by On to the Alamo: Col. Crockett's Exploits;Adventures in Texas
Crockett’s emergence as a national figure came at a time when great changes were occurring in American politics: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had died in 1826, and for all intents and purposes the Republican and Federalist parties were extinct. Monroe had been succeeded in 1825 by John Quincy Adams, a former Federalist who espoused many of the positions associated with Jeffersonian Republicans, including government funding of internal improvements. The popular vote in that election was won by Tennessee’s favorite son, Andrew Jackson, but the story was that Adams had cut a deal with Henry Clay, offering him the position of secretary of state in return for his support in the House of Representatives, where the close election was determined in Adams’s favor. Whether true or not, the story cast a shadow over Adams’s presidency, and in 1828 Jackson famously won.
From the wreck of the Adams administration emerged two great statesmen who would dominate American politics for twenty years: Henry Clay of Kentucky and Daniel Webster of Massachusetts. Both were eminently qualified for the presidency, which both coveted mightily; both were identified with the rise of the Whig party, which emerged in 1834, but neither man was able to convince the voters that he was a viable candidate. Moreover, the Whigs, taking their cue from General Jackson’s success in using his western origins and military fame as political capital, were forever searching for a like champion. In 1840 they were successful in their choice of General William Henry Harrison, celebrated as the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe, a minor and indecisive skirmish preceding the War of 1812.
I rehearse what may be familiar facts to clarify the otherwise puzzling course of Crockett’s career in Congress. When he was first elected, Crockett maintained that despite his earlier differences with the general he was a Jacksonian Democrat but he ended his congressional career five years later a champion of the Whigs. It was Crockett’s claim that he had remained a true Democrat while Jackson had become a dictator, a familiar enough charge at the time, thanks to the old general’s aggressive and authoritarian personality. But as James Shackford maintains, Crockett’s defection was chiefly inspired by the same old issue of squatters’ rights, on which he and Jackson had taken opposing positions early in the 1820s. The matter of the disposition of vacant lands in Tennessee was made a national issue by James K. Polk, who had been elected to the state legislature during Crockett’s tenure and who in 1825 was elected ahead of Crockett to the U.S. House of Representatives. Polk was a powerful member of Congress by the time Crockett arrived and became even more powerful after the election of 1828, thanks to his friendship with and loyalty to Jackson.
As a representative from Tennessee, Polk heeded the resolution of 1822 and sought the sale of hitherto vacant lands there for the purpose of funding public education in his state; Crockett at first supported Polk’s Vacant Land Bill, operating as before under the assumption that the tracts already settled by farmers would be ceded to them without cost. But things turned out differently, and when Crockett learned that all of Tennessee’s vacant lands would be offered for sale, thereby shutting out impoverished squatters while opening up opportunities for speculation, he opposed Polk’s bill, which had the approval of President Jackson.
Throughout his subsequent career in Congress Crockett tried to advance substitute bills and proposed amendments to Polk’s bill that favored those who had already settled on the “vacant lands,” but to no avail, and his failure was increasingly a source of frustration and anger, increasingly aimed at Jackson and his supporters in the Democratic party. The congressman was undoubtedly sincere in his loyalty to the poor farmers of western Tennessee, but he also knew that his reelection depended on his success in protecting their rights to the land on which they had settled.
Another matter on which he disagreed with Jackson was the tangled and controversial issue of internal improvements—defined as building roads and canals as well as removing obstacles to navigation on rivers—identified in western states with facilitating the exchange of commodities. Although General Jackson had supported a system of national roads as important to the defense of the frontier, President Jackson, with the aid of Congressman Polk, consistently opposed the federal funding of internal improvements, nominally because it was unconstitutional—on the grounds that any such improvements would benefit some sections of the country at the expense of all—but also because his party anticipated that the cost would be met by imposing high tariffs on imported goods.
Henry Clay as early as 1810 had proposed his “American system,” in which tariffs would be used to protect American manufactures even while encouraging the use of American raw materials, a plan favored by politicians from the industrial eastern states. The agrarian South was opposed to tariffs as having no advantage to farmers while increasing the cost of manufactured goods, whether from abroad or from New England. This southern opposition came to a head when the tariff of 1828, the “Tariff of Abominations,” was followed by Henry Clay’s “compromise” tariff bill of 1832, regarded as inadequate by many southerners including Jackson’s vice president, John Calhoun of South Carolina. In response, Calhoun put forward the doctrine of nullification, which would allow individual states to ignore laws with which they disagreed. Anathema to the Whigs, the idea of nullification was also opposed by Jackson as unconstitutional, forcing Calhoun’s resignation as vice president even as he was elected to the Senate as a champion of states’ rights.
The point of all this is that internal improvements were linked inextricably to high tariffs, yet in 1830 David Crockett had supported a bill for building a national road, providing it ran from Washington to Memphis, in his home state, a position verifying Jackson’s opinion about sectional particularism. And in 1831, for similar reasons, Crockett sponsored a bill authorizing national support for improvements to navigation on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, arguing that waterways that passed through many states would not otherwise be cleared of obstructions because interstate rivalry precluded cooperation. It was the president’s newfound opposition to the national funding of internal improvements that inspired Crockett’s remark in Congress in 1831 that although “our great man at the head of the nation has changed his course, I will not change mine… . I shall insist upon it that I am still a Jackson man, but General Jackson is not” (Shackford: 112).
Crockett’s essentially populist views led him to oppose appropriations for the military academy at West Point, which he considered an institution favoring (and creating) elites, a position taken by many in the Tennessee legislature, and which was likewise supported by Congressman Polk. By contrast, Crockett spoke against the president’s proposal for the removal of all Native American tribes to reservations located west of the Mississippi, a measure that catered to the expansive spirit along the frontier. Since the colonel had proved to be no Indian lover during the Creek War, his opposition to a bill, which though unjust was favored by his constituents, has puzzled many commentators.
Shackford notes that opposition to the Indian Bill came mostly from the East, where the conflicts with Native Americans were long past. Indeed, in the 1820s novels and poems by eastern authors promoting a sentimental view of an essentially extinct people began to appear, heralded by Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans. By 1830, Crockett had become increasingly friendly toward the positions of the anti-Jackson party which had begun to cast a hospitable eye in his direction as a Democrat who had become well known for his hostility toward the president. Since the anti-Jacksonians were especially strong in the Northeast, Shackford regards Crockett’s position on Indian removal as a first step toward his eventual alliance with the Whig party of Webster and Clay.
In 1830, Crockett opposed Jackson in the matter of political appointments, pointing out that the president had campaigned by promising retrenchment of the burgeoning government bureaucracy. Having won the election, Jackson was conducting business as usual, with the active help of Calhoun’s replacement as vice president, Martin Van Buren of New York. The Jackson administration sought to consolidate its power by appointing off
ice holders friendly to its policies, creating by the spoils system what Crockett called “a Set of Jackson worshippers.” He maintained that he wore no collar around his neck that identified him as Andrew Jackson’s “dog” (Shackford: 118-19).
He had, he declared, in the same letter to a correspondent, been “herled” by Jackson supporters “from their party,” in effect throwing him in the direction of the opposition party. The specific charge Crockett made against Jackson was that he had removed the postmaster general appointed by President Monroe and kept by the Adams administration so as to replace him with a Democrat of his own persuasion. Later it was discovered that there was a huge deficit in the Post Office funds, the blame for which was laid on Jackson’s man—the “dog” in question—by the president’s opponents.
Shackford notes that this refusal to wear a collar with Jackson’s name on it also appeared in the anonymous Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee, published in 1833 and credited to Matthew St. Clair Clarke, clerk of the House of Representatives from 1822 to 1833 and a friend of the president of the second National Bank, Nicholas Biddle. President Jackson regarded the bank with great hostility as an anti-democratic institution, and any friend of Biddle was no friend of Jackson. The book was the first of several connected with or credited to Crockett, and like the others, it was essentially a proto-Whig document attacking Jackson’s record, especially his removal of government deposits from the second National Bank in 1833.
The bank had been created during President Monroe’s administration at the behest of financial and manufacturing interests who thought of a centralized institution as an instrument for controlling the currency thereby stabilizing the national economy. But the bank was opposed by agrarian interests who thought it had been created chiefly for the benefit of eastern elites opposed to westerners’ desire for easy credit, which was regarded by the moneyed class as promoting inflation, thereby devaluing investments.
During Biddle’s leadership national prosperity boomed, but Jackson regarded the bank as an autocratic institution favoring his opponents whose power would be (and was) greatly reduced by his removal of government funds. The president redistributed the money to state banks, supposedly more responsive to local (agrarian) needs, a step that was both a decentralization maneuver and one that eastern Democrats saw as spreading the wealth while sapping the strength of the Whigs. But western farmers were not pleased with the removal and redistribution of the funds, which made the money more available to speculators than to impoverished settlers.
Given that Crockett was the representative of a poor region tenanted by farmers, and that he was ideologically a Populist, his loud and frequent attacks on Jackson’s removal of the “deposites,” as he spelled it, indicates that he was aware of the negative effect of the measure on his constituents. At the same time, his attitude toward the president and the removal of the deposits was in sympathy with the position of the Whigs. They obviously thought of the colonel as a backwoodsman from Tennessee useful to them as a spokesman for their opposition to the Tennessean now in the executive mansion; a mini-Jackson, Crockett in his hunting outfit of buckskins and fur hat was a version of a ventriloquist’s dummy. He may not have worn a collar identifying him as Jackson’s dog, but he soon became harnessed to a leash held in the hands of Nicholas Biddle; as Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. observed more than fifty years ago, the “Davy” Crockett of popular fame was distinctly a Whig creation.
It has been pointed out by Shackford and others that the emergence of the comic Davy Crockett was helped along by the popular success of Major Jack Downing, the creation of Seba Smith, a newspaper editor and Democrat in Portland, Maine. Writing letters with an inimitable Down East flavor from Washington, the fictitious major became a humorous witness to the activities of Jackson’s administration, making shrewd observations that became increasingly satiric as the president’s hand tightened the reins of government while loosening the distribution of political largesse.
These letters were collected as a book in 1833, their publication hastened by the appearance of a second Jack Downing, the creation of Charles Augustus Davis, whose letters were much more critical of Jackson’s administration than were those of Smith’s creation. Collected in 1834, the letters of the alternative Jack Downing had first appeared in a New York newspaper and were addressed to its editor, Theodore Dwight. Dwight had been one of the Connecticut Wits, and was a sympathetic chronicler of the Hartford Convention, who even by the 1830s had remained an unreconstructed Federalist for whom Jacksonian democracy was anathema.
Also worthy of mention is another work of literature that assisted in the creation of Davy Crockett, The Lion of the West, a prize-winning play first produced in 1831. The comedy was written by the multitalented New Yorker James Kirke Paulding, who had collaborated with his friend Washington Irving, on the satiric periodical Salmagundi (1807-08), after which he had written a number of satires and poems. Because he was an author of a series of biographical studies of naval commanders in the War of 1812 and was throughout much of his career steadfastly hostile to Great Britain, Paulding was appointed by President Madison to the Board of Navy Commissioners in 1815. In 1824 he was made navy agent for New York by President Monroe and served President (and fellow New Yorker) Martin Van Buren—Jackson’s handpicked successor—as secretary of the navy. In sum, Paulding was a Democrat who made a successful transition from Jeffersonianism to Jacksonianism. He was in addition a northerner sympathetic to the pro-slavery cause, made clear by his Slavery in the United States (1836), and was friendly toward the people who kept slaves, as he demonstrated in Letters from the South (1817).
It is generally accepted that the protagonist of Paulding’s farce, Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, a congressman from Kentucky, was at least in part inspired by stories already in circulation about Colonel Crockett. Though in Letters from the South Paulding was uneasy about the backwoodsman type, describing a fight between a wagoneer and a riverboatman in satiric terms, in his play (as revised for production first by an American then a British dramatist) the characterization of the hunter from Kentucky was otherwise. Though uncouth in dress and manners (he wears a fringed leather hunting coat and an animal pelt for a hat) and given to boasting about his fighting abilities—claiming to be a “half horse half alligator” able to “lick his weight in wild cats”—the colonel is a courageous and gallant frontiersman with a heart of gold. As acted by James H. Hackett, who had commissioned the play, Wildfire proved to be a popular figure who held the stage for the next twenty years, and is an obvious source for the almanac version of Davy Crockett.
Perhaps anticipating a libel suit, Paulding saw to it, even before the play was first produced, that newspaper stories appeared denying that Wildfire was modeled after Colonel Crockett, who was after all from Tennessee, not Kentucky, and (unlike Andrew Jackson) was not notorious for fights with others, whether with fists or firearms. But it is also undeniable that there was a connection between the two colonels in the mind of the public, and when Paulding’s play was staged in Washington in 1833, the story went, Crockett attended a performance during which Hackett as Wildfire bowed in the congressman’s direction. When the “other” colonel responded in kind the audience applauded the gesture.
It was also in 1833 that Clarke’s Life of Crockett first appeared, in which the author borrowed an episode from Paulding’s play (the account of a fight between a backwoodsman and a boatman that had been previously used in the author’s book on the South, now put into the colorful language of Wildfire). Clarke included other anecdotes that firmly cemented the colonel to his wild-man stage counterpart, and since much of the Life contains biographical material that could only have been supplied by Crockett, Shackford concludes that he must have been a party to its composition, despite his subsequent declaration that he had nothing to do with the book. Subsequent scholars have agreed with Shackford that Clarke’s Life was part of a calculated plan by the anti-Jacksonians to exploit the image of the “other” Democ
rat and frontier hero from Tennessee (Shackford: 256-57).
By 1831, despite his continuing efforts on behalf of western Tennesseans on the vacant lands issue, Crockett was beginning to have problems with his constituents over his claim of being an anti-Jackson Jackson man. He published that year a Circular Letter setting forth the reasons for his several positions on retrenchment, internal improvements, and the like, but to no avail. Crockett was defeated in his bid for reelection that year, in part, Shackford believes, because his bitter antipathy toward the Jacksonian Democrats was beginning to diminish his good-natured and playful attitude toward politics.
In 1828, Crockett had acquired land in Weakley County, and having bought adjacent property with a house already on it, in 1831 he once more moved westward with his family. In 1833, he again ran for Congress, this time successfully, though he seems to have felt that his political career was not enhanced by Clarke’s Life, which was published that same year. Its portrayal of Crockett as a slangy, boastful hunter from the backwoods may have pleased the Whigs but it seems to have been regarded by the colonel as not very helpful to his increasingly ambitious plans for national office. Nor was it very flattering to the western constituency on whose votes he depended.
He therefore declared that he had no connection with the book, and set to work on his autobiographical Narrative, apparently with the help of an old (and literate) friend, Thomas Chilton, a member of Congress from Kentucky. The book covered much of the same ground as the Life, but gave more stress to Crockett’s military career and his heroic ordeals as a hunter and pioneer and had little of the broad humor and anecdotal style of the other book. In it he repeatedly attacked Jackson and Martin Van Buren and gave hints of his availability as a Whig candidate for president, the Narrative not being published until 1834, after he had been returned once again to Congress.
During Crockett’s absence from Washington, the battle between Jackson and Nicholas Biddle over the future of the National Bank had heated up, with the president attacking the bank as a monopolistic agent of corruption. (Shackford tells us that during his career in Congress, Crockett was one of many legislators granted loans by the bank that were in effect gifts, clear evidence of Biddle’s desire to curry favor with the legislature.) At the urging of Henry Clay, Biddle asked Congress to renew the bank’s charter, four years before it was to expire. As Biddle and Clay anticipated, Jackson vetoed the bill after it had passed the Senate and House, a show of executive force that they thought would cause Jackson to lose the forthcoming election. They were wrong, and no sooner had Jackson been returned to office than he removed the government funds deposited in the bank.
