Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  A few weeks later Crockett finally acknowledged that he was at war himself. Jackson had campaigned against corruption and for fiscal responsibility, his catchphrases being “retrenchment and reform.” Yet everywhere David looked he saw the opposite. In the Post Office Department huge deficits appeared despite the promises to correct former abuses, and he prepared an open letter to send to his constituents on the matter. He also condemned Jackson's use of the spoils system. “This is high times in this best land of liberty,” he said sarcastically. “This is the effect of this glorious sistem of retrenchment & reform this is the effect of turning out men that knows their duty to accomodate a set of Jackson worshippers.”

  “Can any honist people have the like of this put upon them,” he pondered. “I for one cannot nor will not I would see the whole of them hung up at the devil before I will submit to such carryings on as this.” As all his frustration of the last three years came pouring out, Crockett finally admitted what he had appeared to resist for so long. Whenever he failed or was frustrated, there was always someone behind it, someone of malignant purpose who must bear the blame. Dark men of evil design conspired to hold him down, just as they did all of the poor from whom he sprang, and those same men sought now to pervert the government of the nation he loved. He saw what the president wanted and had schemed to get, but he would not be duped. “I have not got a collar Round my neck marked my dog with the name of Andrew Jackson on it.” As a result, “because I would not take the collar round my neck I was hurld from their party.”40 He liked that aphorism about the dog collar. From now on he would use it again and again.41

  Crockett had come to his epiphany. The enemy was not just Polk and had never been Polk and the others. They were merely instruments. The foe was Jackson himself. He even feared that Jackson might bring on a foreign war, just as a means of assuming the same kind of dictatorial power he had exercised in Florida when still a general.42 That being the case, there was only one way to meet an enemy, the manly way, straight on, out in the open. Crockett never deceived anyone about where he stood in the past, and now he felt it vital that he proclaim his break openly.

  He did so in the House, on February 24, during yet another debate on internal improvements, this time Crockett's unsuccessful advocacy of an appropriation for navigation work on the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. “Although our great man at the head of the nation, has changed his course, I will not change mine,” he proclaimed. “I am yet a Jackson man in principles, but not in name,” he asserted. “I shall insist upon it that I am still a Jackson man, but General Jackson is not; he has become a Van Buren man.” He punctuated his position with yet another new phrase that he would use again and again with variations: “I would rather be politically dead than hypocritically immortalized.” His conscience meant more to him than any elective office.43 Four days later he refined what would become his watchword in his own campaign to come: “I thought with him, as he thought before he was President: he has altered his opinion—I have not changed mine. I have not left the principles which led me to support General Jackson: he has left them and me.” As for his stalled land bill, Jackson's managers were to blame for that. They, even those from Tennessee, had set aside the interests of his constituents in their campaign to drive him out of Congress to replace him with someone who “would run at their bidding and do as they direct.” Let them try.44

  The rest of the session realized Crockett's prediction in January that Congress would accomplish little in the face of the partisan warfare.45 He never got the land bill off the table again, and when Congress adjourned on March 3, he must have been glad to see the doors of the chamber close behind him. He had been powerless to do more than annoy the administration. A friend said that he was utterly “without influence” in Congress, and the painful truth of that had been made all too evident to him.46 Yet he remained in Washington for several weeks, part of the time posing for a portrait and also trying to attend to his ever-perilous financial affairs. There was no question of his de facto alliance with the Clay-Adams men now, though he did not consider himself a member of their party. Undoubtedly they counseled him on what all knew would be a desperate election battle for his seat.

  It was no secret that the Jackson forces were determined to defeat him. Adam Alexander reported to Polk from the district that he heard constituents' rumblings that sounded “decidedly unfavourable to the Western David.”47 Even before the commencement of this last session, they started publishing accusations that Crockett was a bolter and a traitor to Jacksonian democracy and the common man, harping especially on his Indian Bill vote, and the Jackson Gazette, which had been neutral, came out against Crockett in December 1830. When the Jacksonians selected William Fitzgerald of Weakley County to oppose the incumbent, the Gazette endorsed him. “He can't ‘whip his weight in wild cats,’ nor ‘leap the Mississippi,’ nor ‘mount a rainbow and slide off into eternity and back at pleasure,’” said one correspondent, parodying Crockett's own vernacular, “but this we believe, that Mr. Fitzgerald will make a better legislator; that he will as far excel Col. Crockett upon the floor of Congress, as the Col. does him in the character of a mountebank.”48 Jackson himself broke his silence on Crockett in April, writing directly to friends in Madison County to say that “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.”49 For both men, now, the contest had become personal.

  Before he left for home, Crockett borrowed five hundred dollars from William Seaton, Gales's partner, and of course a prominent Clay supporter. Whether it was for debts, to pay for the portrait, or to help fund his campaign he did not say, but clearly Whigs were now willing to make money available to him. Yet in order to pay it back he had to borrow another six hundred dollars from a fellow representative when the debt came due.50 He did not actually leave for Tennessee until the first of May, going by coach along the old National Road through western Maryland to Wheeling, Virginia, where he took passage on the steamboat Courier for the trip down the Ohio. Along the way he accidentally left behind his new portrait, hardly an auspicious way to begin his race for reelection. Worse, he did not reach home until the middle of May, meaning he had already lost fully two months of potential campaign time.51

  He returned to Tennessee an embattled figure and yet a folk hero in the making, and surely that would aid him in his race. That newspaper reference to him as one of the “Lions of the West” was no accidental turn of phrase. Thanks to the fact that his independence and his colorful vernacular made him good copy, and thanks to the hunger of the people now for a truly original American character like him, he was known throughout the nation, and especially in the East, where there was always a half-patronizing taste for bumpkins in their literature. James Fenimore Cooper and Washington Irving were supplying the literary need quite nicely now, but Crockett was the only man in the country who fitted the evolving stereotype in the flesh. His story-telling was already becoming legend. “No matter what we may say of the merits of a story,” said one of his listeners in February 1830, “it is a very rare production which does not derive its interest more from the manner than the matter.”52 Those who sat in the House gallery to listen to him saw “a true frontiersman, with a small dash of civilization and a great deal of shrewdness transplanted in political life,” said Ben Poore of Washington. “He was neither grammatical nor grammatical nor graceful, but no rudeness of language can disguise strong sense and shrewdness.”53

  He had become the image of the new American ideal, as he put it himself, a “self-taught man,” part legend and part reality. He declared during the coming canvass that “I never had six months education in my life I was raised in obs[c]urity without either wealth or education I have made myself to every station in life that I ever filled through my own exertions.”54 Unwittingly—or perhaps with a bit of self-awareness—he defined the very essence of the aspiration of the age of Jackson, of this new man, this American. He was Cooper
's Natty Bumppo, Sir Walter Scott's Rob Roy McGregor, and Irving's Brom Bones of Sleepy Hollow. Literature idealized the free man, the independent frontiersman, and here was Crockett, the living incarnation. He possessed every asset for the role—humble birth, poverty, lack of schooling, experience as a hunter and warrior, an original—which could mean singular, odd, or eccentric—manner of speech and repartee, and the rise to prominence in national affairs. His life represented the triumph of liberty and democracy, for nowhere else on the planet could such a man live such a life. The public did not see his private aspirations, his constant struggle to rise to the middle class, to look, act, and be taken for a gentleman, and did not want to see that man. They preferred the Crockett who was, like the idealized image of the westerner then sweeping the salons of America, a natural aristocrat, a truly new character on the world stage, the first truly and uniquely original American character.55

  Inevitably, that lost portrait was not the only likeness of him abroad in 1831 as he prepared to face Fitzgerald. The actor Hackett, who had portrayed Jeremiah Kentucky the year before, enjoyed such success with the part that he craved a play in which he could limn such a character not in a supporting role, but as the star. He urged his friend James Kirke Paulding to write such a play for him, and Paulding knew where to go for material. Why make it all up when he had but to portray a living man. He asked his friend the writer Jarvis to send him “a few sketches, short stories, and incidents, of Kentucky or Tennessee manners, and especially some of their peculiar phrases and comparisons.” Even more specifically Paulding suggested that “if you can add, or invent, a few ludicrous Scenes of Col. Crockett at Washington, you will be sure of my everlasting gratitude.”56

  By the latter part of 1830, when it became known that Paulding was writing a new play to be titled The Lion of the West; or, A Trip toWashington, there was no doubt in the public mind that its leading character, the outlandish Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, was not just similar to Crockett but in large measure based on him. Paulding actually wrote to Crockett disingenuously to assure him that Wildfire was really a general character of the western sort, and Crockett, who of course had neither read nor seen the as-yet-unperformed play, took him at his word that the character simply represented “many who fill offices and who are as untaught as I am.”57 And so, even before The Lion of the West made its debut in November 1831, many Americans knew of and anxiously awaited its appearance, and knew as well from rumors that Paulding's buckskin-clad Wildfire, marching about the stage wearing a wildcat-skin hat, would be neither wholly fact nor wholly fiction, but rather Crockett as seen in a mirror skewed out of shape, and thus distorting the image.

  Crockett needed all the positive notoriety he could get, even at the risk of becoming a folk or literary hero, for others were distorting his image for different ends when he went out on the stump. “I was hunted down like a wild varment,” he said later, “and in this hunt every little newspaper in the district, and every little pin-hook lawyer was engaged.”58 The Jackson forces portrayed him as a Henry Clay man, reviled him as the “coon killer” and “the authorized Whig jester.” Fitzgerald's friends furnished him, and the Gazette, with copies of Crockett's votes, and as well with listings of the number of votes he had missed. Certainly Crockett had given his opponents more than enough material to throw at him, especially on the Indian Bill, and then he overtly helped them himself with his announced repudiation of Jackson.59

  Crockett knew he was beleaguered from the start. Despite his mounting debts, he needed even more money for the canvass, and what he got from the bank was not enough. On May 19, just days after returning to Weakley County, he sold his property there to Elizabeth's brother George Patton, selling a slave woman in the bargain. By making himself a man without property, Crockett actually became one of the landless whose cause he championed. It must have been a very difficult choice for him to make, and no doubt further strained relations with Elizabeth, but Crockett decided he had no choice: The greater goal justified the sacrifice. As if to reinforce his own determination that he was doing the proper thing, he scribbled across the bottoms of the two sales documents a simple phrase: “Be allways sure you are right then Go, ahead.”60 Crockett liked certain aphorisms when he coined them himself, and those that were his own he used repeatedly. He liked this one. Perhaps he would use it in the future.

  As the stump campaign wore on through the summer, Crockett tried to drive home his theme of independence; that Jackson had left him, not the other way around; and that the Jackson machine cared nothing for the poor people of West Tennessee. Even if these charges were true, the trouble was that his new friends in the Clay camp offered even less, for they were largely on record as being opposed to preemption rights or cheap land for the poor. Crockett advocated the rechartering of the Bank of the United States, due soon for renewal, in spite of Jackson's opposition.61 Tennesseans wanted the Cherokee and Chickasaw removed, and they did not share Crockett's enthusiasm for internal improvements that had to come from high Whig tariffs. As for Jackson, Crockett could be nothing but honest. He would never support him or vote for him for reelection. Again and again he sang the old refrain of having been one of the first to volunteer to fight the Creek with Old Hickory, but the Jackson in the White House now was not the same man. “I never did support men and forsake principles,” he said, “nor I never will.” He “always parsued one straight forward corse and I ever expect to.”62“I have acted fearless and indepandant and I never will regret my course.”63

  The campaign had the usual spate of trickery, but there was a grimness to it this time that showed more malice than fun. Fitzgerald's handlers went far and wide through the large district making appointments for Crockett to speak—about which he knew nothing, of course. When the day for the speeches arrived, Crockett naturally did not appear, but Fitzgerald and his supporters did, haranguing the crowds with Crockett's record when he could not defend himself.64 As for Fitzgerald himself, Crockett regarded him as “a little county court lawyer with very little standing he is what we call here a perfect lick spittle.” He believed Fitzgerald had authorized the libels and false-hoods that appeared in the newspapers. Meanwhile, when the two did meet on the stump, Fitzgerald came with a chorus of those same “little pin hook county court lawyers” who attested vociferously to anything he said. “The truth is the Jackson worshippers became desperate and had to resort to any and every thing,” said Crockett.65 They even tried to use the very quaintness and “eccentricity” that made Crockett a celebrity in the East by turning it against him in ridicule. Adam Huntsman, one of those “pin hook” lawyers, was something of a writer himself, and in the Jackson press began to publish vernacular letters promoting Fitzgerald. “I air oppose to Kirnil Krokets lection,” he wrote. “I think he air not fit to go to Kongress.” Crockett responded in kind, signing himself as Jacob Van Spetts and saying that “my hatvice to you is to jine Crockett.”66 The letters went back and forth, only getting worse, until the editor apologized for the mockery of journalism produced by the canvass.67

  Crockett never exhibited the confidence in this campaign that had characterized his two previous runs, and the Jacksonians smelled victory three weeks before the polling. One reported to Polk that Crockett would be beaten, predicting that “the name of David the mighty man in the River Country will no longer Disgrace the Western District in the National Legislature.”68 Even before the results came in from the polls, Crockett knew himself to be bested. “I expect I am beaten,” he told a friend on August 22. “I have one consolation I would rather be beaten and be a man than to be elected and be a little puppy dog.”69 The actual count was not as bad as it could have been, considering all the effort the Jacksonians had thrown at him, and revealed the bedrock reserve of support Crockett enjoyed in his district. Some 16,482 voters cast ballots, a dramatic increase over 1829, showing just how much interest the contest excited, and Fitzgerald won by only 8,534 to 7,948, a margin of just 586. Crockett took seventeen of the eighteen counties, including Wea
kley, where both he and Fitzgerald lived, but in Madison County his opponent heavily trounced him, and that decided the issue. Had his mood allowed him, David might have found pride in the fact that his vote significantly outstripped his winning totals in his two previous elections.70 Instead, unwilling to accept defeat gracefully, and convinced as always that any defeat represented dishonesty and conspiracy, he ascribed his loss to “managemint and rascality,” and attempted to challenge the result, charging fraud, but Congress refused.71 As for Fitzgerald, Crockett could not find it in himself to accept defeat with grace. He would refer to his opponent only as “the thing that had the name of beating me,”and receded into self-righteous self-pity, saying: “I have been made a political marter of for being an honest man.” There was no doubt that he would run again.72“I have always believed I was an honist man,” he proclaimed, “and if the world will do me justice they will find it to be the case.”73 Two years later he would give the voters that chance.

  8

  TRAVIS

  1809-1831

  I Travers by birth a Norman

  To gain victorious conquest