Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  As soon as the session adjourned on August 24, Crockett went back to Lawrence and moved his family to the new Obion claim. He had cleared about twenty-five acres or less, now growing corn, and the family moved into a typical “dogtrot” house, two sixteen-by-eighteen-foot hewn-poplar-log cabins connected by an eight-foot open passageway in the center. A fireplace and chimney of branches and twigs plastered with mud heated each cabin, and about forty feet south of the house he had dug a shallow well. In time he would cover the logs with split-log siding and lay a wooden floor inside the living cabin, but there would be little more beautification than that. Given time, he would also plant a few dozen peach trees and some apples in a small orchard.31

  Once there, he stayed only long enough to harvest the corn remaining that had not been ruined by deer, then left once more to roam the woods on what now became for him an annual fall hunt. He hunted until Christmas, when he ran out of powder for his flintlock rifle, then nearly froze to death crossing icy expanses of water trying to reach more powder to continue the hunt.32

  Once more he was gone so long Elizabeth believed him dead, and by now she must have begun to wonder if, with her husband's repeated lengthy absences, he had married her only to have someone to look after his children. Certainly a wife was a necessity for a frontiersman, but increasingly it appeared that to Crockett, Elizabeth was only that.

  He kept right on hunting through the winter, proud that he kept his family supplied with meat, and proud as well of all those long-remembered kills.33 He also kept his sights polished for any wolves he came across, for the county paid a three-dollar bounty for a wolf pelt. That winter of 1823 those bounties and what he got for his deer and bear hides was the only money Crockett earned. He had to take them all the way to Jackson, nearly forty miles south, and there he bought the few supplies like coffee and sugar, and of course powder and lead, that he could not harvest from the land in Carroll. There he could also “take a horn” occasionally, even meeting old friends from his time in the Creek War and reliving with them stories of earlier days. At least once Crockett even let the drink, or the frustration of his poverty, or some other provocation get the better of his usually pacific nature, and he struck a man, earning an indictment for simple assault.34

  Happily politics saved him from anything worse, for on a February 1823 trip to Jackson he spent an evening in a tavern with Jackson's nephew by marriage, Dr. William E. Butler, and local politicos Maj. Joseph Lynn and Duncan McIver. Despite their conviviality with one another, each of the three intended to seek the seat in the legislature for the new county, and during the ensuing conversation someone jokingly suggested to Crockett that he ought to run as well. Living a good two days from Jackson or any other settlement, Crockett said the idea was preposterous and dismissed it, apparently without further thought. But a few weeks later at home, a passerby showed him an issue of the new Jackson Pioneer, containing an announcement of his candidacy.

  It may have been accident or, as Crockett later maintained, a prank at his expense. He may even have been behind it himself but unwilling to tell Elizabeth that he wanted to leave yet again for months at a time for politicking. He expressed chagrin, whether real or pretended, at seeing his name in the paper, and announced that he would not be made fun of. Whoever was responsible for this, Crockett told his wife, he would make the man pay. No one would have fun with his name at his expense. He would go to Jackson and campaign and turn the jest around on its anonymous author by winning the election. Once again David Crockett was the reluctant candidate. He neither sought nor wanted the office. It had come looking for him, in the guise of deceit and ridicule. Now he must win it to repudiate a trickster and defend his honor.35

  His campaign proved to be a virtual repeat of his first bid for office, for, having found a winning formula for capturing votes, Crockett was sensible enough not to change it. He capitalized on both his local reputation as a bear hunter and the small notoriety given his “gentleman from the cane” sobriquet, both of which sat well with these rough voters. His three opponents soon agreed that only one should oppose him, and Butler got the nod, in part because even Crockett confessed that he was clever, and almost certainly because his family connection to Jackson gave him considerable clout. At the first opportunity, Crockett accosted Butler at a stump meeting for the district congressional candidates and, quite conscious of the crowd listening to him, good-naturedly warned the doctor how he would use him in the canvass. He threatened to wear a special hunting shirt with two ludicrously big pockets, one for twists of tobacco and the other for a jug of spirits, and he would give a chew from one and a drink from the other to every man he met, at the same time asking for his vote.36 Moreover, to combat Butler's clear advantage in funds, Crockett promised to depopulate the forests of Obion of their wolves to sell their pelts, if he had to, to buy his whiskey and tobacco. Crockett left Butler slightly bemused, and the crowd of onlookers thoroughly amused.

  Once the electioneering commenced in earnest, Crockett aimed more of his tricks at Butler. When the doctor invited David to his home in Jackson for a small frolic after one of their debates, Crockett made an elaborate point of leaping from the floor to a chair without stepping on the carpet, and kept his feet on the chair rungs while sitting rather than touch them to the rug. If any present missed the point, he soon gave it to them in a speech chiding Butler for the fact that he walked on finer materials than the wives and daughters of the poor voters could afford to wear. And during a series of meetings in which both candidates gave substantially the same address time after time, Crockett arose to speak first one day and took advantage of his keen ear for mimicry and his retentive memory to give Butler's talk almost word for word, effectively rendering the doctor speechless.37

  Crockett certainly did not know it, but his electioneering practices, especially as he and others remembered them in later years, unconsciously cast him firmly in the mold of an ancient folk hero, the so-called Trickster. The character—dating back to the semimythical Merlin and beyond in Western culture—had his counterparts in other societies, including among the native populations of America. He was an outward buffoon, yet inwardly calculating for effect. He played outlandish pranks, some of them mean, and took pleasure in fooling others, though he seemed often to be easily fooled himself. He knew good from evil, could do both at will, yet at times seemed wittingly or unwittingly to trust his fortunes to the dictates of others. He both molded events and lived as the hostage of fortune. Above all he combined a mischievous nature with an unbending sense of justice, and saw himself—and wanted others to see him—as an example to the common people. He was never entirely assimilated into society, but always on its edges, where freedom from restraint gave scope to his extrahuman appetites.38 Scores of real and mythologized folk heroes through the ages fit that mold, each slightly sculpted to fit the culture of the moment, and each generally needing only a popular movement of some sort among the lowly masses to come to the fore. In 1823 Americans had no folk heroes as yet. They were too new a people, their only household gods the Founding Fathers, men too lofty and remote to become the stuff of legend. But the common man was rising now, and he would want one of his own for an icon. The recently deceased Daniel Boone nearly fit the requirement, yet he was too contemplative, brave but quiet, with none of the roughness and outlandishness, tinged with violence, that resonated with the common folk. They admired Boone, but he lacked the stuff of a human talisman.39 The ancestral practices of their culture for millennia, and seemingly human instinct itself, would compel them when the time came to look for the Trickster. And out in West Tennessee a man pranked and played and spread his little mayhem, all the while pressing for the freedom of his kind, even as he acted as the prisoner of the prejudices and fears of his class. In David Crockett, though yet he knew it not, there were the makings of a folk hero.

  When two more late entries came into the legislative race, they only took votes away from Dr. Butler, and Crockett won handily with a majority of nearly 250.
In its way the election represented a triumph for one resident in the district barely more than a year; now a seasoned legislative veteran, he made the long journey to Murfreesboro for the opening of the session in September 1823. His prospects looked excellent as now he found himself placed on three committees: military affairs, one overseeing drawing new county lines, and best of all, the one charged with addressing his pet interest, the vacant lands. He should have been greatly pleased, and indeed, perhaps he felt a bit too pleased with himself, or rather cockier than was wise in a lonely representative from the far west of the state, for almost immediately his prideful independence revealed his limitations as an effective statesman.

  Politics was about playing the game, a hand washing a hand, and mutual scratching of backs, and all the other euphemisms that party and machine politicians used to express the simple idea that a man got ahead by integrity, tempered with loyalty and compromise. The road ahead in Murfreesboro just now lay open to the followers of Andrew Jackson, who expected to see him nominated for the presidency in 1824. Meanwhile Sen. John Williams's term had just expired, and he announced his intention to seek reelection. Since he and Jackson bitterly disliked each other, Old Hickory wanted to see another incumbent replace him, but in the end Williams appeared so strong that Jackson himself had to agree to run at the very last moment. The contest in the legislature—which chose senators—proved to be embarrassingly close, and Crockett repeatedly took a lead in supporting Williams. Jackson won with a margin of just six votes—he later declined the office—and Crockett, though friendly to Jackson's presidential aspirations, made no effort to downplay his opposition. Williams had done a good job and deserved reelection, and that was enough for him, he said. Unstated, perhaps, was his resentment at the less-than-devoted interest of some of the Jackson supporters in the western land issue. “It was the best vote I ever gave,” he said later. “I had supported the public interest, and cleared my conscience in giving it, instead of gratifying the private ambition of a man.”40

  Yet Crockett was disingenuous with himself if he believed that, for he knew as well as any that Jackson really did not want the office and had no “private ambition” in that direction. Jackson and his supporters wanted the office denied to Williams, who could be an embarrassment in Washington two years hence. However, even though he favored Jackson for the presidency, Crockett could not bend his pride in his independence. He would not go along with the group when they expected him to do so, even if he shared their ultimate goal. In that self-righteous pride of the poor man who, ironically, could afford to be independent because he thought he had nothing to lose, Crockett was dangerously prone to be independent solely for its own sake. He called it obeying “my conscience,” but now and thereafter David Crockett would repeatedly confuse his conscience with his pride. It cost him now and would cost him more in an arena in which men needed the support of their peers to accomplish anything, and in which they won that support through loyalty and the inevitable tradeoffs of politics. Crockett's love affair with his conscience may have made him admirable as a man, but it completely unsuited him for the world of politics. He would make his independence his personal religion, recklessly unmindful that religions have a way of creating martyrs.41

  While Jackson's friends in the legislature went on their guard with Crockett thanks to his stiff-necked support of Williams, he spent the rest of his legislative session and the one to follow addressing the same kind of issues he had encountered the term before. Without fail he supported those bills and resolutions that might in any way relieve or benefit men like himself. He opposed using prison labor on state projects, knowing that not a few men in Tennessee jails had committed no crime other than debt. He spoke in favor of the State Bank of Tennessee and the plan to establish branches in every county, believing that it would make loans available to the poor so they could buy their farms and start their businesses. Ironically, considering his own electioneering techniques, he favored a bill to prohibit selling liquor near polling places to prevent candidates from buying votes with drinks, yet he argued against an attempt to place other restrictions on taverns. Revealing his frequent inability to recognize a conflict of interest, he even introduced a bill to provide monetary relief for widows and encouragement for men to marry them, something he had done himself. If there was a bit of self-serving in many of his votes, it was largely due to the fact that the constituents whose interests he served were chiefly people like himself. He saw himself as a champion of the poor and did his best to live up to the image.42

  Of course Crockett also had his bit of fun, as now he felt increasingly comfortable speaking from the floor. He kept the pose of the ignorant bumpkin when it suited him, and made no attempt to broadcast the fact that—for his time and place—he had a better-than-average education, or that he read much of the news of the state and nation in the local press.43 Even when substantive arguments could be launched on an issue, more often than not he chose to wear the armor of the bumpkin's naive wit into battle. When another member introduced a resolution to move the capital from Murfreesboro to Nashville—a thinly veiled gesture for Jackson, who lived in the latter town—Crockett could not resist responding when one of the transparent arguments in the case was the poor food and housing in Murfreesboro and the unfriendliness of its people. He arose and declared in opposition to the measure that for his part he had never lived so well in his life as he did there in the capital. At his boardinghouse they had turkeys and pies and puddings every night, and he suggested that it would be much cheaper to move the poor man who introduced the resolution over to where Crockett lived than to move the government to Nashville. And as for the people not being polite, why, in Murfreesboro even the blacks took off their hats to him when he passed, something the white people certainly did not do for him at home.44

  When it came to the matter of land, however, he was deadly earnest. In the amorphous allegiances in the legislature, with no firm parties taking shape, almost everyone backed Jackson for the presidency, and that provided the nearly universal basis of loyalty that Crockett had peripherally challenged. Within the legislature two factions followed different Jackson adherents, one led by Polk, and the other by Felix Grundy. Thus even a very sophisticated assemblyman had to step carefully lest he offend the wrong faction. When Grundy proposed to sell vacant state land for cash, Crockett broke with Polk and opposed the measure, arguing that it would price the poor out of contention, and that especially in districts like his where no one had any money, the land would be bought and monopolized by speculators from outside the district who would not actually settle the land, thus retarding population growth. He wanted the land sold on credit in whole or part, and declared that he had not come to Murfreesboro to “legislate for ready-money men.” He then sided with Polk in opposition to the presentation of a bank of warrants from the University of North Carolina, all of them unclaimed warrants owed to the state's soldiers and now passed on by its legislature. They would evict hundreds if not thousands of squatters, and Crockett demanded that those occupants be given first chance to buy their land. In the end he and Polk got them a preemption right to buy their smallholdings, but the North Carolina claims remained unresolved. Thus, too, his support for the state bank as a means of occupants getting loans to buy their land. But then he broke with Polk once more when he voted in favor of widows—always a favorite topic with Crockett—being allowed to keep land on which they squatted. Moreover, he and Polk now revealed a fundamental difference that would dog them in the future. Polk favored selling public land to raise money for colleges and universities; Crockett only wanted the proceeds spent on common schools. He could not countenance the sons of the wealthy—the only ones who would attend a university—having their education subsidized by money the hard-pressed poor labored to pay for their pitiful quarter sections.

  Having ardently favored instructing the Tennessee congressional delegation to ask Congress to authorize selling the vacant land in the eastern half of the state, Crockett even more
enthusiastically backed a similar petition now calling for the sale of the vacant land in the western half. Moreover, he continued his efforts to reform the manner of surveys on land warrants, and to protect occupants from being victimized by unscrupulous speculators in warrants. He also addressed taxation, trying to reduce the burden on the small landholder, and when Governor Carroll yet again tried to get a vote to call a convention to revise the state's constitution, it finally passed, Crockett's vote being one of the vital two-thirds majority.45

  In sum, by the time Crockett left Murfreesboro at the end of his second term on October 22, 1824, he could look back on his record with pride—of which he sometimes possessed too much. He stood up for the needs and concerns of his constituents, who by now spread across a tencounty expanse thanks to the new counties created in part through his efforts. If the common man of western Tennessee sought a champion, he found him in Crockett, and though he actually passed very few bills of his own, and none of real consequence, still he stood up for his people. He gave them what they wanted and expected from their elected representative. At the same time, and at first without knowing it, he also began to give them something they needed spiritually, something even Jackson could not give them. He gave them distinction and—even if it came in a bumptious and often self-deprecating manner—self-esteem, a powerful and heady feeling to those who for generations had been the unseen, unheard, and ignored bottom drawer of society. The aphrodisiac lure of that newfound regard could well lead them, and him, untold distances from the boggy canebrakes of the Obion.