Three Roads to the Alamo
Page 8
However they got the blacks into the Louisiana interior, it was at this point that the Bowies' ingenuity changed the old pattern. They would not sell the slaves to planters themselves. Doing so ran them the risk of being caught and charged, with potentially deadly consequences, and also some planters could be reluctant to buy, knowing that the slaves would be confiscated if discovered. The Bowies wanted something that was as risk free as possible, and they hit on a brilliantly simple scheme: They would themselves turn the slaves in to a state or federal official as illegal imports, while concealing their own roles as the conveyors of the blacks. The slaves thus seized would be sold at auction, and the Bowies would outbid other buyers, secure in the knowledge that they could afford to do so because half of the purchase price would be paid to them for having turned in the slaves in the first place. If a slave sold at auction for $1,000, the Bowies really only paid a net of $500 after receiving their reward. Add the $140 they paid Laffite for the slave, and they had an investment of $640. But with the sale came a clear and legal title to the slave. The black had been effectively “laundered” and could now be sold anywhere to anyone without fear. If he went for $1,000 again, they had a clear profit of $360 on their investment, more than 50 percent.83
It only required that they find an official or officials who would not show much curiosity at the Bowies' seemingly remarkable civic spirit as they repeatedly turned in large numbers of slaves and then engaged successfully in the bidding at auction. Ironically Pierre Laffite himself had been a deputy U.S. marshal in Ascension Parish a few years earlier, charged with enforcing the slave trade laws.84 No doubt he still had connections there, or one of his successors was sufficiently susceptible to bribery to ask no questions. Better yet, the Bowies' sister Martha had married Alexander Sterrett, whose brother James was an attorney in New Orleans and would soon be appointed customs officer for the Mississippi district.85 If anything, the Bowies' connections were almost too easy.
The last remaining obstacle was cash. Laffite took no promissory notes. The Bowies needed real currency, and James for one was already dodging at least one creditor. The only way for him to raise his share of the investment capital was to sell his Bayou Boeuf plantation.86 His need coincided with Stephen's, and on October 2 James sold his newly married brother the 480-acre parcel on which he then lived, along with the family of slaves purchased from their father—now increased to six—and the mulatto woman he had bought from Andrus the previous February. Almost a third of the sale price of $17,000 reflected the value of the slaves, while the balance showed what could be done with land speculation.87 James had assembled his plantation from four separately purchased parcels at a total expense of $1,500. The synergy of building them into one larger tract, with improvements of a house and clearing the land, multiplied their value several times over. A few days later Bowie sold his remaining Bayou Boeuf land for an additional $500 in hand.88 How much actual cash he got in the transactions is uncertain, for Stephen Bowie, barely twenty-two, would never be good with money and surely did not have anything like $17,000 in cash. More likely he borrowed a small part of the amount to hand over, and for the rest gave his notes. Certainly, even after the sale of all his Bayou Boeuf land, James Bowie did not have enough to pay Andrus the $1,200 still owed for the slave woman now sold to Stephen. He never would pay it, and a year later Andrus finally gave up and dismissed the suit.89
Nevertheless James put together enough for his share in buying the first group of forty slaves, about $1,850. Further, the brothers may have divided the responsibilities of the enterprise. John, who suffered the worst eyesight, stayed at home and helped with the disposal of the slaves, perhaps as far away as Mobile. Rezin went on one or two of the expeditions and thereafter disposed of more of the blacks in Mississippi.90 James himself did the most dangerous work of convoying the contrabands through the swamps and bayous, bringing them in lots of forty at a time, as many as one or two men could handle. Although the blacks were chained, Bowie found little need for fetters: The frightened Africans knew nothing of the country and had nowhere to go, while they were told enough of alligators, snakes, and hostile natives to know that safety, if not happiness, lay with the Bowies. On one trip a few slaves may have escaped, not to be found again, but for the rest James Bowie felt secure that they would not run.91 He even told Laffite on one of his visits to Campeachy that he rarely lost a slave because he was armed and he knew they feared him. Instilling fear in others was something James Bowie did with ease.92
Over the ensuring months in 1819 and early 1820, James, and sometimes Rezin, made at least four trips to Campeachy or the Sabine barracks, smuggling a total of as many as 180 or more slaves in the process. James formed more close friendships with a few of Laffite's men and reportedly became somewhat close with Laffite himself, one member of the commune even believing that the two clean-shaven men looked alike.93 He may have seen the remaining damage from the late-summer hurricane in 1818 that wrecked Campeachy, forcing him to meet Laffite in his impromptu residence on an anchored brig while the village was rebuilt. He would have missed one important visitor at the smuggler's headquarters, though. George Graham, in addition to being president of the Washington branch of the Bank of the United States, had also until recently been interim secretary of war for President James Monroe. In the fall of 1818 he came to Galveztown as part of a mission to keep an eye on the activities of Americans in Texas, as well as to persuade Laffite to abandon his Campeachy enterprises. He saw for himself that men like Bowie were buying slaves from Laffite, made an official protest, and secured Laffite's disingenuous promise to give up the place in a few months.94
In fact Laffite remained until early 1821, but the Bowies ceased their involvement months earlier. By John Bowie's reckoning they made $65,000 from their slave smuggling. Divided three ways between James, Rezin, and John, that meant more than $21,000 apiece. If Stephen participated, or if the Bowie blood ran true to form and they cut him in, the share of each would still have been over $16,000. Yet the numbers may be deceptive, for chances are that while they had to pay cash to buy the slaves at auction themselves—plus any bribe or cut required by Sterrett and others—their own buyers were very likely to pay with a combination of cash and promissory notes, especially in a depressed economy. Thus they may only have realized a fraction of that $65,000 immediately, and some of the balance they probably never got, for James Bowie was not the only man in Louisiana to renege on a note. Whatever they actually realized, John Bowie quite candidly admitted that they “soon spent all our earnings.”95
They could have stayed at the business longer, but other imperatives drew them away. John had political ambitions, and being a smuggler would hardly advance them. Rezin, too, had some political interests, and his growing plantations and community station required his complete attention at home. Stephen, if he was ever involved more than peripherally, had a daughter by the summer of 1820, and now a plantation of his own to manage. Only James was free of ties and obligations. The slave business had brought some travel and adventure, and certainly some profit, even if he had to wait for much of it. It also showed him a species of crime easy on the conscience because it left no victim yet still offered considerable profit. He stole from no one when he smuggled slaves. The federal government profited, the planters who needed slaves got a good product at fair market price, and he made money in the bargain.
As for the law, if the breaking of it ever bothered him at all, he could always comfort himself that many thought it a bad law in the first place. But then, as evidenced by his evasion of the debt to Jesse Andrus, conscience in his business dealings—so long as they were not with family or friends—did not overburden James Bowie. Moreover, the fact that he chose to default and then renege on a debt to a judge revealed that he was none too thoughtful either. When he saw an opportunity, he lunged at it, stopping neither for careful reflection and planning nor for consideration of consequences. Where it concerned making money, he showed even at this age that he mirrored Tocq
ueville's observation of Southern men that “they feel that they are getting poor because they are not getting rich as quickly as their neighbors.”96 Impatience for profit was a part of his nature, and by the latter months of 1820 other opportunities at home in Louisiana called that dwarfed the slave business for a nature like his. Owning neither plantation nor home of his own now, at the age of twenty-four he was going to make a bid to be the biggest land speculator the Southwest had ever seen.97
3
CROCKETT
1815-1824
It now became necessary that I should tell the people something about the government, and an eternal sight of other things that I knowed nothing more about than I did about Latin.
DAVID CROCKETT, 1834
David Crockett saw more than enough of death during his service with the volunteers to become quite inured to the sight of suffering, but those had been Creek, his enemies, on faraway battlefields. Within a few months, however, death called at his own modest cabin on Bean's Creek and would not be denied. That summer his wife, Polly, fell ill, her problem undiagnosed. It could have been any one of the several frontier killers like typhoid, cholera, or the so-called milksick, which came in epidemics. She did not die quickly but lingered and suffered somewhere between two days and two weeks before she expired. When Crockett buried her near the cabin, he laid to rest as well much of the romance within him. There would be another woman, perhaps several, but only Polly Finley seems to have captured his heart. He ever after held the memory of the death of his “tender and loving wife” as “the hardest trial which ever falls to the lot of man.”1
Crockett always displayed a fair pragmatism in his character. When he needed something, he went after it purposefully. When he decided as a young man that he needed a wife, he looked and tried until he found one. Now he was nearly thirty, with three small children, one of them still an infant, all of them needing care and he with a failing farm to work. In like circumstances men often broke up their families, placing the children in the homes of friends and relatives, but Crockett felt too attached to his sons John and William, and to baby Margaret. “I couldn't bear the thought of scattering my children,” he confessed, showing once more that tender and sentimental side that often countered the image of the rough backwoodsman. He tried having his brother's family live with him, but he found that his sister-in-law did not favor his children as he thought she should. And he missed the company of a wife for himself. Nothing would do but that he should find another.
Not far from Bean's Creek, Crockett knew of a widow named Elizabeth Patton. She had lost her husband, James, to something much more dramatic than the milksick or cholera: The Creeks slaughtered him at Fort Mims. Losing a man in so traumatic a fashion as a massacre might have discouraged some women from marrying again, but Elizabeth had two small children to care for, besides which her luck with almost any second husband seemed bound to be better than with her first. To David she looked a likely prospect. Moreover, she owned her own farm, came of a comparatively affluent family, and was rumored to have eight hundred dollars in cash of her own, an almost princely sum in this backwoods settlement. An alliance with her promised to better not only his present condition but also to bode well for his future prospects and those of his children. In the winter and spring of 1816 he saw her occasionally at social affairs and started to apply the smile in his ruddy cheeks and all the winning manners that came so naturally to him. Yet it was more negotiation than courtship, and even when he began calling on her specifically to further his suit, he confessed that he was “as sly about it as a fox when he is going to rob a hen-roost.” This was no courtship based on love but on present and future necessity. Perhaps Elizabeth Patton was not fooled. Crockett himself praised her industry, and she seemed quite sensible enough not only to see through any guise of ardent lover on his part but also to realize that he and she did share mutual needs and, as Crockett put it, “that we could do something for each other.”2
“We soon bargained,” said Crockett, and sometime in the summer of 1816 they went to the home of Elizabeth's father in Franklin County, where they engaged Pastor Richard Calloway to perform the ceremony. Nothing could have been less suited to the solemnity of the occasion, or offered a greater opportunity for Crockett's yarn spinning in future years, than the unscheduled entrance of a pig through the house door when the bride was supposed to enter for the ceremony. Unruffled, Crockett arose from his seat and calmly led the snorting animal back outside, as he did so addressing the beast: “Old Hook, from now on, I'll do the grunting around here.”3 Crockett soon thereafter met his friend James Gowen, who teased him about Elizabeth's eight hundred dollars. Crockett only grinned and replied with the old folk saying that what was “sauce for the goose” became equally “sauce for the gander”: What was hers was now his too.4
Crockett had plans for that “sauce,” for the itch was on him to move again. His small Bean's Creek place was worth very little. Elizabeth's home would bring more, and with what they could get in selling the two, plus his gander's “nest egg,” they could retire his debts and buy something more promising in new country. And there was plenty of new country waiting. During his travels in the Creek War he had seen much of fertile Alabama, and in the wake of the Creek defeat a lot of that territory now came open to settlement as public domain. With three friends he set out in the fall of 1816, across the Tennessee River, and south to Jones Valley, then on to the Black Warrior. The trip seemed cursed from the start. This was a warm season, and wherever they came near water they contended with myriad mosquitoes that bit men and animals. Scarcely were they across the Tennessee when one of Crockett's friends stepped too near a poisonous snake and took a bad bite that forced him to leave the party. Once on the Black Warrior, their horses wandered off in the night and David set off on foot in pursuit. All day he walked, wading creeks and swamps, and when he called at cabins along the way he got reports that his horses had passed by earlier, obviously intent on retracing their steps home.
Crockett believed he walked fifty miles that day, and in the end, exhausted, he gave up and stopped to pass the night with a settler's family. When he awoke the next morning he felt almost too sore to walk but set out to rejoin his companions, only to stop in the early afternoon, dizzy, nauseous, with terrible aches in his head and back. He found his rifle too heavy to carry and himself too weak to walk farther. He just lay down by the side of the trace and waited for the spell to pass. What he did not yet know was that one or more of those mosquitoes that bit him a few days before had left a poison of its own in his system—malaria. Two passing natives stopped and tried to give him some fruit, but he could not eat, and they told him in their frank way that he would surely die. Fearing the same thing himself, he made to stand again but found himself too disoriented, and only covered the mile or so back to a house with their aid. He spent the next several days in delirious fever, taking only warm tea, and then felt well enough to accompany two passing friends back to where he left his original companions. He found them healthy, but Crockett only got worse, and once more had to be left at a nearby house for care while his friends bought horses and returned home, carrying with them the news that he was dying. Behind them Crockett lay speechless in his fever for almost two weeks before it finally broke and he started to mend.
It was well into the fall when Elizabeth Crockett, resigned to being a widow once more, saw in her doorway an emaciated, hollow-eyed, almost unrecognizable man who proved to be her husband. Crockett discovered to his amusement that rumor said not only that he was dead but that two men actually testified to having seen him buried. “I know'd this was a whapper of a lie, as soon as I heard it,” he ever after declared. Yet death had come close enough, and if he knew anything of malaria, he knew that it would come again. Moving his family could never make him escape that cold hand, but even as he slowly recovered he determined anew to take them from the farm that he found as “sickly” as himself.5
Crockett worked his place for nearly a year after his
recovery, but his Alabama experience seems to have put him off returning there to look for cheap land. However, several months earlier the Chickasaw ceded some of their land in south central Tennessee to the United States, and by 1817 it lay open to settlers. Crockett left in the summer of 1817 to explore the region, only to suffer a recurrence of malaria that confined him for some time in the area of Shoal Creek. He recovered, and when he returned to Bean's Creek he announced to his family that they were moving, and at once. Early in the fall they made the eighty-mile trek westward, locating themselves on 160 acres at the head of Shoal Creek about three miles west of the tiny village of Lawrenceburg. In October, within weeks of their arrival, the state officially decreed the area Lawrence County, and about the same time the inhabitants sent a list of nominees for justices of the peace for the new jurisdiction to the legislature. Crockett's name was on the list, and on November 25 the legislature confirmed him. It was to be his very first public office.6
A certain logic suggested Crockett for the position, though a minor one to be sure. Despite his protestations later that he knew nothing of the law and had never read a page of a legal text, the fact remained that he must have learned at least something from his father's service as a constable and magistrate. Moreover, unlike most of his fellow citizens in the new county, Crockett could read and write with increasing facility. And he came to the county with the added cachet of experience in the Creek War and a lieutenant's commission in the Franklin County militia, given him in May 1815. Such things offered no guarantees of administrative ability, but they made him more than qualified to be a justice of the peace.7