Three Roads to the Alamo

by William C. Davis

  Others commented on what appeared to be a waning in Crockett's novelty, at least to the people in the East. When Chapman's portrait went on display at the National Academy of Design in New York that year, visitors paid it a great deal of attention that could do him no harm, though when one viewer said Crockett had misplaced the tomahawk in his belt, Crockett shot back a snarl to Chapman. “Don't you go to altering my picture for any body's nonsense,” he snapped. “If any man in New York says that I do'nt know how, or where, to stick my hatchet, send him to me and I'le show him.”49 Yet another New Yorker perceived more than “Davy of the West's” shortening fuse. “As he picked up a few more words of English, and softened some of his bold sayings, in fact the more he lost of the man of the woods the less interesting he became as a curiosity,” remarked a man who had seen and heard Crockett over the years. “The last time we saw him he reminded us of the savage who had lost the energy and pantomime grace of the war dance, in taking lessons from a French master to figure in a cotillion.”50 George W. Terrell, a friend of Houston's currently sitting in the Tennessee legislature, thought Crockett “a strange man—a mighty hunter, but rather ‘smart’ than good,” charging him with a lack of political consistency, and even asserting that Crockett's friends doubted his political bravery, fearing that he was “wanting moral courage.”51

  Of course, these commentators were Jackson-Van Buren men, but that did not change the fact that Crockett seemed to have lost his focus. He and the publishers and the Whig politicians had conceived among themselves a creature that they no longer controlled. The public could not tell David from Davy, and sometimes now neither could Crockett. In his private moments his ironbound honesty must have plagued him for allowing himself to act a role for which he was born, yet in which he was always chiefly just a player, not an incarnation. In order to become what he thought he was and wanted to be, he had to pretend to be what he was not, and the years of increasing sham told on him.

  Still he kept trying. Despite Carey and Hart's early reluctance, they eventually agreed to publish the Van Buren book, and by spring Crockett had engaged Augustin Clayton to do the actual writing, while he furnished bits and pieces and lent his name to the title page.52 In June The Life of Martin Van Buren, Hair-apparent to the Government and the Appointed Successor of General Jackson appeared in the stores and stalls, Carey and Hart still fearing it sufficiently libelous that they left their firm's name off the title page. Crockett's contribution, if any, was minimal, and neither did he apparently exercise any control—or perhaps show any real interest—in the presentation, for anyone expecting a Crockett book was immediately disappointed. Gone were the exploits and tall tales, and absent, too, was the wonderful vernacular. The book read as if written by the man who in fact wrote it: an erudite, college-educated lawyer. The only vestige of David was its bitterness toward Van Buren.53

  With reelection in mind, Crockett may have had a bit more to do with a series of letters that appeared in Seba Smith's new magazine, the Downing Gazette. Smith came out strongly in opposition to Jackson at last, and one of the features of his tabloid was a weekly exchange of letters between Downing and Crockett. The series began just as Crockett was on his way home to start his campaign, coincidentally, and continued until the August election, a clear indication that Smith tied the letters to the purpose of supporting Crockett's campaign. Crockett himself had nothing to do with actually writing the letters, for their orthography and grammar, while studiedly quaint, hardly matched his own, but he may have discussed them during his meeting with Smith, or in subsequent private correspondence. Certainly they contained some of the themes that continually occupied his speeches and letters, and even approximations of some of his better known aphorisms.54

  So far as Crockett's reelection efforts were concerned, the Downing Gazette probably did him little good, since few copies would reach West Tennessee. The Van Buren book and the narrative of the eastern tour exerted little more influence, if any. In the end that decision came down to David and Blackhawk, both skilled campaigners, each adept at appealing to the people in their own speech, and both able with the pen. As soon as he got home, David took the stump, and after canvassing three of his counties felt that he had nothing to dread, even thinking that his popularity might force Huntsman to withdraw. “If he does not I have no doubt of beating him with ease.” Moreover, Crockett saw signs that White's candidacy was strong in the district, “and I go for him.”55 But White would balk in the end and decide not to challenge Van Buren for the Democratic nomination, which Little Van got unanimously in May. Instead, White ran along with Webster and others as the candidate of one or two states, the Whigs hoping that they might take enough electoral votes among several candidates to throw the election into the House of Representatives. Though the Democrats had a majority there at the moment, that might change after the election, and there were already enough Southern Democrats opposed to Van Buren that they could join with the Whigs in sending someone else to the White House.

  No doubt White's decision not to run as a Democrat, but to change stripes and become a Whig instead, must have hurt Crockett with some of his voters, for attached as many were to him, they were equally if not more attached to the Democratic Party. By supporting White, Crockett had backed a defector, even though he was one himself in all but name. Huntsman ran quite clearly as an administration Democrat, and one with the endorsement of Polk and Jackson. A year before Crockett thought Blackhawk was politically dead and ready to be laid “away among the unfinished business.”56 Now he found him very much alive, and quite his match on the stump. Huntsman thumped him for abusing the franking privilege in his own behalf, and also for refusing to frank pro-Jackson documents requested by his constituents. Crockett threw the accusation right back at him, charging that the Jackson forces sent copies of the administration paper, the Washington Globe, to every post office in the district. Huntsman harped on Crockett's most vulnerable spot, his failure to achieve anything in three terms in the House, and to that there was no effective reply. At the same time constituents started to complain about Crockett's about-face on one aspect of the land bill, when he changed his position and allowed that West Tennessee land was quite fertile. By so doing he tacitly accepted that it was more valuable than he originally asserted, and that in turn could make it more expensive if ever put on the market, possibly pricing it out of reach of the very people he was supposedly trying to help. It had been simply one of the several compromises that Crockett made for the greater good of getting a bill passed, but now it came back to bedevil him.57

  By early July, with a month of the campaign still to go, Crockett remained supremely confident. “I have him bad plagued for he dont know as much as me about the Government,” he wrote his publishers after two straight weeks of daily stump meetings. “I handle the Administration without gloves,” he boasted, and continued his prediction that the Jacksonian wave was on the ebb. He would double Huntsman's vote, he said. Moreover, he felt so sure of victory that he adapted his old threat about Van Buren's election, and promised that if he did not beat Blackhawk he would leave the country and go to Texas.58

  Crockett bedeviled him as he had every past adversary, and once almost got Blackhawk into very serious trouble indeed. Huntsman had lost a leg during the War of 1812, making him as much a war hero as Crockett, if not more, and now had to wear a wooden leg on campaign. The two candidates spent one night during the canvass with a farmer who happened to be a Jackson man, and who, like the ubiquitous farmer of the old stories, had a daughter. He put the two men in one cabin of his dogtrot, while she slept in the other. When Huntsman, who had a reputation for philandering, fell soundly asleep, Crockett stole out of their cabin, picked up a chair, and walked across the boarded breezeway between the cabins and made a purposefully loud attempt to open her door. When she awakened and cried out, he put one foot on a rung of the chair, held onto its back, and used it as a noisy crutch to stamp back to his own room. The effect was to sound just like a man with a wood
en leg, and so the farmer took it, threatening Huntsman with bodily harm before being calmed, and changing his vote thereafter.59

  The Democrats played their own tricks in return, chiefly in the press, where Crockett found himself accused of saying that former Governor Carroll was corrupt and had been bribed to come out in support of Van Buren, in return for administration support in his bid for reelection to the governorship. Even in denying the accusation, Crockett could not help giving it some foundation when he went on to state that Carroll had been seen walking arm in arm with Van Buren, and riding with him in his lavish carriage. This and other newspaper charges took their toll with the voters.60 Jackson forces also published charges that he cheated on his mileage expenses for going to and from Washington for the sessions, and Crockett could only respond that he put in for the same mileage as Felix Grundy, an administration pet, who lived in Nashville. It may have been true, but that did not alter the fact that he claimed one thousand miles of travel for a trip that was really seven hundred.61

  David remained as animated on the campaign as ever. “His voice was loud, and well suited to stump oratory,” wrote a listener a few months later. “If his vocabulary was scanty, he was master of the slang of his vernacular, and was happy in his coarse figures. He spurned the idle rules of the grammarians, and had a rhetorick of his own.”62 Crockett never missed a barbecue, a house raising, or a logrolling fete where there might be votes. Nor did he let pass any chance for a jape at Huntsman's expense. Late in the campaign, when Blackhawk tried to emphasize Crockett's rude backwoods bumpkin image by handing him a coonskin to ask if it was good fur, David's own hair remained unruffled. He blew into the fur, examined the pelt carefully, then handed it back saying: “No, sir, 'tis not good fur; my dogs wouldn't run such a 'coon, nor bark at a man that was fool enough to carry such a skin.”63

  When it came down to the last days in early August, Crockett repeatedly said that he had been a good steward, looking out for the interests of his people, and that he was the same man he always was, only now better qualified thanks to experience.64 But he could not disguise the fact that he had accomplished nothing for his voters, abandoned Jackson and the Democrats, and that the district had paid the price for the administration's punishment of him. That hurt him more than any outside accusations or tricks by Huntsman.

  On election day itself Crockett went to McLemoresville, midway between two forks of the Obion. There he cast his own vote and tried to muster a few others. When he encountered one eighteen-year-old he asked him if he had voted, and hearing that he had not, Crockett marched him to the polls despite his being underage.65 At the same time he saw, or heard, that the Jackson forces had promised twenty-five dollars to every man who would vote for Huntsman. The officials supervising the polling places also appeared to be thoroughly in the Jackson camp, and some he heard rumored to have placed heavy bets on Blackhawk to win. With or without chicanery, the count ran close, and no one knew the result until August 9. It showed Crockett with 4,400, but 4,652 for his opponent. “The great Hunter one Davy has been beaten by a Huntsman,” one voter crowed to Polk, while another exulted that “we have killd blacguard Crockett at last.”66 Even in far-away Little Rock, Arkansas, the Jackson press celebrated Huntsman's victory over “the buffoon, Davy Crockett.”67

  Predictably, David did not accept the defeat gracefully. Not only was it the sort of rejection that always sent him into a reverie of self-pity, it also virtually brought an abrupt end to any hopes he had for the presidency in 1836, especially since White would be running as a Tennessee favorite son for the Whigs. As soon as he knew the results, Crockett charged corruption over the vote-buying rumors. Now he knew why Jackson had removed the deposits. It was to use the money to buy elections to sustain his support, and perhaps especially to defeat Crockett. The old irrational suspicion completely took hold as he imagined the President and all the government having as its sole aim the destruction of this one lone honest man. “I have no doubt that I was completely Raskeled out of my Election,” he grieved to his publishers, then heaped self-righteousness onto self-pity when he protested that “I do regret that duty to my self & to my country compels me to expose such viloney.”

  He felt vindicated that he had spoken the truth in the canvass, his truth anyhow, and more pride than ever that he refused to bow to Jackson's power and party. “I have suffered my self to be politically sacrafised to save my country from ruin & disgrace,” said the reemerged martyr, “and if I am never a gain elected I will have the grattification to know that I have done my duty.” Yet, in a tantalizing phrase, he also noted that “I have no doubt of the time being close at hand when I will be rewarded for letting my tongue Speake what my hart thinks.” He meant, of course, that when White beat Van Buren in 1836, he could expect a prominent appointment in the new administration as reward for having been for so long the lone voice of truth in Tennessee. To make certain that the Whigs would know he was available, he suggested to Carey and Hart that they might want to publish his letter.68 Ironically, Huntsman saw more clearly to the essential truth of Crockett's defeat. Advocacy of the tariff and internal improvements, his fight on behalf of the bank, and above all his fanatical and highly personalized animosity toward Jackson were what really beat him. He also lost, quipped Huntsman, “because he did not get votes enough.”69

  The depth of the hurt that Crockett felt at his defeat is evident in his announcement through the press in September that “I never expect to offer my name again to the public for any office.”70 Time and time again during the campaign, and as far back as late 1834, he made those boasts about leaving the country if Van Buren won, and then brought the threat closer to home when he made it with reference to his own reelection. The eastern press, commenting on his frequent remark about going to Texas, noted in his defeat “strong premonitories of which event he now begins to see.”71 Just as he took off into the wilderness for the long hunt after defeat before, he needed to get away now, to conquer some new beasts or new territory to relieve the ache of failure in his heart. Moreover, having made that boast so often, he may have felt honor bound to live up to it, to “stand up to his lick log.” The prospect of remaining an impoverished hardscrabble farmer without even his own land in West Tennessee seemed intolerable. A fellow Tennesseean remarked of Crockett that “his life had been a wayward one, and he could not tie himself to routine.”72 A New Yorker who heard him during the 1834 tour, and who recognized the infection of politics, understood David at this moment perfectly. “He could not live without being before the public,” he said. “He had been half inebriated with distinction for eight or ten years, and inglorious seclusion would not answer for David Crocket.”73

  It did not help that some of Elizabeth's relatives charged him that summer with malfeasance in administering her father's will, an embarrassing though eventually inconsequential matter that only further soured him on staying in Gibson County. Never apparently deeply involved with his family, now estranged from Elizabeth entirely, and rejected by the voters of his district, there was nothing to keep him here any longer. He could always return, of course, and nothing in his threats of going to Texas included a promise to stay there. At least the trip would be an adventure. He could spend a few months scouting the land, hunting the game, including the buffalo now long disappeared from Tennessee, and mixing with old friends like Sam Houston. Surely he knew of the growing uproar out there, and that the colonists were virtually in rebellion now, but that was their fight, not his. On the other hand, he also knew that politically Tennessee might be played out for him, whereas Houston assured him that one day Texas must be a state in the Union. If David liked the look of the place and decided to stay, Texas might just provide a base for getting back into politics in case Van Buren won next year, or if the Whigs did not come through with the reward he expected. The trip promised much to gain and nothing to lose.

  The prospect of the adventure buoyed his spirits, making up for his humiliation at defeat, and Crockett decided to give hims
elf a sendoff with a large barbecue at his Gibson County farm. He dug a pit one hundred yards south of the cabin, and there the cooks tended the meats while he and most of the men played at a logrolling, the object being for a man to roll a barkless and heavily greased log some distance. Through the day Crockett dipped a gourd into the barrel of liquor, and the more he drank, the more he talked of Texas. It commenced raining, but still the frolic continued, and well into the afternoon the logrolling began. Crockett took the first turn at the black, sticky poplar trunk, and in two minutes was black from head to toe, to the great mirth of his friends. He swore that he would move the log, and good-naturedly promised to change the color of every one of them to red from embarrassment for laughing at him, and so he did. That done, he took his fiddle and played a merry tune for them all, and regaled them with stories and quips, including a new variation on his threat to leave. He had done his best to get elected, he said, but the voters had rejected him. In that case, the voters could go to hell, and he would go to Texas.74