American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett

by Buddy Levy

  The test of independence to which Crockett alludes had to do with the election of a United States senator. The term for Senator John Williams had recently expired, and he sought reelection. Around the assembly halls and in the local taverns it was no secret that Williams and Jackson had open enmity dating back to the Creek War. It was also common knowledge that the political machines of Tennessee were priming Jackson to be president. As the senate vote neared, Williams looked like a shoo-in, so much so that in the end Jackson, against his initial interests, agreed to run, fearing that his party’s chosen opposition candidate, Pleasant M. Miller, was unlikely to defeat the incumbent. The race was far too close for comfort, with Jackson prevailing by a mere ten votes, and illustrated just how divided the legislators were.34 Crockett had until this time been openly amenable to Jackson and especially to the idea of his presidential candidacy that would be forthcoming, but he voted for Williams, noting that Williams had been successful and done a good job the last time around, and therefore there was no good reason to discharge him: “I thought the colonel had honestly discharged his duty, and even the mighty name of Jackson couldn’t make me vote against him.”

  It is unclear whether Crockett had other motives for voting against the tide, and against Jackson. It may have been as simple as personality traits, with Crockett beginning to sense that Jackson was moving away from the common man and would be no friend when it came to the western land issues. Crockett was already deeply suspicious of men with money and vast land holdings, and he would certainly have known that while Jackson liked to play on his “self-made” status, they were not on equal footing. By 1798, Jackson owned more than 50,000 acres in central and western Tennessee, much of it worth more than ten times what he had originally paid.35 Crockett was unapologetic, even downright prideful, about how he voted, though he admitted that the decision was unfavorable politically. He later assessed his first public breach with Jackson in this way: “But voting against the old chief was found a mighty up-hill business to all of them except myself. I never would, nor never did, acknowledge I had voted wrong; and I am more certain now that I was right then ever.”

  As it turned out, though he was victorious, Jackson later declined the office—he had only intended to run and win, and that was enough to keep Williams out of the position. Jackson had succeeded in ridding himself of Williams as a political thorn in his breeches. Crockett summed up his sentiments on his vote by adding, “I told the people it was the best vote I ever gave; that I had supported the public interest, and cleared my conscience in giving it, instead of gratifying the private ambition of a man.” He would be his own boss even if there appeared to be very long and helpful political coattails to ride on. He was having none of it. He did what he believed was right and stuck to his guns, exhibiting an obstinate, unyielding nature that wasn’t entirely suited to partisan politics.

  David Crockett was in the process of establishing his political tendencies, but also his persona: he would be a man of the people and for the people. He would back any bills or resolutions that were conceived to assist those people with whom he could relate, with whom he felt fraternity, even kinship. Interestingly, James Polk voted with Crockett twice during the session, including on a petition to hear no divorce proceedings— Crockett was actually in favor of the legislature paying the legal expenses in such cases so that the poor would have fair and affordable access to lawyers. Crockett came out in opposition of using prison labor on state construction projects like roads and improving the navigation of rivers, suspicious as he was of authority and mindful that some of the inmates would have been incarcerated simply for being indigent and unable to pay their bills.36 In fact, quite early in the session Crockett put forth a bill that would entirely eradicate imprisonment for debt, if that debt could be proved “honest debt.” Mindful of the fiscal pains people in the region still felt from the depression of 1819, Crockett aligned with the majority vote to reduce state property taxes, again in an effort to assist the impoverished. In a curious and ironic vote, especially given his own penchant to campaign using the “plug and a dram” technique of luring voters to the liquor stand, and plying them with horns of spirits and twists of tobacco, Crockett voted to prohibit the sale of liquor at elections. Crockett also presaged a later interest in (and deep suspicion of ) banking issues, favoring a move toward the state bank of Tennessee and local branches that might provide loans to farmers in need.37 Crockett had previously spoken outwardly, and scathingly, against the current banking system, and was quoted in the National Banner and the Nashville Whig in September of 1823 as saying that the “Banking system [was] a species of swindling on a large scale.”38

  The land issue arose again in the form of the North Carolina land warrants, with North Carolina University presenting a large number of warrants of veterans (by now deceased) and requesting authorization to sell them in Western Tennessee as a fundraising technique for the growing university. The North Carolina warrants had the potential to displace untold numbers of squatters; Crockett smelled a rat. He had his own claim on the Obion, and he believed that folks like him deserved the right to buy their land first, before outsiders with dubious warrants. A division within the Jackson supporters had occurred over this issue, with Felix Grundy supporting the presentation of North Carolina warrants, and the savvy legislator (and future president) James Polk in opposition. Crockett initially aligned with Polk, but later broke with him, believing that it was a mistake to allow outsiders in the form of North Carolina residents to come in and purchase vacant lands for cash—the poor would once again be priced out.39 Crockett preferred that the land be sold to those who lived on it, on credit, rather than be bought and used as speculative real estate by outsiders. Crockett’s position garnered him a degree of public notoriety when it appeared in the Whig:

  Crockett’s spangled, three-pocket buckskin vest reveals a man with a sense of style. The glass beadwork is colorful and attention-getting, just like his character. (Crockett vest—color transparency. Courtesy of the Daughters of the Republic of Texas Library, San Antonio.)

  Mr. Crockett called up his resolution relative to land warrants . . . He had heard much said here about frauds, &c., committed by North Carolina speculators; but it was time to quit talking about other people, and look to ourselves. This practice was more rascally, and a greater fraud, than any he had yet heard of . . . The speculators then preferring to be great friends to the people in saving their land, had gone up one side of the creek and down the other, like a coon, and pretended to grant the poor people great favors in securing them occupant claims—they gave them a credit of a year and promised to take cows, horses, &c., in payment. But when the year came around, the notes were in the hands of others; the people were sued, cows and horses not being sufficient to pay for securing it. He said again, that warrants obtained this way, by the removal of entries for the purpose of speculation, should be as counterfeit as bank notes in the hands of the person who obtained them, and die on their hands.40

  By the end of the session Crockett had turned over a good number of political cards—most revealing that he would vote his conscience come what may. He’d outwardly broken with Jackson, and with Polk as well, when Polk favored the sale of public land to raise money for universities. Crockett understood too well that universities were the domain of the privileged, so subsidizing land-grant institutions was of no interest to him. By now his name and position on such matters were getting out into the regional papers, developing his reputation as a representative of the poor and downtrodden. It was a role Crockett played well.

  EIGHT

  “Neck or Nothing”

  CROCKETT’S MODEST SUCCESSES in the last session whetted his appetite for politics enough to convince him that a run at Congress was a reasonable next step. He had now begun to feel a modicum of comfort moving in the elite circles of Murfreesboro, playing on his persona to win voters and using his contrary nature to stir things up in state politics and get himself noticed. Elizabeth would have bee
n very happy to have him home, as his hunting skills were responsible for their food. The pressure to provide was increased by the lease of an additional tract of land on the Obion, and coupled with the hunting were the need to continue tilling, planting, and harvesting viable crops for vegetable sustenance, which Crockett oversaw in a rather distracted way, leaving much of the toil to his boys and few hired hands. He would always prove a very reluctant farmer, much preferring the chase, whether for wild animals or public office.

  Crockett later postured that he was coerced into his first congressional race, again against his wishes and better judgment, but that others urged him into the fray. Colonel Adam Alexander was then representing the western district, which now numbered eleven counties, and though he possessed significant power and influence, and was a wealthy planter and extremely well-connected, he had blundered in his previous term by voting in favor of high tariffs, leaving his constituents bemused at best, and leaving himself potentially vulnerable to defeat.1 Crockett remembered that Alexander’s “vote on the tariff law of 1824 gave a mighty heap of dissatisfaction to his people. They therefore began to talk pretty strong of running me for Congress against him.” Crockett went on to say that his initial feeling was to decline, citing lack of preparation and knowledge as ostensible reasons, though a spotty or nonexistent résumé had never stopped him before. “I told the people that . . . it was a step above my knowledge, and I know’d nothing about Congress matters.”

  He might have been slightly disingenuous here, for in 1824, some months before he officially offered himself for the candidacy, and perhaps while still serving in the state legislature, Crockett sent out a circular to the district that included the following appeal:

  I am not one of those who have had the opportunities and benefits of wealth and education in my youth. I am thus far the maker of my own fortunes . . . If in the discharge of my duties as your representative, I have failed to exhibit the polished eloquence of men of superior education, I can yet flatter myself that I have notwithstanding, been enabled to procure the passage of some laws and regulations beneficial to the interests of my constituents.2

  Clearly Crockett plays on the emotions here, underscoring his humble origins, while at the same time jabbing barbs at the moneyed and educated. Throughout his political career he would face opponents with more money, connections, power, and influence, always assuming the role of the reluctant underdog. His ill-fated first attempt at Congress was no exception, and Crockett said that finally, at continued pressure from friends, “I was obliged to agree to run.” It was a mistake, for he wasn’t ready yet, and the result would offer schooling in the dirty machinations of national politics, games and power plays about which Crockett was untutored.3

  First of all, Crockett didn’t have the financial means to run a successful campaign, which would require printing costs, travel expenses, and worst of all, more time away from farm and fields and hunting grounds. He felt that he was well liked in his local area, but the congressional district covered an impressive eighteen counties, and Crockett would need to venture far and wide to make himself known. It was simply beyond his current means.

  His opponent, Adam Alexander, did not share Crockett’s indigence or lack of influence. He was close with Jackson, and with two other significant “Jackson supporters,” Felix Grundy and Judge John Overton. Crockett had already alienated Grundy in the previous legislative session when he voted in favor of Williams over Jackson for senate, and Crockett would quickly come to understand that such decisions came with consequences. In politics, allegiances mattered, and people tended to hold grudges.

  A number of factors conspired to doom Crockett in that first attempt at Congress, though he would later blame it all on the price of cotton. It’s true that cotton prices ran miraculously high in 1825, up to $25 per hundredweight, nearly five times the average price, and it’s true that Alexander was quick to jump on this fact, taking credit for it in the two main papers, with which he had connections and influence while Crockett did not.4 To complicate matters, John Overton began to have some fun at Crockett’s expense, partly in retaliation for Crockett’s vocal opposition two years earlier to moneyed planters and speculators, of which Overton was both. Writing under the nom de plume of “Aristides,” he took Crockett to task for attempting to change court days and to add an East Tennessee brigade to the militia of the Western District.5 Overton made a convincing case against Crockett with sustained newspaper postings, an onslaught that lasted over three months and kept Crockett constantly on the defensive. In the end, with the peoples’ purses bursting from the high cotton prices, and Alexander promising that there would be equally high prices for everything else they manufactured and sold, Crockett’s entreaties fell on deaf ears. “I might as well have sung salms over a dead horse, as to try to make the people believe otherwise; for they knowed their cotton had raised, sure enough, and if the colonel hadn’t done it, they didn’t know what had.”

  He was unable to persuade the voters differently, and this, combined with his general political naïveté, cost him dearly. Though years later in his autobiography Crockett would remember incorrectly that he lost by “exactly two votes,” the real tally difference that August was not two, but 267. Given his lack of preparation, Crockett’s showing was better than he let on; he had received 2,599 votes of the 5,465 total cast.6 But he was not accustomed to losing, and the fact that he later fudged the poll figures suggests that he took defeat hard. In a move that would become a pattern, Crockett chose to pacify his hurt pride by heading back out into the canebrakes to hunt, out into open country where he conjured schemes for making easy profits to get ahead, always dreaming of ways to make his fortune.

  One such enterprise involved some speculation of his own, for no sooner had Crockett returned home from his defeat than he made a trip of some twenty-five miles to Obion Lake, where he hired a small crew and put them to work building two large flatboats, which he intended to pile high with cut barrel staves and float to market in New Orleans. The plan seemed sound, if a bit ambitious for the self-described landlubber Crockett, and he felt confident enough to leave the construction of the craft to his men while he got down to the more serious and enjoyable business: “I worked on with my hands till the bears got fat, and then I turned out to hunting, to lay in a supply of meat.” It would be his most productive winter hunt ever, and he ended up supplying not only his family, but many other friends and relatives, with an abundance of meat, sustaining, and even augmenting, his backwoods legend. Crockett by this time had acquired an impressive pack of “eight large dogs, and as fierce as painters [panthers]; so that a bear stood no chance at all to get away from them.” Crockett took his dogs and hunted for a few weeks with a good friend, and when he’d filled the friend’s larders he spent some time helping his boys with the flatboats and the collection and cutting of barrel staves, but the work grew tedious and his mind wandered. “At length I couldn’t stand it any longer without a hunt,” he admitted. The hunt coursed through his veins, so he took one of his younger sons (either Robert Patton, nine, or William, sixteen), with or without Elizabeth’s complete blessing, and headed out for a long hunt. The hunt proved notable because during this winter, in an oft-told story, he killed a massive bear with nothing but a knife.

  One day early in the winter hunt, Crockett came across a downtrodden fellow who he described as “the very picture of hard times.” The man bent over a rough field, hacking away with a heavy implement and trying to clear the ground of roots, stumps, and boulders in a process called “grubbing.” Crockett stopped to chat with him, and commiserating when the other informed him that it wasn’t even his field; he was grubbing for another man, the owner, to get money to buy meat for his family. Crockett struck a deal with the man: if he would go with Crockett and his son and help pack and salt the slain bears, Crockett would provide the man with more meat than he could earn in a month of this backbreaking grubbing. The man retired to his rustic cabin, conferred with his wife, then reappe
ared with her blessing, and off they went. They killed “four very large fat bears that day,” and in the course of only a week added seventeen more. Crockett relates that he quite happily gave the man “over a thousand weight of fine fat bear-meat,” pleasing both the man and his wife, and when he saw him again the next fall, he learned that the meat had lasted him out the entire year.

  Crockett and his son later hooked up with a neighbor named McDaniel, who also needed a good supply of meat. They struck out to likely ground between Obion Lake and Reelfoot Lake, the brambly “harricane” country some of Crockett’s most coveted and productive, the strewn and tangled timber providing perfect cover for the animals. They followed ridges dense with cane, peering inside the hollows of black oaks in search of hiding bears, using Crockett’s wily techniques of finding treed bears by noting the differentiation of scratch marks on a tree bark. On the third day Crockett and McDaniel left the young boy in camp and headed deep into the cane, but found the going slow “on account of the cracks in the earth occasioned by the quakes.” The deep troughs and fissures forced them to go around in places, and soon they met a bear coming straight at them, and Crockett sent his dogs off and they howled in pursuit. Crockett remembered this bear well, noting that “I had seen the tracks of the bear they were after, and I knowed he was a screamer.” Crockett kept hotly after the bear, the foliage so tight in places that he was reduced to traveling his hands and knees: “The vines and briars was so thick that I would sometimes have to crawl like a varment to get through at all.”

  In time he managed to scramble through, and he found that his dogs had treed the bear in an old dead stump, and shaking with fatigue Crockett just managed to shoulder his rifle and bring the bear down. With McDaniel’s help they butchered and salted the bear, “fleecing off the fat” as they skinned the animal and packed the prepared meat on horses. They rode when they could, but mostly they walked, and they reached the camp around sunset. Crockett called out and his son answered, and as they moved in the direction of camp, the dogs opened up again, baying into the sunset. Never one to forgo a fresh chase, Crockett handed his reins to McDaniel and trotted off after his hounds into the darkening skies.