Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  It might almost seem that in the rush to finish the book, Crockett had forgotten what it was that brought him to Washington, however, he started his political duties even before the House assembled.54 Of course as soon as Congress convened, he went back for another try at the land bill, but the Democrats were not very amenable to resurrecting Crockett's bill, backed as it was now by many Whigs' wishes. Undaunted, Crockett told a friend that “I will go a head.”55 Finally, on December 17, Crockett successfully got a motion on the floor to appoint himself the head of a select committee to investigate disposal of the public lands in Tennessee, and his optimism began to grow. “I have but little doubt of its passage during the present Session,” he wrote in January.56 He sent a copy of his land bill to his son John to show in the district, certain that “this will secure every occupant in the district and that will effect the object that I have been So long and So anxious to effect.” He expected the whole Tennessee delegation to stand with him this time. “My prospects is much brighter than ever it was at any former Session.”57

  He reckoned without the personal animosity of his old Jacksonian foes and the equivocal support of his new Whig friends, who faced two mutually exclusive goals—the advancement of Crockett and the sale of public lands at high prices for the federal treasury. When he succeeded in getting the select committee approved, the Jacksonians groaned. “I notice that the Immortal ‘Zip Coon’ has called up his old land relinquishing bill,” a friend wrote Polk in derision.58 There was still plenty of opposition, and now his foes were using his new image increasingly to ridicule him. They derided him as “Zip Coon,” “the Western David,” “David of the River,” and even simply “Davy,” and they frustrated his every attempt to get a bill on the floor. By late May he still had hopes. “I know of no opposition to it if we could get to act on it,” he said, failing to grasp that his inability to get it to debate revealed powerful opposition.59 By mid-June he still tried, and still failed, finally accepting the fact that he would not succeed that session.60

  Part of the reason was another issue that even Crockett had to admit took up much of his time. The battle was on over Jackson's policy of denying the bank a renewal of its charter, and he had taken advantage of the recess between sessions of Congress to remove its deposits. “The old man is in much trouble,” Crockett gloated five days into the session, and thereafter he speedily made the issue an obsession, delighted that Jackson had done something that fixed the attention of the nation on his abuses of power. His correspondence for the next several months dripped with venom, self-righteous indignation, and glee at the uproar. “It will sink the administration in the mind of all honist men,” he predicted, maintaining that Jackson's opposition proved that his animosity toward the Bank stemmed from its failure to lend its aid to sustaining his regime and Van Buren's prospects. “I do believe the old chief is in a worse drive then he ever was before and he is begining to find it out.”61

  For weeks to come Crockett harped on Jackson's “kingley powar,” especially when Jackson declared that he would stand fast even if his entire party deserted him. “By this you see we have the government of one man that he puts forward his will as the law of the land,” Crockett crowed. In his mind, the nullification crisis of 1832 paled in comparison. “I consider the present time one that is marked with more danger than any period of our political history,” he said. The “ambition of King Andrew” would destroy the country. “He is surrounded by a set of imps of famin that is willing to destroy the best intrest of the country to promote their own intrest,” he continued. “I write the truth and the world will see sense I hope before it is too late.”62 He expected Congress to order the deposits returned, though the House seemed soft on the issue, but then believed that Jackson would veto any such order, only deepening the crisis. If so, he expected Congress to teach him a lesson with an unequivocal override.63“The truth is if he had been dead and at the devil four years ago it would have been a happy time for this country,” Crockett told one friend.64 Privately he predicted that in two years' time it would be hard to find any man who would admit ever having been a supporter of Old Hickory.65

  The battle lasted through most of the session, and as evidence of Crockett's spreading cultural influence despite his practical failures in the House, even Jackson's supporters on the bank issue advised the administration with what one called “one of Davys expressions,” to “go a head.”66 As spring approached Crockett sent a number of political documents under his frank to inform his district of his views of what he saw as “political war,” and meanwhile issued ever darker predictions that if Jackson succeeded, the people would be trading democracy for despotism.67 He saw signs all across the country of public opposition to Jackson's course, which made Old Hickory's stubbornness seem even more dictatorial. People left their work; factories stopped their manufactures, or so he believed; the monetary system of the nation faced disruption with the loss of the stabilizing influence of the bank; and the commercial community predicted depression, “all for the vengeance of Jackson on the Bank because it would not aid him in upholding his party.” The result might well be civil war.68

  When he could, Crockett opposed the campaign against the bank from his seat on the House floor, sometimes letting his near monomania over Jackson get the better of him. “The people can't stand it, sir,” he almost shouted one day in April. “I can't stand it. I won't,” slapping his hands down on his mahogany desk so vehemently as he sat down that the gallery broke into laughter.69“This is a new seen in our political history,” he lamented to a friend. Gradually his hopes of Congress forcing Jackson to back down evaporated as he realized that many Democrats in the House, though opposed to the removal, would not break with party policy in favor of principle. If anything, the business only reinforced Crockett's thorough disgust with the growing force of political parties in American politics.70 When Congress proposed raising a Bank Committee to investigate all of Jackson's charges against the institution, Crockett vehemently opposed the idea, believing it to be a sham, since the committee, packed by the Speaker with Jacksonians, would inevitably whitewash Old Hickory's actions.71

  Slashing at Jackson was simply a reflex now, and one that made David rather a bore. However original he may have been as a character, or in his literary construction in the autobiography, when it came to style itself Crockett was anything but original. The same phrases and aphorisms appeared over and over again. “King Andrew the First,” “imps of famin,” “this political Judeas Martin Vanburan,” and more. Just as with “go ahead” and other expressions in the book, when he found a phrase that he liked, he used it too often. He derisively called the President “Dr. Jackson,” after Harvard gave Old Hickory an honorary degree.72 He took to referring to Washington as “head quarters,” implying that Jackson was now a military dictator.73“We may say with propriety that we have the government of one man,” he declared. “Andrew Jackson holds both the sword and purse.” Then he began to accuse Jackson of being more tool than tyrant. “They have prompted the poor old man by Singing glorification to him until he believes his popularity is able to brake down the constitution and laws of the country,” he said, and he knew where the real manipulation came from. “If I can put Back this political Judeas Martin Vanburan I will do so for I think him a perfect scoundral.”74 Over and over Crockett repeated the refrain that he had been one of the first to enlist under Jackson in the Creek War, that he had never abandoned the president but that Jackson abandoned him and his principles. “I do consider him a greater tyrant than Cromwell, Caesar or Bonaparte,” David ranted near the end of the session. “I hope his day of glory is near at an end!”75

  Yet there may have been more to Crockett's endlessly repetitive harangues than simply obsessive ranting. By the end of the session the next presidential election lay just two years in the future and no clear candidate led the Whig field. Indeed, the Whig Party itself was still amorphous, comprised as it was of old Clay-Adams Republicans, disaffected Jacksonians like himself,
and even a burgeoning “Anti-Masonic” movement. The eventual choice of nominee might just as likely be determined by his own efforts as by any unified decision of the nascent party. By his constant and strident attacks on Jackson and Van Buren, unimaginative as they were, Crockett established himself as one of the most outspoken opponents of the administration. In addition he may just have been subtle enough to see that if those boastful frontier expressions so identified with him—things like whipping wildcats and riding lightning bolts—could take such deep hold in the public imagination, then why not other expressions more to his purpose? Even now “go ahead,” which probably was his creation, began to sweep the country, entering the speech even of his enemies. Why not, then, other sayings like “King Andrew” and “political Judeas” and “one man rule”? If those caught fire with the public, their association with Crockett would only make him a stronger contender and keep him prominently in the public mind as the election approached. As the session came to an end, he spoke frequently of the 1836 contest, and he actually started making plans for a summer trip through the Northeast as far back as January.76 Of course he disclaimed any purpose other than purely vacation. “I have no object in view more than to injoy myself,” he told a prospective host. “I am electioneering for no boddy in the world.”77 That was all but a formal declaration of candidacy.

  Nothing, then, could have been better timed than the appearance early in March of A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee. Crockett's anxiety mounted in the days approaching publication. He chafed at the delay when his manuscript, being somewhat longer than anticipated, held up typesetting and perhaps resulted in some of those cuts. A British firm's representative called on him to ask about foreign rights to publish the book, sight unseen, and Crockett repeatedly referred inquiries from anxious wholesalers to Carey and Hart.78 In the latter part of February and early March he wrote to his publishers every three or four days with more suggestions, more questions, and usually wanting to know when he would see the finished book “for my own private satisfaction.” He also anxiously awaited having ten author's copies to distribute to his close friends, to share that moment of pride and joy of the new author.79

  When the package finally arrived, Crockett felt first the burst of pride of a father holding his newborn, and then some disappointment as he turned the pages and noted the changes in his orthography, and the omissions.80 That mild chagrin stayed with him for some time, but was quickly overshadowed by the book's public reception. Priced at sixty-five cents each when purchased in quantities of a dozen or more, the book's first printing sold out in no more than three weeks.81 One book dealer in Washington told the congressman that his Narrative “was the only Book that he could Sell.” Crockett immediately predicted a brisk trade for the book in the Ohio and Mississippi Valleys, where Clarke's “counterfeit” work first appeared in Cincinnati. Perhaps realizing his vernacular's appeal to the boatmen from whom it in part derived, he believed it would do especially well in the river towns like Memphis, Natchez, and Louisville.82 Within a few months the Narrative went into its sixth printing, and Crockett himself seemed never to tire of talking about the book, an acquaintance noting that “he did not affect indifference to the popular notoriety it had brought upon him.”83

  He took an avid interest in the sales, to the point of objecting when Carey and Hart wanted to reduce the wholesale price to fifty cents per copy for a bulk order of five hundred. “I know mighty little a bout such matters,” he confessed, but then shrewdly noted that the result of such a reduction could lead to a reduction in his royalty. But his way to make up the difference was to secure an agreement from the publishers to sell up to a thousand copies to him personally at the same price. He would get a small share of that sale, of course, and then be free to retail the books himself, pocketing all of the difference between cost and retail price himself. Throughout he dealt fairly and openly with Carey and Hart and placed an implicit trust in their honesty that was almost touching. “I am hard pressed in money matters,” he told them in April before another printing. He needed to “form some opinion of the aid I may expect from this sourse.”84 Within days of the end of the session and his anticipated departure, he talked of taking up to fifteen hundred copies with him for friends in Tennessee to market.85 Just how much Crockett did in fact derive from the Narrative is difficult to judge. Even at fifty cents per copy wholesale, Carey and Hart still certainly made some profit on the title, if no more than ten or fifteen cents. The book must have sold between five and ten thousand copies that first year, at an average wholesale price of about fifty-eight cents. If the margin on that was only twenty cents a copy, still Crockett's 62.5 percent share must have brought him between $875 and $1,750, and probably more. It was no fortune, but enough to relieve much of the strain of debt.

  He could hardly fail to be gladdened and impressed by the attention the Narrative brought him. People accosted him in the House and on the city streets begging for his autograph, and in signing he could not resist making again the point that he used in his opening preface to attest to the authenticity of his account. “I David Crockett of Tennessee do certify that this Book was written by my self and the only genuine history of my life that ever has been written,” he inscribed in one copy. “The first work is a counterfit and was written with out authority.”86 Even some of the literati noticed the popular reaction to the book, if not in the most glowing terms. Harriet Martineau, an English journalist just then visiting in America, encountered the Narrative, and perhaps even observed Crockett in Washington. “Persons have made up their minds that there is very little originality in America, except in regions where such men as David Crockett grow up,” she observed. She disagreed, thinking him not truly original but merely a popular aberration, arguing that the New England that much more suited her refined tastes produced just as many original men as Crockett “or any other self-complacent mortal who finds scope for his humours amid…the canebrakes of Tennessee.”87

  Martineau's opinion of Crockett's book mattered far less than the phenomenon she perceived—that it produced a popular sensation that only enhanced his image as the western man and the embodiment of the new character of America. Tocqueville was closer to the mark on the impact and import of Crockett's book, though not writing about it specifically. “In democracies a writer may hope to gain moderate renown and great wealth cheaply,” he wrote the same year that the Narrative appeared. “For this purpose he does not need to be admired; it is enough if people have a taste for his work. The ever growing crowd of readers always wanting something new ensures the sale of books that nobody esteems highly.”88 Crockett's book got him much more renown than wealth, of course, but it hit at exactly the right time, when more and more Americans of the common classes were reading, and their tastes ran far less to the classics and the works of the literati than to small books that spoke for and about their own kind. Coming as it did at the same time that Crockett attracted more and more attention as the leading and most vocal foe of the Democratic regime, this substantially enhanced his prospects for a presidential nomination in 1836. If he could keep his name and his image in front of the people in the interim, it must inevitably place him among the top Whig contenders. Happily attention begat more attention, and another medium stepped in now to fill out the word portrait he had made of himself with a likeness on canvas.

  Probably within no more than two months of the appearance of the Narrative, the painter John G. Chapman asked Crockett to sit for him to produce a bust portrait. This in itself presented nothing new to David. Two or three other painters had done likenesses of him in previous years, none of which he found very impressive. They tended to make him look like what he called “a sort of cross between a clean-shirted Member of Congress and a Methodist Preacher.” Still he gave Chapman his sittings, but felt no hesitation in expressing his displeasure with the result. Almost in passing he told the painter that “if you could catch me on a bear-hunt in a ‘harricane,’ with hunting tools a
nd gear, and team of dogs, you might make a picture better worth looking at.” Chapman liked the idea, though feared that he knew nothing of the outdoors kind of scene needed, let alone anything of “harricanes,” but David promised to give him all the technical advice necessary. Chapman made a rough sketch that pleased the congressman. “That's the sort of thing to start with,” said David. “I'll show you how to have all right. We'll make the picture between us, first rate, mind if we don't So Go ahead! just as soon and fast as you like.”89

  Of course Crockett may simply have been caught up in the spirit, not to mention the flattery, of being painted. Yet certainly there was more to it than that, and Crockett, who so despised manipulation in his foes, now consciously or unconsciously manipulated Chapman. The bust portrait had been fine, but it looked like all the others he had seen, and for that matter was of a piece with standard portraiture throughout the country. There was nothing original in it, and more-over it depicted the man Crockett had been, not the man the public now wanted. No one reading the Narrative wished or expected to see the head and shoulders of a man in a broadcloth suit, cravat at his neck, sitting in the obligatory three-quarters view with some dim and indistinct background behind him. Those readers, and all Americans, wanted the Crockett that David persuaded Chapman to paint, on the hunt in the wilderness where every man was a lord. Having just published what could well be his campaign biography in 1836, Crockett now cajoled Chapman into producing the perfect companion piece, a Crockett that even the illiterate could absorb, the living likeness of “the gentleman from the cane.”