Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  Crockett himself passed the next eighteen months largely in seclusion, scarcely seen or heard, and leaving almost no trace of his comings and goings. No doubt he went back to the long hunt, as much from necessity as to find anew that personal victory in the killing that evaded him on the stump. He saw a few friends, of course, including the equally impoverished young Ben McCulloch, who lived in Dyersburg.7 Sometime in 1832 he also managed a trip east to Washington and Philadelphia. After four years as a congressman, enjoying the bustle and excitement of the cities, he simply could not sit and stagnate on a hard-scrabble patch on the Obion. Besides, he needed to deal with his friends at the bank, to discuss both his past loans and possible future notes to finance his 1833 campaign. He would need Whig support to help counter all that the Jacksonians would throw at him, and this trip afforded an opportunity to enlist such assistance, which the Whigs would be only too willing to offer, for their benefit more than his. Either on his way to or from the East, he joined Matthew St. Clair Clarke for some of the journey, regaling him at length with stories of his life in the backwoods and on his hunts. Clarke very likely pumped Crockett consciously for recollections, and it is quite possible that the two came to an understanding of how that information was to be used.8

  Soon enough the spring of 1833 arrived, and with it the anticipation of another canvass. Crockett did not wait to be importuned to seek election: It had been his determination since the day of his defeat in August 1831. Fitzgerald was his opponent, of course, but by a mutual pact both candidates agreed to conduct the campaign on a higher plane than last time.9 When David took the stump he tried to address the questions facing Congress in the next term—and much had happened in his time out of office. The rift between Jackson and former Vice-President John C. Calhoun grew ever greater, especially over the tariff, and when Jackson reneged on earlier promises and supported a permanent tariff that seemed unfavorable to the agrarian South, Calhoun's South Carolina met in a state convention that proclaimed a policy of nullification. They asserted that the Union was a compact of sovereign states, and that any state could nullify the acts of president and Congress within its own borders. Jackson denounced nullification as anarchy and disunion and threatened force to impose the rule of federal law everywhere. Compromise at the winter 1833 session of Congress averted outright crisis at the last minute, but the whole issue remained hot in the minds of the people.

  Then there was the Bank of the United States. Jackson never liked the bank, thanks largely to its perceived Whig leanings, and his own prejudice against anything savoring of monopoly, which the government charter of the bank certainly implied. Biddle unwisely allowed the bank's recharter to become an issue in the 1832 election. Even though Congress passed the recharter, Jackson successfully vetoed the measure, and then when he defeated Henry Clay and won a second term, the bank's unqualified support of Clay doomed it forever. By July 1833, even as Crockett and Fitzgerald stumped the district, it became known that Jackson intended to bleed the bank dry by removing the government's deposits to meet operating expenses, and instead of replenishing them to place deposits in selected state banks. He would kill the bank even before its charter expired in 1836.

  And, of course, for Crockett himself, Andrew Jackson was a campaign issue, and everything that had happened in his time out of office only further convinced him that Old Hickory had become a tyrant, abetted now by having Van Buren as vice-president, obviously the hand-chosen successor. On the stump now Crockett spoke out strongly for rechartering the bank and holding onto its deposits. Speaking at Brownsville, Crockett accused Jackson of seeking to close the bank in order to take control of the deposits himself to use for the purpose of ensuring Van Buren's succession.10 Should they be a nation of laws “or have a despot,” he asked them. As he later put it himself, his constituents told him to “go ahead, Crockett.”11

  Predictably the Fitzgerald forces once more sought to ridicule Crockett for his ignorance, but he had no problem with that question. “It is objected to me that I want learning. Look to your President. Look to your President I say. What does he know.” Harking back to the “blab” school lessons he learned, he boasted that “I will spell with him all the way from AB—ab up to Crucifix and beat him at that.” The reference to the cross suggested that Crockett still associated his defeat in 1831 with martyrdom.

  There was another reason for his reference to the Crucifixion. Wisely his opponents did not play the bumpkin card too strongly this time. Paulding's The Lion of the West was an enormous success wherever it played now, and the public appetite for the backwoodsman only grew. Calling attention to Crockett in that idiom would only help him. Instead the Democrats engaged Adam Huntsman to attack Crockett with a biblical satire called The Book of Chronicles, West of the Tennessee and East of the Mississippi Rivers. The pamphlet appeared in the district in June and was extensively distributed. Huntsman, known locally as Blackhawk, burlesqued Crockett as a would-be savior of the poor whites of the district. “And it came to pass in those days when Andrew was chief Ruler over the Children of Columbia, that there arose a mighty man in the river country, whose name was David,” and so it went. Huntsman accused Crockett of falling into the clutches of Clay, Adams, and Daniel Webster, and making a bargain with them that he would join them if they supported his land bill.12 The vehicle and satire were crude but made an effective point, and Crockett himself saw no humor in it. He thought Huntsman unprincipled for writing such a document, and suspected that his motive was to achieve notoriety in order to run against Crockett himself in 1835. “I have no confidence in him,” said David.13

  If the Jacksonians knew that the Nimrod Wildfire weapon was a weak one in their hands, there is no doubt that Crockett recognized it for all its power and used it to the full. Paulding had followed The Lion of the West with a novel in 1832 called Westward Ho!, once again populated with colorful frontier characters, one of whom echoed Crockett's own growing trademark when he said: “I do just what I think right.” Crockett now used the phrase liberally himself, though typically it varied before he found its final form. Daniel Webster, whom Crockett certainly knew and might well have met in Washington the year before, said that Crockett told him that his watch phrase was “If for the right, go a-head.”14 By the end of the year he refined it to its permanent form, “Be always sure you're right—THEN GO AHEAD.”15

  Crockett's recognition of the potential of exploiting his frontiers-man image was further confirmed by what had been appearing in the press around the nation, and of which he could not be entirely unaware. As far away as New York's spas at Saratoga Springs, visitors that summer read stories in their newspapers, not about this campaign but tales of “the notorious Davy Crockett.”16 The reason those tales were there was the next step in the progression of the literary exploitation of the Crockett idiom. In January 1833 a new book came from the presses, Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee. The book made an immediate hit, sold out rapidly, and appeared the same year in another edition titled Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee. No author's name appeared on the book, but Matthew St. Clair Clarke almost certainly wrote it, and was probably even composing it at the time of his travels with Crockett, and possibly without Crockett's knowledge.17

  The appearance of Clarke's book was enormously propitious timing for Crockett, and given his Whig connections, Clarke may have meant it to be so. His close relationship to Biddle certainly afforded both a motive, and even raised the possibility that Biddle paid Clarke to write it, since the actual royalties went to someone else.18 While it contained much of truth that he could only have gotten firsthand from Crockett himself, the book contained as much of Jeremiah Kentucky and Nimrod Wildfire. It employed every cliché of the frontiersman, and then took the backwoods vernacular already so closely associated with Crockett and exaggerated it even more into something so ignorant and ungrammatical that Crockett himself was angered at the caricature. “I'm that same David Crockett, fresh from the
back-woods,” it proclaimed, and then added the by-now-obligatory “Half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with snapping turtle.” In places it did little more than lift phrases from The Lion of the West and combine all manner of frontier stories to present them as though lived or told by Crockett. Clarke even included the notion that Crockett could “grin” wild creatures into giving themselves up to him without being shot, or that he once funded a campaign party by selling the same coon skin to a tavern keeper over and over again without being caught.19

  That buffoon image was one that Crockett struggled in his personal life to avoid. He wanted to be a gentleman. Yet he could not help but realize how potent the Clarke book's popularity was in his favor. Then, too, it may have upset him that someone was making money from his life story—or a parody of it—when it had been his life and he needed the money.20 But as he traveled the stump during this canvass he encountered time and time again people who had read the book, or seen extracts from it in the newspapers, or merely heard about it. Moreover, when he told them repeatedly that he had nothing to do with the book and that it was full of fiction, they invariably suggested that he should write his own story. It would set matters straight. Better yet, they would buy it to read.21 That got his attention.

  So did the newspaper letters of Maj. Jack Downing. Seba Smith, a New Englander, recognized the literary potential of the new common man and tried to stretch the definitions of the idiom by inventing a bumpkinish Maine character who wrote letters to the editors commenting on current political topics. He was, said Smith, “a green, unsophisticated lad from the country,” who happened to blunder into the legislature.22 Like Crockett, Smith was a Jacksonian in the midst of shifting allegiance, though Crockett was considerably ahead of him in his move to the Whigs. By the time of this campaign, the Jack Downing letters had appeared throughout the nation's press, and despite his speaking in a Down East vernacular, people still associated him with the Crockett of the Clarke Life, and both of them with the living Crockett. Seba Smith may even have been influenced by Crockett in his writing, for in Downing's August 4, 1833, letter commenting on Jackson and the bank question—a letter that appeared in the same issue of Atkinson's Saturday Evening Post with an account of the San Saba fight by Rezin Bowie—Downing very pointedly used the expression “go ahead,” putting it in quotation marks to signify not only that it was borrowed but also that it was coming to be an Americanism.23

  Unwittingly, all this literary output, and the public celebrity it gave to Crockett (or characters seen to be based on Crockett), worked to his advantage. He needed the help, for the Jackson-dominated legislature even engaged in a sort of passive gerrymandering to help in his defeat. Prior to the election it planned to divide his enormous district in two, the Twelfth and Thirteenth Congressional Districts, with Crockett running in the former, where he lived. But as originally intended, Madison County—the one that ensured his defeat in 1831—would have gone into the Thirteenth. Now, to try to defeat him again, the legislature attached Madison to the Twelfth. “It was done to make a mash of me,” he complained, pointing out that the resultant redistricting produced a bizarre Thirteenth District that almost encircled the Twelfth. He used the obvious electioneering trick to good advantage in campaigning against Fitzgerald, who he believed lay behind the plan, and told the voters not to let themselves be shifted around like hogs and horses.24

  It all worked. On election day in August, Crockett narrowly squeaked past his opponent by 3,985 to 3,812. Gleefully he sent a friend the sparsest of victory announcements: “Dear Sir—Went through—tight squeezing—beat Fitz 170.—Yours, D.C.”25 His actual margin was 173 rather than 170, but the import of the message remained the same, and it was not lost on the Jacksonians. Polk's friend Clement Clay of Alabama heard the news and sent a condolence to Polk over the victory of “the notorious Davy Crockett.”26

  The Whigs felt even more pleased than the Jacksonians did chagrined. In a half-admiring, half-condescending quip a few years later, an English editor remarked that “Democracy and the ‘farwest’ made Colonel Crockett: he is a product of forests, freedom, universal suffrage, and bear-hunts.”27 He was right. All that popularity of Crockett and his distorted image on the stage, in books, and the press coincided precisely with the burgeoning power of the common voter. In this election every state but one finally countenanced universal white male suffrage, and the more common the voter—and the more there were of his kind—the more electable became the real David Crockett. The Whigs learned the lesson the moment they heard of his election. Suddenly one of their major national journals, Nile's Weekly Register, published in Baltimore, began to sing his praises. Crockett, said its editor, was “just such a one as you would desire to meet with, if any accident or misfortune had happened to you on the high way.” There was the Robin Hood aspect of the Trickster—the honest, dependable, strong, brave, and gallant defender. As for Crockett the statesman, Nile's asserted boldly that when he gave his vote in Congress, “whether right or wrong, the vote is his own.”28 Seba Smith authored a special letter after Crockett's election, addressed to him, and inviting him to come to Washington to observe Congress as Major Downing observed his state legislature.29

  This attention from the Whig press and writers may have had a special motive. Sensing the sudden dramatic power of the frontier hero in politics, they felt all the more the want of anyone in their own ranks who could capitalize on the enthusiasm. A party still led by the privileged and the affluent, and primarily serving a like constituency, it had no “common men” that could be groomed to resist Van Buren for the presidency in the coming 1836 election. Yet that was exactly the time they would most need such a candidate, for in the eyes of much of the nation, “Little Van” looked and acted more like a Whig, well-to-do, professional, educated, and cunning. He utterly lacked any of the common-man antecedents of his sponsor Old Hickory.

  Ironically, then, the best way to beat Van Buren would be to find someone like Jackson to run against him, to turn the tables and pit a Whig common man against a Democratic candidate of the eastern establishment. Henry Clay was no spent force, but he no more fitted the image needed than did Webster or Adams. Since the Whigs would use onetime Jacksonian stereotypes against the Jacksonians in 1836, why not use one of their own disaffected men against them in the process? That being considered, only one man fitted the bill, and to stunning perfection. For perhaps the first time in U.S, history, the popular media had created a genuine celebrity. By giving Crockett attention far beyond the significance of one distant Tennessee district, and completely out of proportion with his utter failure to date as a congressman, that same attention gave its object a potential power of unfathomed depth. The longer Clarke's book sold, the more performances of The Lion of the West that toured the country, the more letters Maj. Jack Downing wrote, the greater that power must become. And now, bathed in the light of the focus of public gaze, every move the real David Crockett made, however trivial, would only increase public awareness and provide ever more fuel for the scribblers molding public opinion and interest. Suddenly, out of the chance juxtaposition of the man and the times, the real Crockett stood in danger of being swallowed by the jaws of his own folk image.30

  That was the kind of power that could make a president. The frontier dragon slayer must be a western man, for the stereotype so demanded. Kentucky could offer only Clay, clearly an impossible fit, and none of the other states then comprising the West and the Old Southwest—Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri—had any Whig favorite sons with national appeal. But they could do what the other western state could not. The Whigs in Tennessee were simply too weak and cowed by the Jackson machine to expect anything but ridicule if they tried to propose their favorite son as a potential 1836 nominee. However, neighboring Mississippi could do it for them, and within a few months of his election Crockett received an inquiry from a state convention asking if he would be willing to allow them to put his name forward as a possible candidate.31 There was a dramatic
turnaround in the very best American tradition—a downcast failure in a rude log cabin in West Tennessee that summer, and a candidate touted for the presidency in the fall.32

  Crockett may not have taken the presidential business all that seriously. After all, the election would not come for another three years, and he of all people knew how a man's fortunes could change in that time. Still, the contact made an impression on him and at least planted the idea of higher office in his mind. It gave him the taste of possibility, and with it the ultimate revenge against Jackson and even more the hated Van Buren. More than that, it would make him incontestably a gentleman, and above everything else, a success.

  Crockett must have champed to get to the capital to start the new term. The euphoria over his win, the approach of the Mississippi convention, that fact that his favorite son John was himself successful now as a court clerk and teacher at a local academy—all seemed to signal a complete reversal of his fortunes.33 There were still the inevitable debts, however, including one to the bank that he could not settle.34 But in the back of his mind Crockett already had the solution to that problem developing, a solution that could as well advance his fortunes in ways not at all financial. He may have started work on the project right after his election, or could have been working out its details as he traveled east. In either case, by the time the first session commenced on December 2, 1833, and Crockett took his seat for the opening, he stood ready to get started. He was going to write his own memoirs.