David Crockett (26 page)

C
ROCKETT FINALLY REACHED
the Obion River and made his way to his home in Gibson County in the late spring of 1826. It had been almost nine months since he had seen his wife or spoken with his children. True to form, as soon as he got back he turned right around and left again—this time for another crack at the bears. They had come out of hibernation, and Crockett wanted to add to his tally. He was out another month and took down 47 more, bringing the total to 105 bears killed over the seven-month-long season.
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“It is in the bear hunt that he is most himself,”
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wrote Richard Slotkin in
Regeneration through Violence
, the first of his trilogy on the mythology of the American West. “In the bear hunt the forces opposing him, keeping him from his desires, become tangible. They can be met in direct, open combat and vanquished…. The source of Crockett’s satisfaction with politics lies in his association of vote-getting and hunting…. They are quantifiable indicators of the degree of his prowess, symbols of great deeds of skill.”

It is doubtful if Elizabeth Crockett ever figured out just what kept her wayward husband always on the move and away from home. She and the children played no real role in Crockett’s world. In fact, his wives and offspring were not prominently featured in his autobiography. Instead they almost became “conquests of a hunt, as do bearskins, votes, and a powerful reputation in the community.”
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Elizabeth had to know that neither she nor the land could ever hold her husband. For that reason, she was far from pleased when he announced that he was going to try another run for Congress, for these were not times when all wives accompanied their political husbands to Washington.

On September 16, 1826, it became official—Crockett once again offered himself as a candidate for a seat in the U.S. Congress. “I have again been induced to submit my pretensions to a generous, high minded and magnanimous people,”
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Crockett wrote to voters on that date. “I am opposed to the Administration of this man from the Yankee states, called John Q. Adams; I am opposed to the conduct of the Kentucky orator, H. Clay [Henry Clay]; I am greatly opposed to our present Representative’s vote on the Tariff.” In closing, Crockett made one more promise. “I will not set [
sic
] silently, and permit the interest of my District to be neglected, while I have got a tongue to speak and a head to direct it…. I am the rich-man’s safe-guard, and poor man’s friend.”

Crockett opened his campaign in the spring of 1827. He realized that running against an incumbent opponent was always difficult, but he felt he could best Colonel Adam Rankin Alexander, despite having lost to him in the previous election. This time, Crockett had the much-needed backing of a solid financial benefactor. Crockett put his trust in Major Marcus Winchester; Memphis, on the western edge of the sprawling Ninth Congressional District, was the second largest congressional district in the nation, with more than 22,000 voters.
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Since their first encounter, following the riverboat accident, Crockett and Winchester had become even better acquainted, and Winchester was impressed with Crockett’s grit and style. He lent the campaign $250, endorsed Crockett, and talked him up to friends and associates throughout the region.
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“We frequently met at different places,” Crockett wrote of Winchester, “and as he thought I needed, he would occasionally hand me a little more cash; so I was able to buy a little of ‘the
creature
,’ to put my friends in a good humour, as well as the other gentlemen.”
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Besides Crockett and Alexander, a third candidate entered the race—the politically ambitious William Arnold. He was a veteran of the War of 1812 and a prominent attorney from Jackson who had been elected major general of the Tennessee Militia in 1826.
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Crockett, however, remained undaunted, even though he faced two high-profile opponents with illustrious military records. He figured that he had a military and political record all his own and that in the long run it would be more appealing to the general populace.

During the campaign, a sharp decline in the price of cotton hurt Alexander, whose past support of the tariff law came back to hurt him, just as Crockett had long predicted. Both Arnold and Alexander also helped Crockett’s cause by largely ignoring him and focusing on each other. At one campaign stop, Gen. Arnold spoke and directed his remarks at Alexander as if Crockett were not even there. After a time, a large flock of noisy guinea fowls happened upon the scene and made such a clatter that the flustered Arnold had to stop talking until the birds could be driven away.
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Crockett recalled,

That was exactly the folksy style that the crowds found so appealing. Crockett had become a seasoned campaigner who spoke the language of the voters. All of his speeches sounded much like the autobiography that he and Thomas Chilton would pen just a few years later, peppered with country expressions and his own peculiar brand of idioms and phrases. He was affable and did not seem to take himself too seriously. All of it worked in his favor. Crockett defeated both his opponents by a substantial margin. Arnold had 2,417 votes, Alexander received 3,646, and Crockett polled 5,868 votes, giving him a plurality of 2,222 votes.
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David Crockett, “the gentleman from the cane,” most comfortable, it seemed, hunting bears, appeared to be as strange a congressman-elect as there ever would be in American history. Some people, in fact, who recalled the seemingly impossible occurrence in 1811 when the great earthquake caused the Mississippi to run backward, were even more shocked by the news of Crockett’s election. Crockett himself may even have been surprised, though it might have been another instance of feigned modesty when, years after the election, he told a friend that “he never knew why the people of his district elected him to Congress, as it was a matter he knew precious little about at the time and had no idea what he would be called on to do when he arrived in Washington.”
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Early nineteenth-century pundits scratched their heads and wondered what had happened. The answer appeared clear. What had happened was that from the ranks of eligible voters, a huge number of white men—many encouraged by wives still almost a century away from being permitted to cast votes—turned out for Crockett. His vote count more than doubled the number of votes he had received just two years before, and, even more impressive, more than 12,000 voters cast ballots on election day, twice the number who voted in 1825. At least half of them supported Crockett.
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That is what made the difference—those hardscrabble farmers, squatters, stave makers, coon hunters, militia privates, storekeepers, tavern owners, and so many more. In their minds, and espousing early progressive sentiment, they were sending one of their own to Congress. At last they would have their own champion—and one without landholdings and aristocratic pretensions—fighting on their behalf. Crockett defined what it meant to be a populist—an advocate for the rights and interests of ordinary people. Flushed with victory in the autumn of 1827, Crockett felt invincible.

Just a few weeks after the election, Crockett surprised and delighted Elizabeth with a trip to her family home in North Carolina. His eldest son, twenty-year-old John Wesley, accompanied them. Their first stop was Nashville, a future state capital known as the “Athens of the South,” where a meeting was arranged with John Patton Erwin, a rising attorney and the son of Colonel Andrew Erwin and Jane Patton, from Elizabeth’s family in North Carolina. Not only did young Erwin have family ties to the Crocketts, he also was closely linked to noted statesman Henry Clay (serving as secretary of state under President John Quincy Adams), an intellectual who spoke seven languages fluently, drafted the Monroe Doctrine, and was an ardent foe of slavery. Erwin was the husband of Anne Brown Clay, the daughter of the Kentuckian who had become a force to be reckoned with in Congress and on five occasions tried but failed to become U.S. president.
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Erwin was puzzled by the newly elected congressman’s visit, for although his voting record did not always show it, Crockett still backed Old Hickory. The animosity between Clay and Jackson had only grown following the controversial 1824 presidential race, when Clay played a pivotal role in vanquishing candidate Jackson and sending his opponent, John Quincy Adams, to the White House. It was about then that Jackson began referring to Clay as the “Judas of the West.”
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Considering that Clay and Jackson so despised each other, a meeting between Crockett and Clay’s son-in-law might have been viewed as absolute betrayal by the Jackson camp. On the other hand, an ardent Jackson supporter asking for an introduction to Jackson’s chief nemesis may have aroused Erwin’s suspicions.

It turned out that Erwin had nothing to fear. Crockett explained that when he got to Congress he planned “to pursue his own course,” but he also looked forward to receiving wise counsel from proven political veterans such as the Honorable Henry Clay, a revered Kentucky lawyer first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1806. In a letter sent to Clay shortly after the visit, Erwin gave a rather blunt assessment of Crockett. “He is not only illiterate but he is rough & uncouth, talks much & loudly, and is by far, more to his proper place, when hunting a Bear, in a Cane Break, than he will be in the Capital.”
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But beyond the obvious and somewhat contrived frontier image, Erwin also offered a telling appraisal of Crockett’s strengths. “He is independent and fearless & has a popularity at home that is unaccountable,” Erwin wrote. “He is the only man that I know in Tennessee that could openly oppose Genl. Jackson in his District & be elected to Congress.”

From Nashville, the Crocketts moved on to eastern Tennessee and visited friends and family in the country where Crockett was raised. One of the stops was at the home of lifelong friend James Blackburn. Others came there as well, and Crockett told them old stories from the past and some of his best tales about the bear hunts, his escapade on the river, and the recent election. Many years later, John L. Jacobs, then in his eightieth year, recalled the day Crockett spent at Blackburn’s place.
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Jacobs was just a boy and had seen Crockett when he stopped to give Jacobs’s widowed mother the dollar he had borrowed from her husband.

“James Blackburn had a corn-shucking in my neighborhood,” remembered Jacobs.

The day after they left Blackburn’s home and returned to the road to North Carolina, Crockett experienced what was probably a recurrence of his malaria, which he described as “billes feaver” (bilious fever).
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Despite feeling poorly, he managed to finish the ride with Elizabeth and John Wesley. As soon as they arrived at her parents’ home in Swannanoa, South Carolina, Crockett was put to bed and a doctor summoned. The physician turned to a standard remedy of the time and bled the patient, which weakened him even more and forced him to stay bedridden for several weeks.

By November 6, Crockett had regained enough strength to witness a duel between his friend Sam Carson and Dr. Robert Brank Vance.
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Both men were from influential families in western North Carolina, and they had been pitted against each other in heated political races. Carson had defeated Vance for a seat in Congress in 1825, and Vance had tried again and failed in 1827. Near the close of that heated campaign, Vance made serious accusations about the Carson family’s loyalty, even claiming that Carson’s father had been a cowardly Tory during the Revolutionary War. More insults flew, and soon a duel was arranged, as was the custom among southern gentlemen who felt their honor and reputation had been tarnished.

Crockett thought dueling was ridiculous, but he was loyal to his friends, and it was said that he even drilled Carson in pistol practice. Crockett also was in the small party that rode with Carson and his second to the dueling ground across the state line at Saluda Gap, in South Carolina, where dueling was still legal.
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There the frail Crockett watched as Carson and Vance marched off their aces, turned, and fired their pistols. Vance was struck mortally wounded and fell at first fire. He died at midnight. Before the smoke from the dueling pistols lifted, Crockett—somewhat revived by a burst of adrenaline—was on his horse riding off to spread the news. One of Carson’s daughters later wrote that “he rode his horse almost to death, beat his hat to pieces & came dashing up yelling ‘The Victory is Ours.’”
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