David Crockett: The Lion of the West

by Michael Wallis

  During the campaign, he made an effort to keep his sense of humor and build rapport with the voters, but without coming off as the buffoon his critics and enemies portrayed him to be. The Jacksonian camp tried to help Fitzgerald by gerrymandering his congressional district in such a way that it would work against Crockett. They also published a vitriolic tract, The Book of Chronicles, filled with attacks on Crockett and his political motives written in biblical language. The author of the Chronicles was Adam R. Huntsman, a Tennessee attorney and rising star in Jackson’s fledgling Democratic Party, who had lost a leg in the Creek Indian War. It was replaced by a wooden leg.15

  “I had Mr. Fitzgerald, it is true, for my open competitor,” Crockett wrote, “but he was helped along by all his little lawyers again, headed by old Black Hawk, as he is sometimes called (alias) Adam Huntsman, with all his talents for writing ‘Chronicles,’ and such like foolish stuff…. But one good thing was, and I must record it, the papers in the district were now beginning to say ‘fair play a little,’ and they would publish on both sides of the question.”16

  The results of the election in August 1833 were close, but Crockett surprisingly managed a victory. “The contest was a warm one, and the battle well-fought,” explained Crockett, “but I gained the day, and the Jackson horse was left a little behind.”17 In fact, the Jacksonian machine was left a total of 173 votes behind, according to official election returns, with Fitzgerald polling 3,812 votes to Crockett’s 3,985.

  Crockett’s victory, given his popular celebrity, got the attention of the nation, particularly the leaders of the Whig Party. Crockett was now considered electable and, with the exception of Andrew Jackson, probably the most popular man in Tennessee, if not the nation. The influential Niles’ Weekly Register, a pro-Whig national journal published in Baltimore, came out with a glowing tribute to Congressman Crockett. It read, in part:

  A great deal has been said in the newspapers concerning Col. Crockett, who has been again elected a member of congress from Tennessee. It was the misfortune of the colonel to have received no school education in his youth, and since to have had but little opportunity to retrieve that defect; but he is a man of a strong mind, and of great goodness of heart. The manner of his remarks are so peculiar that they excite much attention, and are repeated because of their originality; but there is a soundness, or point, in some of them which shows the exercise of a well disciplined judgment—and we think it not easy for an unprejudiced man to communicate with the colonel without feeling that he is honest.18

  Out in west Tennessee, Crockett readied himself for a triumphal return to the nation’s capital. As he had done in the past when facing debt, he again treated human beings like the livestock he took to market. In his capacity as the executor of the Robert Patton estate, it is recorded that he sold an eighteen-year-old slave, Sofia, to his friend Lindsey Tinkle for $525. He also sold two slave boys, Aldolphus and Samuel, to his stepson George Patton for $480 and $372, respectively, as well as a husband and wife, Daniel and Delila, together for $660.19 The infusion of cash paid off some bills and also provided Crockett with some cash until his congressional pay resumed.

  His bag packed and the hounds entrusted to his sons, Crockett once more headed east to Washington City, arriving at Mrs. Ball’s Boarding House well before the December 2 opening of Congress. Crockett had new people to meet, old friends to greet, and some scores to settle. He also had a book that needed to be written.

  THIRTY-TWO

  GO AHEAD

  WITH HIS CONFIDENCE RESTORED, his seat in Congress reclaimed, Crockett was more than ready to leave behind the makeshift cabin, where he lived alone on a piece of hardscrabble leased land, and join his Whig allies while ensconced at Mary Ball’s comfortable boardinghouse on Pennsylvania Avenue. His two-year absence from Washington City had made him grow fonder of the drama and excitement of the national political scene; the capital even in these early days pulsed with an energy not to be found in Tennessee and addictive to those who experienced it.

  True to the familiar motto customarily ascribed to him—“Be always sure you are right, then go ahead”—Crockett behaved, in effect, like a lead hound plunging into the cane. When the Twenty-third Congress convened, on December 2, 1833, Crockett was ready for action. He openly condemned Jackson, whom the Whigs now referred to as “King Andrew the First,” for his assault on the Bank of the United States and opposition to renewal of the bank’s charter. Jackson had been wary of banks since he was a young man in the 1790s and had lost a sizable amount of money in a bank investment. He believed the Second Bank of the United States, chartered in 1816 just five years after the First Bank of the United States lost its charter, was nothing but a monopoly and that its president, Nicholas Biddle, was guilty of corrupt lending practices. While Congress was out of session, Jackson not only vetoed the bank charter but also removed all government funds and deposited them in privately owned state financial institutions that became known as “pet banks.” Crockett favored keeping the government’s money in the Second United States Bank, and believed that Jackson was acting out of personal spite. A loan that Crockett had received in the past had been forgiven by Biddle, an action that endeared him and the institution to Crockett.1 Besides joining the other lawmakers battling Jackson on the banking issue, Crockett also introduced proposals concerning his Tennessee Land Bill. Apparently he labored under the false belief that all of his newfound notoriety would somehow ensure passage of the land legislation that had previously eluded him. “My land Bill is among the first Bills reported to the house and I have but little doubt of its passage during the present Session,”2 Crockett boasted in a letter to one of his constituents. It would never come to pass.

  Another dream, however, would soon be realized. By December 1833, Crockett was hard at work on his autobiography. At last he would have a book of his own done that would clear up some of the misconceptions caused by the earlier works about his life. It also would bring in money and earn him increased recognition among the press and the public. After watching others profit from his life and adventures, Crockett figured that—as one of his many chroniclers later put it—“he might as well taste the pie he had helped bake.”3

  To accomplish this daunting task, Crockett knew he would need a great deal of help. He turned to his friend Thomas Chilton, the Kentucky lawyer who also had first entered the House of Representatives in 1827. Like Crockett, Chilton had served two terms, was voted out of office, and had just been reelected as an Anti-Jacksonian.4 Chilton and Crockett not only shared a room at the boardinghouse but they also “sang out of the same hymnal” when it came to their political views, particularly a mutual disillusionment with Jackson and an extreme dislike of his heir apparent, Vice President Martin Van Buren, a native of Kinderhook, New York, who grew up speaking Dutch as his first language. Over the years, Chilton had helped Crockett write legislative documents, speeches, and circular letters for constituents, so he seemed the obvious choice for collaborator on the autobiography.

  “I am ingaged [sic] in writing a history of my life and I have Completed one hundred and ten pages and I have Mr. Chlton [sic] to correct it as I write it,”5 Crockett wrote to his son John Wesley, on January 10, 1834. He also explained that publishing houses in New York and Philadelphia had expressed some interest in the book and that he expected it would “contain about two hundred pages and will fully meet all expectations.” Crockett went on to tell John Wesley that he would likely tour the eastern states to promote and sell the book once it was published. “I intend never to go home until I am able to pay all my debts and I think I have a good prospect at present and I will do the best I can,” Crockett wrote.

  In much of his correspondence to friends, Crockett urged them to tell their local booksellers about the autobiography, which, he promised, would be “just like myself, a plain and singular production.” This mission statement was repeated in the book itself: “I want the world to understand my true history, and how I worked along to rise from a caneb
rake to my present station in life.”6

  The writing went relatively fast, taking just about two months, with Crockett dictating his thoughts and memories to Chilton in the comfort of their room. In developing the text, the two turned to a variety of sources for inspiration and as models to follow. One of these was The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the traditional title given for the unfinished record of Franklin’s life, which he wrote with considerable humor and wit in the final decades of his life, between 1771 and 1790.

  First published in France in 1791, Franklin’s work appeared two years later in an English edition. It was said to have been the first secular biography printed in the United States and served as the model for many more authors to follow. According to popular legend, a well-thumbed copy was among Crockett’s possessions when he made his trek from Tennessee to the Mexican state of Texas in late 1835.7

  Like Franklin, Crockett avoided discussing any of his serious failings. Other similarities linked the two men, superficial and substantive, including the fact that both were known to wear fur caps—Franklin to delight and charm his many admirers in France, Crockett to prop up his colorful frontiersman image. Franklin portrayed himself as homespun but shrewd, with plenty of horse sense. He also was one of the first American writers to make a case for the notion that a lack of formal education was actually beneficial. This was a game plan from which Crockett planned not to stray.

  “Both were self-made men,” Joe Reilly, of Drexel University, explained during a presentation about the two men in 2007.

  They volunteered for glory and fame. They had political and economic goals they chose to pursue. To establish and maintain their public image they manipulated the contemporary media by publishing an Autobiography. Ben Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanac for 25 years. He became wealthy from it. Davy Crockett was the supposed author of an almanac series for 20 years. He had no financial interest in them and never profited from it except for notoriety. He was an early example of others profiting from a celebrity.8

  Another literary work that influenced Crockett was an English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which had been published in 1774 in Ireland. The University of Tennessee’s 2003 acquisition of this copy of the Metamorphoses—bearing an authenticated Crockett signature and with a complete provenance—provided some additional insight into both the historic and the mythical Crockett.9

  One of the most influential works in the Western literary canon, this epic narrative poem in which Ovid tells of the creation and history of the world through the legends of the gods, and their transformation of humans into nonhuman forms, has inspired great writers from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Joyce. This particular copy of the Ovid classic came to the attention of the University of Tennessee in late March 2003, when Aaron Purcell, a special collections archivist, randomly scanned eBay. com. The online listing that drew Purcell’s attention provided a detailed provenance of the book—published by John Exshaw, the edition had been issued by a family of prominent printers and booksellers on Dame Street, in Dublin.10 Along with other information about the book, the seller included a digital image from the endpages. When he examined it, Purcell was stunned. He could not believe what he saw on the computer screen—David Crockett’s distinctive autograph, scrawled in ink.

  “The online description had a very strong scan of Crockett’s signature,” according to Purcell, who quickly compared the computer version to archival documents signed by Crockett.11 If, as Purcell thought, the autograph was genuine, he had “unearthed an almost too-good-to-be-true find: a book that had once belonged to Tennessee’s backwoods hero, Davy Crockett.”

  After several weeks, the book finally arrived. Following careful examination, it was determined that the Crockett signature inside was authentic, making the book an invaluable addition not only to the rare book collection but to American history. The text of the accompanying affidavit from the seller, Erby Madrese Markham, a woman then in her nineties, revealed even more about the book and Crockett. Markham explained that when Crockett gave the book to her great-uncle, Thomas Owen, a friend of Thomas Chilton, he advised, “If he could read this book he could whip any bear.” Crockett and Chilton told Thomas that they read the book to get a better understanding of myths and fables as they prepared to write the Narrative.

  “The news that Special Collections had acquired a book owned by Davy Crockett that carried his signature was truly a signal event,” declared Crockett scholar Michael A. Lofaro in a university library publication. “Like many a frontiersman, Crockett was never renowned as a reader, and a book that he owned and signed at the rear as testimony to the fact that he had read it could lend true insight into the man and perhaps into the works that he himself authored or encouraged.”12 Lofaro added:

  We are left with the tantalizing proposition that Crockett’s reading of this compendium of myths may have had a significant impact on the evolution of the narratives that essentially define his legendary status through tall tales. While only further study can prove or disprove this hypothesis, it is also well to note that Metamorphoses does translate from the Latin as transformations and that the first line of Ovid’s text reads “my intention is to tell of bodies changed to different forms.”13

  The book’s importance to Crockett is significant, and it is important to realize that the work had been available since the mid-1700s, when lexicographer Nathan Bailey translated the original Latin text into English, primarily for use in school classrooms. This meant that Crockett—who certainly did not master Latin but, contrary to some accounts was not an illiterate backwoods bumpkin—could have read much of the book, including the main introduction, the story summaries, the various notes, and a final explanation of the history and mythology of each of the fables. Moreover, besides Crockett’s signature on page 392, Thomas Owen, the man to whom the book was given, signed the same page, with the date 1832.

  Another critical detail contained in the book’s affidavit of provenance is the mention of Thomas Chilton, friend of both Crockett and Owen, the man who received the book from Crockett as a gift. Certainly much credit for the Crockett autobiography was due Tom Chilton, who had an ear for his friend’s vast repertoire of stories laced with idioms and phrases. Chilton also proved quite helpful in negotiating a contract for the 211-page book, which was officially completed on January 28, 1834.14

  On February 3, the manuscript was shipped to the publisher selected by Chilton and Crockett—E. L. Carey and A. Hart in Philadelphia, a then venerable house with a solid reputation for publishing such well-known authors as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.15 In the cover letter to the publisher, which was, like the manuscript, in Chilton’s handwriting and dictated by Crockett, the coauthors cavalierly mentioned that they had no time to have the manuscript copied, so they shipped the only copy. “It has been hastily passed over for correction, and some small words may have been omitted,” Crockett wrote. “If so you will supply them. It needs no corrections of spelling or grammar, as I make no literary pretensions.”16 The lone copy of the manuscript arrived safely in Philadelphia, and the publishers immediately distributed a broadside with the announcement:

  It may interest the friend of this genuine Son of the West to learn, that he has lately completed, with his own hand, a narrative of his life and adventures, and that the work will be shortly published by Messrs. Carey & Hart, of Philadelphia. The work bears this excellent and characteristic motto by the author:

  I leave this rule for others, when I’m dead:

  Be always sure you’re right—THEN GO AHEAD!

  Three weeks later, Crockett again wrote Carey and Hart, expressing how anxious he was to see bound books, and instructing the publisher to split the royalties between himself and Chilton, although he stressed that this arrangement had to remain confidential.17 Only a month later, the results were in and everyone was pleased. The book, as they say, was a runaway success. The first editions of A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee, had sold out and th
e presses busily cranked out more. Within a few months the book went into a sixth printing, which, at fifty cents per copy wholesale, made Carey and Hart a profit and began to pay royalties to the two authors as well. Some sources estimated that at least 10,000 copies sold that first year, which computed to at least $2,000 for Crockett. While not a fortune, that sum would have at least whittled down some of his enormous personal debt. The book also was a great source of pride for Crockett, and he devoted much of his time to promoting it and urging others to buy as many copies as possible, no doubt appeasing his publisher.

  Crockett’s vivid and compelling descriptions of bear hunting and his account of his role in the Creek War are sometimes inaccurate or embellished. Yet, despite deviation from fact, much of the Narrative is supported by independent accounts. Ultimately, the book remains an important record of a time and place in American history when the fledgling nation was defining itself.

  In the preface of the Narrative dated February 1, 1834, Crockett heaps much criticism on the author of Sketches. He also explains that in his book he has “endeavored to give the reader a plain, honest, homespun account of my state in life, and some few of the difficulties which have attended me along its journey, down to this time.” Much like Crockett, the Narrative remains a paradox. It serves as a fairly reliable source, despite embellishments, for both the mythical and the authentic man. It also captures much of Crockett’s personality, down-to-earth charm, and wit, while providing insights into the brutality of frontier life and the cutthroat world of politics. Embedded with backwoods idioms and seasoned with Crockett’s own dialect, proverbs, and humorous misspellings, the Narrative endures as a historical and political document. It is also a genuine American work, in the tradition of the writings of Ben Franklin and Mark Twain, though perhaps not as literary. Most of all, the autobiography gives the reader the voice of David Crockett—loud, clear, and unforgettable.