Richard Penn Smith & John Seelye Page 4
When he returned to Washington in 1833, Crockett had immediately set to work on behalf of his version of the Tennessee Land Bill, at the same time fulminating in private correspondence against Jackson because of the president’s naked display of power in removing the deposits, which had the effect of “deranging” the stability of currency and “destroying” the nation’s system of commerce (Shackford: 147). He repeatedly used the phrase “King Andrew,” popular with Whigs (who took their name from the anti-Tory party in England), and with them he maintained that the president was a despot indifferent to the will of the people.
With his “authorized” autobiography now in print, Crockett went on a tour of the Northeast in late April and early May of 1834, hoping to increase the sales of his book. The trip was also a test of the political waters in Whig country, first in the expectation of gaining support for his land bill, and second with some vague hope of making a run for the presidency against Jackson’s appointed heir, Martin Van Buren. The vice president was variously characterized by Crockett and the Whigs as “Old Kinderhook,” “the Magician,” and “the little Red Fox.”
But the only palpable result of this trip was another book, An Account of Colonel Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (1835), a first-person narrative published in his name but credited by Shackford to William Clark, a fellow congressman and a Whig. Shackford uncovers evidence that Crockett was active in contributing materials to Clark, but though faithful to the facts of the congressman’s tour, the book is a thoroughgoing piece of Whig propaganda. Thanks to a well-managed schedule of events during his tour, Colonel Crockett received a tumultuous welcome in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The event was comparable to President Jackson’s tour of the Northeast the year before; indeed it may have been arranged by the Whigs as a calculated response to the general’s trip.
We may not doubt the colorful congressman’s widespread popularity, but that much of the applause was politically inspired we may also accept, and the book that renders an account of the tour is filled with “Crockett’s” euphoric praise of progress in the places he visited, from improvements to navigation (the Union system of canals connecting Philadelphia to Pittsburgh) to the factory system in the Northeast. He also spoke of the necessity of protective tariffs to foster local manufacturers, and his description of the Lowell mills, with their miles of attractive young women tending looms, reads like an advertising brochure written by Abbot Lawrence himself. He claimed that in New York he had sat down to dinner with “Major Jack Downing,” and his account of the tour closes with an exchange of “letters” with the fictitious Yankee opponent of Jackson. Like the version of the “Major” created by Charles Augustus Davis, the western colonel, by the end of the account of his tour, had become a figment of the Whig imagination.
Much of the tour’s cost was covered by his hosts, and in Philadelphia Crockett was given a watch-chain seal engraved with his famous motto, “Go ahead,” sentiments beloved by Whiggish champions of progress (one of the first locomotives put in service in Massachusetts was named “Davy Crockett”). In Boston he was given a hunting coat of local manufacture. In Lowell he received a bolt of fabric spun in the mills from wool supposedly shipped from Mississippi, thus proving the value of factories in the Northeast (and tariffs) to farmers in the South—a major stress of Clay’s “American system,” the royal arch supporting the Whig notion of national union.
When Crockett returned to Philadelphia from Washington on the following 4th of July, he was given (by the “Young Whigs”) a new rifle crafted to his specifications, and in response to a heavy hint by the congressman he was at the same time presented with “a half a dozen cannisters of his best sportsman’s powder” by none other than the aging Éleuthère Irénée Du Pont (Tour, quoted in Shackford: 168). Independence Day in Philadelphia, the city where the Declaration of Independence had been written, was a special occasion, and Crockett shone, delivering rhetorical fireworks in an address denouncing the return to America of tyranny in the form of Andrew Jackson.
During his grand tour, Crockett had made similar speeches along the way, all printed in the Tour, all repeating the same themes, all walking the line dictated by the Whig party, and all apparently written for him to read aloud. The result is probably the most boring book associated with Crockett’s authorship, though the Life of Martin Van Buren, which appeared over his name later the same year, is a close rival, being a complex and at times incomprehensible recounting of the “Magician’s” political career. But these efforts were to no avail if Crockett expected to garner Whig support for his land bill, for it was defeated when the vote was called on February 18, 1835, as was Colonel Crockett in the congressional election later that same year.
His loss to Adam Huntsman—another hero of the War of 1812 whose artificial limb inspired Crockett’s unfortunate epithet, “timber-leg”—resulted in his declaration that the people of Tennessee could go to hell and that he was going to Texas. And so he did, his adventures inspiring one more ghostwritten book, a narrative written after his death but trailing inglorious clouds of defeat generated by Colonel Crockett’s congressional career. Out of those clouds, however, in part inspired by his martyrdom at the Alamo, sprung the phoenix called Davy Crockett, granting him an immortality he never sought but for which we may be sure he would have been grateful.
IV.
Richard Penn Smith, the author of Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas, was a well-connected Philadelphian; born in 1799, he was the grandson of William Smith, first provost of what would become the University of Pennsylvania. A lawyer with a creative bent inherited from his father, Smith had by 1836 written twenty plays and a novel, as well as sketches, short stories, and poetry. His first literary endeavor was a series of newspaper essays published in the early 1820s under the title “The Plagiary,” a meaningful coincidence given that his subsequent dramatic works were mostly adaptations of French plays.
As we shall see, Smith’s spurious account of Crockett’s apotheosis at the Alamo is likewise dependent on other men’s work and, having been written at a great rate of speed, is a tour de force of literary amalgamation. Though no great shakes in terms of style, the book managed to convince its readers that it was genuine, in part because Crockett’s autobiography is itself stylistically uneven and occasionally boring. Smith’s book was instantly popular, selling ten thousand copies in the first year of publication by Carey and Hart, and it received enthusiastic reviews in Great Britain, where it was regarded as a dependable account of the conflict in Texas. Smith’s twentieth-century biographer regards the book as superior to the author’s plays, which were overwrought and melodramatic, and regrets that he did not repeat his experiment in a realistic, humorous style. For whatever reason, Smith thenceforth abandoned his writing career, but his last book satisfied its immediate purpose: as the publishers had hoped, it emptied their shelves of unsold copies of Col. Crockett’s Tour.
Ever since the nativist enthusiasm for Davy Crockett in the 1930s, led by V. L. Parrington, Walter Blair, Franklin J. Meine, and Constance Rourke, most studies of popular culture in the United States have focused on the comic almanac adventures of the famed “Kentucky” hunter, which have been credited with creating a mythic Crockett. And yet, with their crude wood-cuts, raw humor, and emphasis on violence, the almanac stories bear little resemblance to the historic Crockett, who was of course from Tennessee. James Shackford’s biography, published in 1956, was intended to rescue the virtually forgotten original from the mythic version, but over the past fifty years it has continued to be the “Davy” of almanac fame who has monopolized scholarly attention.
Following the lead of Richard Slotkin, perhaps the most influential revisionist historian of the American West in recent times, modern students of popular culture have been drawn to literature that has attracted a large audience. It is a criterion clearly related to the populist tendency of democracy, which ranks the tastes and preferences of the general public higher than those of elite
s. Moreover, the distinction between the “two” Crocketts has been blurred by Slotkin himself, who confuses the chronology and contents of the “authorized” and ghostwritten Crockett autobiographies. As a result Slotkin gives the Sketches and Eccentricities undue emphasis, regarding its “folkloric” collection of “tall tales, trickster pranks, and magical triumphs” as having had the greater influence because it was published after Crockett’s own narrative of his life (Fatal Environment: 166).
Thus, in his discussion of Crockett’s death at the Alamo, Slotkin notes that his “publishers and editorial associates immediately increased the number and circulation of the almanacs that bore Crockett’s name, and published a sequel to his earlier biographies which purported to be the journal found on his dead body” (171). This conflates two quite distinct genres: whatever their origins, the almanacs were aimed at the masses, where Smith’s book, like the earlier accounts of Crockett’s life and adventures from which it derives, was intended for a relatively sophisticated readership. Moreover, the almanacs were ephemeral productions, and their great rarity today indicates how few escaped destruction at the end of the year for which they were published. On the other hand, Smith’s account of Crockett’s Texas adventures continued to be reprinted for nearly a century, often in tandem with Crockett’s own Narrative, and provided biographers and historians with what they assumed was authentic material.
In 1883 there appeared a compilation of biographies of celebrated western heroes by D. M. Kelsey, the frontispiece of which was a depiction of “Custer’s Last Rally on the Little Big Horn.” In celebrating “Pioneer Heroes” from de Soto to Generals Miles and Crook, Kelsey rendered an account of Crockett’s life that combined the authentic Narrative with Smith’s Exploits and Adventures, and it was shortly afterward that Theodore Roosevelt wrote “Remember the Alamo,” with its dependence on Smith’s account of Crockett’s final days. When in 1923 Hamlin Garland brought together Crockett’s autobiography and excerpts from the ghostwritten Tour, he also included the main body of Smith’s narrative despite a bibliographic note declaring that the book was spurious.
Garland himself seemed to be dubious about its authenticity, calling Smith’s an “apocryphal work,” but he also noted that it “remains the only account of the great woodsman’s death, and it is in character” (10). The bibliographic note takes a somewhat harder but still positive tack, noting that “this pseudo-Crockett … is itself interesting,” if only because “the existence of such a book that there was current at the time a popular legend and literature of the frontier which made it possible for catch-penny hacks to manufacture a reasonably characteristic, reasonably convincing ‘autobiography’ of a dead hero while his death was still in the news” (11).
This rationale still seems valid, for Smith’s fictional narrative bears witness not only to the contemporary popularity of Colonel Crockett, intensified by his martyrdom at the Alamo, but to the author’s skill in producing a convincing story from a patchwork of anecdotes borrowed from earlier books supposedly written by Crockett along with other elements popular at the time. Smith gave verisimilitude to his narrative by incorporating bona fide materials about the mounting friction between the Americans in Texas and the authorities in Mexico, binding the whole with a reasonably accurate description of the landscape through which Crockett had passed. As his biographer notes, Smith used a realistic, often slangy style, and he included a number of humorous and picaresque anecdotes; though the narrative is often sketchy and occasionally flat, anyone familiar with the other books credited to Crockett, including the bona fide autobiography, will recognize the terrain.
In 1933, Franklin Meine published his anthology, Tall Tales of the Southwest, and aroused the ire of James Shackford by ignoring the “real” David Crockett. Meine included “only a selection from the entirely spurious Exploits, the only Crockett book with which David had nothing to do” (viii). This, Shackford continues, “paved the way” for Constance Rourke’s “fictional” biography of Crockett in 1934, “which gave ‘Davy’ the identical tall-tale treatment Mr. Meine had given him.” This was what Parrington meant when he referred to Davy Crockett as “a mythical figure that drew to itself the unappropriated picturesque that sprang spontaneously from the crude western life,” only Shackford identified the mythmaking process with the 1930s, not the 1830s (II: 173).
Rourke used a number of anecdotes about her hero’s travels through Arkansas and Texas as told by Smith, and devoted a chapter to “the brightly colored story [about] the shadowy companions who joined Crockett somewhere along the way,” including Thimblerig (supposedly inspired by the famous gambler Jonathan Harrison Green) and the Bee hunter (179). Though aware that Smith had been identified as the author, Rourke felt that “a pattern of evidence may yet be woven to prove that it had a basis in fact… . The tale was—and remains—part of the spreading Crockett legend … and so must have a place in this narrative.” Indeed, Smith’s book is still of great relevance to anyone interested in the “mythic” Crockett, not because it may have been written by Crockett but because it is a self-conscious attempt to construct a narrative out of contemporary popular materials.
There is an early reference in Smith’s book to Sam Patch, who gained fame and a short-lived immortality by leaping from great heights into rivers and falls. A millworker in Rhode Island, Patch obtained local notice by his dives into the Pawtucket River, but he first caught the attention of a greater public after going to work in a factory in Paterson, New Jersey. Appearing high above the Passaic River where a crowd had gathered to watch as the span of a great bridge was being slowly drawn across the chasm, Patch stole the show by shouting what became his famous slogan, “Some things can be done as well as others!” then jumping into the water far below. He thereby commenced a career of sorts, the high point of which was reached when he leaped into Niagara Falls from a platform on Goat Island before a huge audience.
Patch’s series of breathtaking jumps ended with yet another, even greater leap, this time into the Genesee Falls in Rochester: Sam promoted the event with a poster declaring, “HIGHER YET! SAM’S LAST JUMP. SOME THINGS CAN BE DONE AS WELL AS OTHERS. THERE IS NO MISTAKE IN SAM PATCH” (Dorson, America in Legend: 94). The words proved prophetic: this was truly his last leap because it killed him. Smith works Patch’s slogan into his narrative at several junctures, thereby associating Crockett with another eccentric hero of the day, perhaps with a somber implication.
Like Patch, Crockett had been elevated suddenly from a humble station in life and then had become trapped in his own notoriety; moreover, his heroic stature, like Patch’s, was regarded as something of a joke: not even his Whig champions took Crockett seriously. Patch literally rose to a great height and suffered a great fall—his wooden tombstone read “Here lies Sam Patch; such is Fame”—and a similar epitaph could have decorated Crockett’s grave, had his body not been burned and buried with the other defenders of the Alamo. As I have already stated, had Crockett abandoned his political career after his second term as a state legislator, his fame would have remained local, but once elected to Congress, he gained a platform from which, like Patch, he took a fatal leap.
The first part of Smith’s Exploits and Adventures relies heavily on material in Clarke’s 1832 Life, and takes material as well from letters Crockett had sent to his (and Smith’s) publishers, Carey and Hart. The former includes the colonel’s account of his campaigning methods and the cunning trick played on a rum-seller, and though the victim is not a swindling Yankee like Job Snelling—a type that was then emerging in contemporary popular literature—several Yankee tricksters do appear in Clarke’s book. From Crockett’s letters to his publishers Smith took details of the colonel’s departure for Texas, and, as Constance Rourke notes, “whole passages were taken over from [Mary Austin] Holley’s ‘Texas’ and from David B. Edwards’s ‘History of Texas,’ among others” (267-68).
Smith soon introduced characters into the narrative that were apparently of his own creation, including
both Thimblerig and the unnamed philanthropist-fiddler, a sentimental type perhaps inspired by Laurence Sterne. But the lovelorn Bee hunter was lifted from Cooper’s recent The Prairie, much as Crockett’s feat of marksmanship, first used in Clarke’s Life, is a parody of a famous episode in The Pioneers where Leatherstocking actually does hit the center of a bullseye twice. Crockett’s encounter with the young bumpkin rehearsing “a knock-down and drag-out fight” was taken from a sketch in Augustus Baldwin Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes, published in 1835, indicating the extent to which Smith was up-to-date not only on major authors of his day but on southwestern humor as well.
Most narratives about Crockett’s martyrdom in the cause for freedom in Texas ignore the fact that one of the many objections American colonists had to arbitrary Mexican rule was the law against slavery incorporated in the Mexican constitution of 1824, the year that independence from Spain was finally achieved. The founders of the American colony had pinned their hopes for prosperity on raising cotton, from which fortunes were being made along the Mississippi delta, and cotton growing on a large scale depended on slave labor.