Richard Penn Smith & John Seelye Read online

  We may find the roots of the antipathy between East and West buried in the politics of the early 1830s, specifically with the emergence of the Whig party in reaction to the ascendancy of Jacksonian democracy. And it was out of the political broils of this decade that the mythic Davy Crockett first emerged, as a “hero” whose self-creation and self-contradictoriness are a register of the complex discontent that was sown by the ultra-democratic yet dictatorial policies of Andrew Jackson. As V. L. Parrington wrote, Crockett provides “a full-length portrait of the Jacksonian leveler, in the days when the great social revolution was establishing the principles of an equalitarian democracy” (II, 390-91).

  Yet David Crockett, as he always styled himself, was a single-minded congressional advocate of an increasingly anti-Jackson policy; indeed his fame rose because it was fueled by his antipathy toward “Old Hickory.” Without that anger there would have been no legendary Davy Crockett and most definitely no hero of the Alamo, never mind of the book titled Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas. That is, to understand Davy Crockett of Texas fame we must start with David Crockett of Tennessee.

  II.

  The son of Rebeckah Hawkins Crockett and her husband, John, David was born in 1786 in eastern Tennessee, his parents having moved there from North Carolina, fleeing those familiar frontier specters, poverty and debt. John Crockett’s own parents had been slaughtered by Native Americans in 1777, shortly after they had relocated from North Carolina to land that would soon become Tennessee. John was married by 1780, and settled in Washington County, North Carolina. Court records supply the material of his early biography, which was typical of his generation, for like many he was the son of an immigrant Irishman who had sought prosperity in the West but found only hardship and sudden death. The son shared the familial (and generational) propensity for misfortune: with a partner John built a mill in 1794 that was subsequently destroyed by a flood. He also speculated in land, one parcel of which he sold for a profit, but another parcel in eastern Tennessee, to which he moved his family from North Carolina after losing his mill, was auctioned off in 1795 to satisfy his debts.

  On a remnant of this land John built a tavern, and it was there, in Greene County, Tennessee, that David—namesake of his late grandfather Crockett—was born, a fifth son, well short of the blessed seventh, and with no great expectations. His youth, chronicled by himself in the Narrative of his life published in 1834, was a series of hardships and feats of endurance. At the age of eleven or twelve he was hired out by his father to a man driving a herd of cattle to Virginia who attempted to keep him on afterward as his employee, against the boy’s will. David escaped on a snowy evening, hiking through knee-deep snow for seven hours until he was rescued by travelers who, knowing his father, came to his aid.

  Once again, one of the party tried to keep the boy with him, but David continued on by foot until he reached home. Then, in the fall of 1799, he ran away, fearing retribution by his father or his teacher (or both) for having fought with a school-mate, and hired himself out to a drover taking cattle to Virginia. David’s later attempts to return were balked by this and subsequent employers, who often swindled him out of his pay, and it was 1802 before he was able to reach his father’s tavern, with nothing to show for his experience save a greater awareness of the frequent meanness and occasional generosity of strangers.

  The schoolyard episode had been forgotten, but, having been gone for more than two years, David had missed a critical period in his education. He was in effect illiterate, not even knowing the alphabet. For the next year he worked for hire, earning money to pay his father’s debts, but he later managed to acquire six months of further schooling by hiring himself out to a teacher in return for instruction. He could then read, write, and “cipher,” on a very basic level, sufficient for frontier conditions. Despite David’s poor prospects, he determined in 1805 to get married, again encountering obstacles, as the first young woman he courted married suddenly out from under him. But the second venture was successful.

  In 1806, he married Mary Finley, called Polly, over her mother’s objections, and the couple rented a small farm that yielded a meager income. Two sons were born to them before David set out in 1811 with his father-in-law for central Tennessee to claim land in Lincoln County. Crockett supported himself by hunting (game in new country being plentiful), a skill at which he became adept over the next two years, but in 1813 he left the Finleys for Franklin County in western Tennessee, the frontier region with which he would be identified for the rest of his short life.

  The War of 1812 was identified in the Southwest as a conflict with hostile Native Americans who were in league with the British. In Tennessee it was called the Creek War, during which Andrew Jackson first distinguished himself as a military leader before marching on to New Orleans and fame. It was during this war, also, that Crockett as an enlisted mounted volunteer first crossed paths with “the old general” while serving under his command during several important battles, service that took him as far as Tallahassee in Florida but not on to New Orleans. According to an early biographer, Crockett was present when the captain commanding his troop, which had been repeatedly insubordinate, went to Jackson for advice, that Crockett, upon returning to camp, distilled as “Be sure you are right, then go ahead,” a motto which he would famously make his own in future years (Shackford: 26).

  In his “authorized” autobiography, Crockett claimed to have been involved in a mutiny against Jackson, identifying himself with those soldiers whose term of enlistment had expired, and who attempted to return home against the general’s orders but were turned back by Jackson himself. The facts were otherwise, David having been with his family on an approximate furlough at the time, and as his best biographer, James Atkins Shackford, observes, his claim that he had participated in the mutiny was inspired by his subsequent quarrels with President Jackson during his years in Congress.

  Shackford also notes that Crockett’s account of his brief military career was somewhat exaggerated for political effect, but by all accounts, including his own, Crockett was a brave and diligent soldier. He underwent great hardship from hunger and cold while improving his hunting abilities by supplying his fellow militiamen with meat. He left the army somewhat short of his ninety days of contracted service, but he paid another man to serve out the remainder of his time. No deserter, despite his subsequent claim, David ended his enlistment with the rank of fourth sergeant.

  Crockett returned home early in 1815, about the time that Mary gave birth to their third child, a daughter. In the summer of that same year Mary died, and David, now responsible for a growing family, soon remarried. His new wife, Elizabeth (“Betsey”) Patton, was herself a young widow with children, well-born in frontier terms and a woman of strong character who would be of great help to David, who was not much gifted with “managerial abilities” (Shackford: 34). His gifts were, like those of Cooper’s Leatherstocking, suited for the wilderness life and the hunting trail, and in subsequent years he had frequent opportunity for displaying them.

  After an initial foray into Alabama in 1816, he took his family west the following year, to Lawrence County in Tennessee, newly created from land ceded by the Chickasaws, hence filled with wild game. There he became a justice of the peace and was elected colonel of the local militia, warranting the title by which he was thenceforth known, not an honorary but a genuine rank. It was also an indication of Crockett’s popularity, which was further testified to by his election to the state legislature in 1821 as a representative from his county.

  Colonel Crockett’s military rank and elevation to political power are associated by Shackford with the same “squatter democracy” that swept Andrew Jackson into office in 1828. The reference is to Crockett’s frontier constituency, which in western Tennessee was often identified with settlers who had taken up lands without authentic claims. But in Jackson’s case it overlooks the support the president received from north-eastern Democrats, not only workers but elites represe
nted by the historian George Bancroft and the author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Nonetheless, it is undeniable that Crockett’s style of political campaigning was very different from that found in long-established communities in the Northeast and the South and resembles the depictions of stump speaking and election days in Missouri painted by George Caleb Bingham.

  It was by Crockett’s account something of a game, staged between friendly adversaries who took pride in verbal athletics and pranks. It involved (as Bingham’s paintings suggest) the dispensation by candidates of free liquor to the electorate, and required a sense of humor and a fund of anecdotes. Elections, like camp meetings, were social affairs, providing relief from the isolation and tedium of life on the frontier. Democrats being virtually without competition in southwestern Tennessee, party was not the issue, and candidates vied with each other in promising prosperity for their people, whether by building roads or opening new lands for settlement. Crockett became as adept at electioneering as at hunting—nor were the two talents unrelated, the reputation as a skillful man with a rifle being highly valued by his frontier constituents—and he undoubtedly drew on his wilderness exploits for the stories he told during political campaigns.

  During his first term of legislative office, moreover, Crockett became acutely aware that the interests of voters in western Tennessee were quite distinct from those in the east. Thus representatives from the eastern and middle sections of the state differed from representatives from the west over the matter of land warrants, made complex by Tennessee having been carved out of the western part of North Carolina. As in the similar creation of Kentucky from part of Virginia, a situation emerged in which a man might unknowingly claim land actually owned by another; then, having set up a cabin and made improvements, he could lose all to the original claimant. Daniel Boone, the grand original for hunter-pioneers like Crockett, had lost his Kentucky lands to absentee owners in Virginia, speculators who had bought large tracts with the intention of selling them after their value increased.

  Shackford tells us that David, while serving as an enlisted man in the army, had come to resent the privilege and power engendered by mere rank. As a legislator representing western interests, it was easy to translate this inequity into the conflict between propertied elites in east and middle Tennessee and the poor settlers in his own region. Men like Andrew Jackson of Nashville not only lived on large plantations, they aped the manners of the southern aristocracy, including the assertion of personal honor by fighting duels, whereas differences on the Tennessee frontier, a region of struggling farmers rather than wealthy planters, were settled by the exercise of wits or fists.

  It was during Crockett’s first term as a member of the state legislature that he was styled “the gentleman from the cane” (a reference to the unsettled regions where the tall stalks of wild cane grew in abundance, forming thickets called “brakes”) by an opponent during a debate, an epithet which he first found offensive but then turned into a joke against the other man. He subsequently made it a part of his emerging identity as a champion of the underprivileged settlers in the west, those other “gentlemen from the cane” who had elected him to office.

  That is, Crockett had begun to form the backwoods persona that would make him famous, yet had he ended his political career in 1824 he would have followed a mute and inglorious career not much different from that of his constituents. Frontier life was often marked by financial failures inspiring a move farther west, an experience involving considerable hardship that could well be followed by subsequent failures. During the first legislative session in which he served, Crockett was called home because a grist-and-powder mill he had built had been destroyed by a flood along the very waters that were to turn the mill wheel and that also swept away a distillery connected with the operation. This disaster was similar to the one experienced by his father in 1794 and likewise inspired Crockett to plan a move with his family to lands newly opened west of the Tennessee River.

  Before Crockett left for home, the legislature met in joint session to consider an issue of serious interest to settlers in western regions, a call for a convention to revise the state constitution, necessary to give due representation in the legislature of the rapidly settled districts in west Tennessee. A convention would also correct inequities in property taxes, which being uniform throughout the state, bore heavily on western settlers. Favored by the newly elected Governor William Carroll (and Colonel Crockett, soon to be of west Tennessee) the call for a convention was opposed by wealthy landowners in central Tennessee, and was tabled for the time.

  No sooner had the state legislature adjourned in November than David headed out in search of a suitable site to which he could relocate his family. This he found on a branch of the Obion River, in a region that had experienced both hurricanes and earthquakes in 1812-13, resulting in tangled windfalls, large crevices in the ground, and a change in lakes and river courses that left great swamps behind. Though apparently hostile to the needs of settlers, the region was friendly to wildlife, which made it very attractive to men with Crockett’s talents.

  On the other hand, his penetration of this wilderness involved wading and swimming through flood waters in order to bypass heavy thickets and windfalls, this in the winter months. David demonstrated the qualities of courage and hardihood shown by him as a boy and an enlisted man, but having staked out his new home, he returned to the old one to be confronted by lawsuits for the debts occasioned by the loss of his mill, along with other claims against him that required the sale of his house and land to satisfy. He moved his family to the cabin he had built on a branch of the Obion in September 1822, but in the meantime he responded to the newly elected governor’s call reconvening the General Assembly for a special session in July.

  The Tennessee legislature met to vote on issues of serious interest to Crockett and his constituents, including a proposal to extend the date terminating the land warrants issued by North Carolina—which Crockett opposed—and a resolution to be sent to the United States Congress asking that a bill be passed that would allow Tennessee to sell off vacant lands, thereby acquiring funds to be used for fostering education in the state. Crockett voted for this resolution, apparently under the assumption that it would deal fairly with settlers already living on “vacant lands.” He likewise voted once again to issue a call for a convention to revise the state constitution, which he would continue to support during his career in the state legislature.

  Crockett returned home to move his family across the Tennessee River to their new place of residence, where he began to kill game in such large quantities as to earn him a considerable local reputation as a great hunter in the tradition of Daniel Boone. Where before Crockett had lived in regions where bears had become scarce, this region of windfalls and deep holes in the earth was a virtual haven for the animals settlers greatly valued for meat and fur. In one year he claimed to have killed 105 bears, a figure that Shackford questions, but he accepts as probable Crockett’s story about crawling into a crevice left by an earthquake to kill a bear with a hunting knife as well as another tale about shooting a bear that was as large as a bull.

  In the election of 1823, Crockett was returned to the Tennessee house of representatives, as before voting for bills favorable to “gentlemen from the cane,” especially those who had settled on lands still subject to North Carolina warrants, and he introduced a bill mandating the improvement of navigation in the western part of the state. He increasingly found himself at odds with representatives loyal to General Andrew Jackson, who had been nominated by the legislature in 1822 as their presidential candidate for the election of 1824, but who was identified by Crockett with eastern elites. In October of 1824 Crockett returned home, the second session of his term having ended, thus closing his career as a state representative.

  The very next year, he offered himself as a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives but was defeated and, seeking to augment his income, he set about building two flatboats loaded with a cargo of ba
rrel staves intended for New Orleans. His skill as a frontiersman and hunter did not translate well into river navigation, and he was nearly drowned when the boats, lashed together and floating sideways down the Mississippi, grounded on an island of tangled logs. The boat on which Crockett was aboard began to sink, and being below decks, he barely escaped through a small hatch with the help of his friends, parting with his clothes and considerable skin in the process. Both boats and their cargoes were lost, along with the time and money invested in the venture, and he returned to hunting bears for a living, a hazardous but familiar trade.

  In 1827 Crockett again ran for Congress, trailing the usual cloud of humorous anecdotes, dispensing free liquor to voters, and outwitting (and outlying) his opponents. This time he was successful, heralding his appearance on a much more prominent platform, which for Crockett was tantamount to a stage. By then he had mastered his public persona as something of a self-parodying backwoodsman; he was not in Washington long before he was discovered by newspapers, and anecdotes describing his eccentric behavior began to circulate, resulting in Crockett’s becoming what we now call a celebrity. Like many such, Crockett confused notoriety with true fame, at least for a time, and it was during this period, of about five years’ duration, that the mythic “Davy” began to cohere.

  III.