in the service of the General Government, and Col. Palmer is said to have taken French leave and gone to Texas.” The term French leave is used to describe someone who evades creditors.
THIRTY-FIVE • TIME OF THE COMET
1 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 210.
2 Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo, 408.
3 Jones, In the Footsteps of Davy Crockett, 187.
4 Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998), 54.
5 Ibid., 39.
6 Stephen F. Austin correspondence to Edward Lovelace (or Josiah Bell), City of Mexico, November 22, 1822. Correspondence Regarding Slavery in Texas, Sons of DeWitt Colony, Texas, www.tamu.edu/ccbn/dewitt/dewitt.htm, Wallace L. McKeehan, ed.
7 Noah Smithwick, The Evolution of a State or Recollections of Old Texas Days (Austin: Gammel Book Company, 1900), online edition, Southwestern Classics On-Line/Lone Star Junction, 1997, www.oldcardboard.com/lsj/olbooks/smithwic/otd.htm. Noah Smithwick was born in Martin County, North Carolina, on January 1, 1808. Smithwick moved with his family to Tennessee in 1814 and then drifted with the tide of emigration to Texas in 1827. He was a keen observer of many events during the evolution of Texas, and his lurid anecdotes were first published in book form in 1900. Texas historian J. Frank Dobie considered Smithwick’s work the “best of all books dealing with life in early Texas.” The Noah Smithwick Papers, 1835–1922, are located at The Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.
11 T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and Texans (New York: Collier Books, 1980), 152.
12 Terry Corps, Historical Dictionary of the Jacksonian Era and Manifest Destiny (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2006), 306–7.
13 Eugene C. Baker, “Stephen F. Austin and the Independence of Texas,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly Online 13, no. 4 (1933): 271, http://www.tshaonline.org/. Mary Phelps Austin Holley, born in Connecticut in 1784, was a first cousin to Stephen F. Austin. Her brother, Henry Austin, and his family had gone to Texas to join the Austin Colony, and Mary was a frequent visitor. Both her father and her husband, Horace Holley, a Unitarian minister, died of yellow fever, as did Mary, in 1846.
14 Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier, 41.
15 David J. Weber, ed., Foreigners in Their Native Land: Historical Roots of the Mexican Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1973), 152.
16 The University of Tennessee Special Collections Library, MS 1225, David Crockett letter “To the Editors” [Gales & Seaton], Weakley County, TN, August 10, 1835.
17 Hauck, Davy Crockett: A Handbook, 47.
18 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 212.
19 The Gazettte, Little Rock, AR, November 17, 1835.
20 Time magazine, “Just Around the Backbone of North America,” October 7, 1957, www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,809942,00.html.
21 Richmond Enquirer 32, no. 63, December 10, 1935.
22 Jones, In the Footsteps of Davy Crockett, 194–95. Jonesboro was established by ferryman Henry Jones in 1815 and became a major hub as both the farthest navigable point upstream on the Red River and a terminus for Trammel’s Trace.
23 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 213–14.
24 Pat B. Clark, The History of Clarksville and Old Red River County (Dallas: Mathis, Van Nort & Co., 1937), 14–15.
25 Ibid., xiv.
26 Ibid., 12.
27 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 216.
28 New-Bedford Mercury 29, no. 34, February 26, 1836.
29 Jones, In the Footsteps of Davy Crockett, 199.
30 Levy, American Legend, 245.
31 Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo, 409.
32 Hutton, Introduction, Narrative, xxv.
THIRTY-SIX • EL ALAMO
1 Arkansas Gazette, May 10, 1836. This account of the Nacogdoches banquet speech was published more than two months after the fall of the Alamo. Various versions of the speech also appeared in several other newspapers of the day.
2 Jones, In the Footsteps of Davy Crockett, 204, quoting Niles’ Weekly Register, April 9, 1836.
3 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 218–19.
4 Ibid., 216.
5 Ibid., 217–18. John Forbes, The Handbook of Texas Online, http://www.tshaonline.org/. Forbes was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1797 and immigrated to the United States in 1817. He settled in Cincinnati, OH, and in 1834 moved with his family to Nacogdoches, where he became chairman of the Committee of Vigilance and Public Safety. He was elected first judge of Nacogdoches Municipality on November 26, 1835, and administered the oath of allegiance to many army recruits, including Crockett, as they passed through Nacogdoches. He went on to become aide-de-camp to Sam Houston and served during the campaigns at Anahuac and San Jacinto. It was said that he acquired Santa Anna’s sword. In 1856 he became mayor of Nacogdoches, and he died there in 1880.
&
nbsp; 6 John H. Jenkins, ed., Papers of the Texas Revolution, vol. 4 (Austin: Presidial Press, 1973), 13–14.
7 Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo, 414. Corzine came to Texas from Alabama in 1835 and settled near San Augustine. In October 1836 he was elected senator to the First Congress of the Republic of Texas, but he resigned two months later to become judge of the First Judicial District. Corzine died in San Augustine in 1839.
8 Ibid.
9 Copy of original Crockett letter and accompanying transcript from Sally Baker, Crockett Tavern Museum Archives, Morristown, TN.
10 Rod Timanus, On the Crockett Trail (Union City, TN: Pioneer Press, 1999), 41. Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. “Patton, William Hester,” www.tshaonline.org/handbook/ online/articles/PP/fpa54.html. Helen Widener, “Republic of Texas—Freedom Fighter—William Patton,” Irving Rambler, August 2, 2007, 11. At one point there were two William Pattons reported at the Alamo, but neither of them was there on March 6 when the old mission was stormed. The older one was William Hester Patton, a Kentuckian who had commanded a company of Texian insurgents at the siege of Bexar from December 5 through December 10, 1835. This Patton became the aidede-camp to General Houston. After the Battle of San Jacinto, he was given custody of Santa Anna and accompanied him to Washington, D.C., prior to the Mexican leader’s release and subsequent return to Mexico. Patton went on to serve in the Second Congress of the Republic of Texas and was murdered by bandits at his home on the San Antonio River in 1842. The other Patton—Crockett’s nephew—may have been sent from the Alamo bearing a message. If so, he thus was spared the fate of the others who perished there. On March 17 his name appeared on the muster rolls of Captain Henry Teal’s company of regulars, an outfit that fought at San Jacinto. Although he was due a sizable parcel of land for his military service, Patton probably left Texas soon after his discharge.
11 Hutton, Introduction, Narrative, xxix–xxx.
12 H. W. Brands, Lone Star Nation (New York: Anchor Books, 2004), 349–50.
13 John M. Swisher, The Swisher Memoirs, edited by Rena Maverick Green (San Antonio: Sigmund Press, 1932), 18–19.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Paul Robert Walker, Remember the Alamo: Texians, Tejanos, and Mexicans Tell Their Stories (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2007), 34.
17 Michael Wallis and Suzanne Fitzgerald Wallis, Songdog Diary: 66 Stories From the Road (Tulsa: Council Oak Publishing, 1996), 146–49. After March 6, 1836, Santa Anna was also called the “Butcher of the Alamo,” depending on the side of the border. “His Serene Highness,” the moniker Santa Anna preferred, had a love-hate relationship with the Mexican citizens he governed off and on for many years. “If I were God,” he once said, “I would wish to be more.” He survived a few expulsions, coup attempts, and exiles, as well as battles against the United States and France. The dictator, who had lost a leg to a French cannonball at Veracruz in 1838, died alone, in poverty and mostly forgotten, on June 21, 1876.
18 Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo, 204–6.
19 James L. Haley, Texas: From Frontier to Spindletop (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 29.
20 Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo, 282–83.
21 Amelia Williams, “A Critical Study of the Siege of the Alamo and of the Personnel of Its Defenders,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1934): 237. John McGregor was born in Scotland in 1808 and emigrated to Texas in the early 1830s. When Sam Houston put out the call for volunteers, McGregor left his farm, armed with a shotgun and his bagpipes, and rode west to San Antonio, where he became known as the “Piper of the Alamo.”
22 Editorial in the Telegraph and Register, published at San Felipe de Austin (vol. 1, no. 24), Thursday, March 24, 1836.
23 Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 214.
24 Walker, Remember the Alamo, 54–55.
25 Levy, American Legend, 285–86.
26 Hauck, Davy Crockett: A Handbook, 50–51.
27 Marshall J. Doke Jr., “A New Davy Crockett Story,” Heritage 4 (2007): 29.
28 Brazoria Courier, Brazoria, TX, March 31, 1840.
29 New York Times, May 18, 1893.
30 Davis, Three Roads to the Alamo, 568.
31 A Guide to the José Enrique de la Peña Collection, 1835–1840, 1857, Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin. The bulk of the collection consists of Peña’s personal papers, which provide an eyewitness account of the Mexican army’s campaign to suppress the Texas Revolution. The personal papers fall into two sections: a field diary of 109 pages and an extended memoir of 400 pages based upon the diary. Peña wrote the memoir by verifying happenings he recorded in his field diary and by adding information based on his fellow officers’ reports.
32 “Controversial Alamo Memoir Appears Authentic, Says UT Austin Forgery Expert,” University of Texas at Austin, Office of Public Affairs, May 4, 2000. Following several weeks of evaluation, a University of Texas forgery expert said that he found the memoir’s paper consistent with the materials of the period, and watermarks in the diary paper match watermarks in the paper used by the Mexican army at the time. He further declared the narrative to be genuine and said he saw “no signs that the memoir had been tampered with.”
33 Hutton, Introduction, Narrative, xxxv–xxxvii.
34 The Texas Constitutions of 1836 or 1876 and the U.S. Constitution do not provide explicit provisions for the state’s right of secession. Proponents of Texas secession, however, point out that Article 1, Section 1, of the Texas Constitution adopted in 1876 states that “Texas is a free and independent state, subject only to the Constitution of the United States,” and makes no mention of the state’s being subject to either the U.S. President or U.S. Congress. They also note that the Texas Constitution states, “All political power is inherent in the people…they have at all times the inalienable right to alter their government in such manner as they might think proper.” In 2009, Texas Governor Rick Perry, as part of a reelection campaign, suggested secession as an alternative that Texas might want to pursue. “There’s a lot of different scenarios,” Perry said at that time. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.” The Texas Constitution does clearly spell out an option to divide itself into five separate entities. The Ordinance of Annexation, passed on July 4, 1836, by the Texas Convention, reads: “New States of convenient size not exceeding four in number, in addition to said State of Texas and having sufficient population, may, hereafter by the consent of said State, be formed out of territory thereof, which shall be entitled to admission under the provisions of the Federal Constitution…”
BIBLIOGRAPHY
PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
Dorothy Sloan Collection, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books, Austin, Texas
Emily Priddy Collection, Tulsa, Oklahoma
Joseph A. Swann Collection, Maryville, Tennessee
Ron McCoy Collection, Tulsa, Oklahoma
ARCHIVES, MUSEUMS, LIBRARIES, AND HISTORICAL SOCIETIES
Berkeley County Historical Society, Martinsburg, WV
Birmingham Public Library Cartographic Collection, Department of Geography, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL
Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society Archives, Buffalo, NY
Calvin M. McClung Historical Collection, Knoxville, TN
Crockett Tavern Museum, Morristown, TN
Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library at the Alamo, San Antonio, TX
Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
Drexel University Archives, Philadelphia, PA
East Tennessee Historical Society, Knoxville, TN
East Tennessee History Center, Knoxville, TN
Franklin County, TN, Files, Tennessee Historical Commission
Franklin County
Historical Society, Winchester, TN
Gilder-Lehrman Collection, Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, NY
Gowen Papers, Gowen Research Foundation, Lubbock, TX
Great Smoky Mountains Heritage Center, Townsend, TN
G. W. Blunt White Library at Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic, CT
Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
Jefferson County Archives, Dandridge, TN
Library of Congress, Manuscript Division, Washington, D.C.
Mountain Heritage Center and the Hunter Library Special Collections, Western Carolina University, Cullowhee, NC
National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.
Newberry Library, Chicago, IL
New York Public Library, New York, NY
Rosenberg Library, Galveston, TX
San Jacinto Museum, Houston, TX
Tennessee Historical Society, Nashville, TN
Tennessee State Library and Archives, Nashville, TN
Tennessee State Museum, Nashville, TN
University of Tennessee Special Collections Library, Hoskins Library, Knoxville, TN
University of Texas at Austin, Office of Public Affairs
Van Zandt County Genealogical Society, Canton, TX
Woolaroc Museum, Bartlesville, OK
BOOKS
Abbott, John S. C. David Crockett: His Life and Adventures. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1874.
Aderman, Ralph M., ed. The Letters of James Kirke Paulding. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1962.
Alderman, Pat. The Overmountain Men. Johnson City, TN: Overmountain Press, 1970.