Read American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett Online

Authors: Buddy Levy

Tags: #Legislators - United States, #Political, #Crockett, #Frontier and Pioneer Life - Tennessee, #Military, #Legislators, #Tex.) - Siege, #Davy, #Alamo (San Antonio, #Pioneers, #Frontier and Pioneer Life, #Tex.), #Adventurers & Explorers, #United States, #Pioneers - Tennessee, #Historical, #1836, #Soldiers - United States, #General, #Tennessee, #Biography & Autobiography, #Soldiers, #Religious

American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (25 page)

Ironically, while Crockett drifted into turbulent political waters, his general popularity blossomed. His name, his peculiar sayings and idiom, and stories about his character, even about meetings with him, were circulating from Washington City outward across the growing nation. While his brash and unwavering independence ostracized him from the powerful Jackson forces, it was becoming his notable trademark, establishing him as an “eccentric” and “original character.”
35
He was becoming more than a curiosity—he was on the verge of achieving celebrity at home and even abroad. Alexis de Tocqueville, a young French civil servant and aristocrat visiting America in 1831, wrote about Crockett in his work
Journey to America.
Tocqueville learned of Crockett from others, and became fascinated by his unlikely ascension from the canebrakes to one of the greatest political bodies in the world. He marveled that a common man could rise to the distinguished halls of power in America. But more important, his assessment of Crockett’s character contributed to Crockett’s growing celebrity.
36
Crockett was the living, breathing embodiment of a
type,
a Western character writ large, one that audiences and individuals yearned to glimpse more of.
37
He relished the interest, even if later, feigning modesty, he claimed that he could not understand it.

Strained relations with Elizabeth made recesses awkward, and Crockett spent as little time as he could at home, instead focusing on nurturing what positive associations he still had in Washington and around his region—such as his Adams-Clay connections, and others on the routes to and from the capitol and his home. By late summer, Crockett’s break with the Jacksonians was widely known. The Jacksonians themselves noticed his movements and the fact that he spent more and more time with known anti-Jackson types, including “Henry McClung, a friend of Houston’s and himself an outspoken Adams-Clay man.”
38
Crockett also fostered camaraderie with Matthew St. Claire Clark, whom he’d met during his first term and who was rumored to be an Adams-Clay crony. Crockett’s defection would have consequences, as he would come to understand in a few short months.

This portrait highlights Crockett’s high cheekbones, which he described as “Red Rosy Cheeks that I have carried so many years.” (David Crockett. Watercolor drawing by James Hamilton Shegogue, 1831. Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC. Gift of Algernon Sidney Holderness.)

 

Crockett finally returned to Washington in December a week late for the Twenty-First Congress, immediately scrambling to salvage something of the land bill if he could, understanding intuitively that failure to push it through would seriously threaten his chances at reelection. On three occasions he tried to get the bill reconsidered, failing each time, though the vote was painfully close. Frustrated, Crockett was suspicious of the apparatus that was keeping the land bill tabled, and he now took it personally. He openly argued with other members of his delegation and made thinly veiled references to Jackson’s dictatorial tendencies. On January 31, he created a brouhaha over the formation of a committee to review a petition of three Cherokee Indians claiming 640 acres of land apiece. Crockett believed the petition should be dealt with by the Committee of Claims rather than by Polk’s Committee on Public Lands. Crockett argued reasonably and compassionately that though the Indians had brought suit to reclaim land confiscated from them, they were too indigent to obtain proper legal assistance in the matter, and effective counsel from the state of Tennessee had been denied them.
39
His points were well taken, and after vigorous discussion the petition did find its way to the Committee of Claims, a token victory for Crockett but one that would have been noticed by Jackson and his forces, who had earlier repealed part of the 1789 Judiciary Act keeping the court from ruling on the issue.
40
Crockett was once again at direct and defiant odds with Jackson on questions involving Indians, and he felt that Jackson’s interference outstripped the bounds of his office’s duties and power.

Crockett fumed for the remainder of the session, losing a fight to gain appropriation for improved navigation on the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, another internal improvement issue, and now his choleric temper took hold of him. He could no longer contain his feelings about Jackson the man, whom he increasingly believed to be a hypocrite, an autocrat, and a powermonger. He lashed out at Jackson personally, accusing him of betraying the very principles he had espoused in getting elected. “When he quitted those principles, I quit him. I am yet a Jackson man in principles,” Crockett railed, “but not in name. I shall insist upon it that I am still a Jackson man, but General Jackson is not; he has become a Van Buren man.”
41
Crockett’s venomous barbs were aimed at Martin Van Buren as well, whom he believed had manipulated Jackson. Crockett referred to Van Buren as the Fox, alluding to what he considered a sneaky, oily character (another nickname for him was the Magician) who would do anything for personal advancement. “The
fox
is about,” he had warned in a letter published in the
Gazette,
“let the
roost
be guarded.”
42
Though Crockett’s attacks were public and personal, he at least couched them with an eye toward the upcoming congressional elections, hoping his complaints would show him in a positive light, making the case that it was Jackson, not he, who had changed:

 

He has altered his opinion—I have never changed mine. I have not left the principles which led me to support General Jackson: he has left them and
me;
and I will not surrender my independence to follow his
new opinions,
taught by interested and selfish advisers, and which may again be remolded under the influence of passion and cunning.
43

 

Those were fighting words, and Jackson interpreted them as such. Meantime, Jackson had bigger problems than one disgruntled congressman. Jackson’s administration continued to grapple with fallout over the so-called “Eaton Affair,” which had begun at the outset of Jackson’s first term the moment he selected his cabinet and appointed his reliable and dutiful understudy John Eaton as secretary of war. Eaton’s wife had died, but he had entered into a relationship with a woman named Margaret O’Neale Timberlake, herself recently widowed by her young, tall, and handsome Navy purser rumored to have taken his own life as a result of her infidelity.
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As gossip swirled around the social functions of Washington, Jackson forcefully suggested that Eaton marry Margaret Timberlake as the honorable course of action. Eaton consented, but by now other wives within the administration had snubbed her, and many viewed this wedding as conspicuously hasty. The whole affair created internal administrative tension that Jackson hardly needed. Additionally, there were rumblings within his own cabinet on another matter, as it was becoming evident that Vice President John C. Calhoun was now actively eyeing the presidency for 1832, Jackson having intimated that he sought a single term, and no more.
45

Perhaps knowing that Jackson and his core people had public relations problems to contend with, in late February Crockett generated a circular explaining his recent break with the president, as well has his failure to hammer the land bill legislation through. Ghostwriter friend Thomas Chilton certainly had a hand in the prose, which employs a clever combination of indignation and self-exoneration:

 

Why I have not entered into some arrangement with my colleagues to secure the land to them [his constituents]? I can only reply that I thought that I had done so. After it was ascertained that my first proposition would fail, I prepared a substitute for it, which I understood as being satisfactory—and which I again repeat I believe would have passed without difficulty, if they had not prevented me from getting the subject before the house. Heaven knows that I have done all that a mortal could do, to save the people, and the failure was not my fault, but the fault of others.
46

 

By this time he appeared to be reaching, however, and the squatters were primarily interested in results, not excuses. Despite Crockett’s emotional appeals, he was losing his stronghold, even in his own district, and he was clearly on the defensive.

Crockett closed his circular with patriotic language aimed at the heart, hoping for loyalty:

 

You know that I am a poor man; and that I am a plain man. I have served you long enough in peace, to enable you to judge whether I am honest or not—I never deceived you—I never will deceive you. I have fought with you and for you in war, and you know whether I love my country, and ought to be trusted . . . I hope that you will not forsake me to gratify those who are my enemies and yours.
47

 

There was no question that the circular was a campaign speech, and sincere as it may have been, many saw through the rhetoric. He was blaming others for his shortcomings, and even if his constituents believed him to be honest and trustworthy, they could also see that he was ineffectual. The Jacksonians rallied, putting forth William Fitzgerald from Crockett’s own Weakley County as their man to oppose him. They would do what they could to unseat the incumbent, and in April, Jackson himself entered the fray, taking time from his own extremely busy schedule to write his friend Samuel Hays: “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.
48
Jackson, who typically did his best to ignore Crockett and, as a matter of course, used envoys or henchmen to do his bidding, apparently found Crockett a nettling inconvenience and wanted him out of office. That he would personally confront the matter suggests he took Crockett seriously and reckoned that he must be dealt with. It set up an ugly and bitter campaign.

Crockett was on his heels from the start, broke, in debt yet again, and behind in his electioneering, having lingered for weeks in Washington to pose for a portrait he may have been intending to use as a campaign prop. He borrowed money from William Seaton, a Whig supporter, and having finally attended to some remaining personal matters, he took the completed portrait and started home, heading overland by coach through Virginia via Maryland, eventually boarding a steamship for the final leg down the Ohio River.
49
Paradoxically, while he might have had cause for depression during the journey, knowing full well that he was in for an up-hill battle for reelection, something beyond Crockett’s power was taking hold of the American consciousness. Earlier in the previous session, people began to speak of him in metaphoric terms; a man hearing him speak at the House referred to him as “the Lion of Washington,” and added that he was practically hypnotized by his charisma and magnetism. “I was fascinated with him,” he said.
50
Visitors to the city, knowing that he lodged at Mrs. Ball’s Boarding House, would try to get a peek at this object of “universal notoriety” if they could. A newspaper article in 1831 exclaimed that he was one of the “Lions of the West,”
51
alluding to a fierce, fearless, and independent nature that led Crockett to roar his principles across the aisles. But he would need all the press he could get if he hoped to retain his seat.

Along his journey Crockett lost his new portrait, a bad omen. He arrived home fraught with fiscal worry, having been sued in April, for outstanding debts, by John Shaw, and in late May he was forced to sell twenty-five acres at his Weakley County residence to his brother-in-law George Patton. He made only $100 in the transaction, so he included Adeline, a slave girl, for another $300.
52
It wasn’t much, but canvassing required ready cash. Then, as if to bolster his own waning confidence in himself, he wrote down for the first time the maxim that would come to define his brand of “can-do” attitude, scribbling across the bills of sale for the property and the slave, “Be allways sure you are right then Go, ahead.”
53
It was as if he was convincing himself that continuing the campaign against such odds was the right thing to do.

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