David Crockett (27 page)

Due to his prolonged recovery, Crockett did not have time to accompany his wife and son back to the family home in far western Tennessee. He would have to press on to Washington City in order to attend the December 3 opening of Congress. Elizabeth and John Wesley wished David well on his new adventure, and they departed the Patton home, taking with them three young slaves, parting gifts from her father.
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After some more bloodletting, Crockett also took his leave. He was sorry that he had not been well enough to enjoy shooting matches with his father-in-law at the “Target Tree,” a large oak near the Patton home where they blazed away at targets. Crockett, still racked with pain and fever, climbed on his horse and rode off. The newly reelected Sam Carson and his colleague Lewis Williams, a ten-year veteran of Congress, accompanied him. It was a grueling journey for a sick man, but Crockett’s companions kept him occupied with stories about what he could expect and what he should avoid in Washington City.

At last they arrived. Crockett and the others were directed to a neighborhood not far from Capitol Hill, where there were plenty of hotels and boardinghouses and an array of busy taverns. One of the popular choices on Pennsylvania Avenue was the McKeown Hotel, remembered as the place where “The Star-Spangled Banner” was first sung in 1814. Many visitors, including American Indian delegations from the far West, preferred the St. Charles Hotel. One of the city’s most prestigious hostelries was Brown’s Indian Queen Hotel. Each evening, Jesse Brown—“the Prince of Landlords”—presided over a table offering decanters of whiskey and brandy free to all guests. Some of the wealthier politicos could afford the sixteen-dollar-a-night hotel rates, but many congressman chose the more reasonably priced boarding houses, known as “messes.”

Crockett took a room at Mrs. Ball’s rooming house on Pennsylvania Avenue, located across the street from the Indian Queen. Here he would share meals and accommodations with several other congressmen from Virginia, Alabama, North Carolina, and Connecticut. Three members of the Kentucky delegation boarded at Mrs. Ball’s, including the honorable Thomas Chilton, a representative who would come to play a key role in Crockett’s future. Soon enough he would meet his fellow boarders, mostly all fellow members of Congress from across the land.

Almanac
illustration with text. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)

C
ROCKETT WAS STAGE CENTER
beneath a shining light. After yeoman political performances in Tennessee—where he honed and perfected his craft—the homespun forty-year-old found himself in the best theater of all: the nation’s capital. Here all sorts of forces and influences, such as a curious national press, a bevy of hack writers, and a gaggle of self-serving partisan politicians, waited in the wings. All of them recognized the unrefined backwoodsman’s raw magnetism and potential as a kind of political prop and populist mouthpiece. They saw that Crockett’s antics, eccentricities, and colorful style would propel him to national and eventually international acclaim and ridicule. Dealing with such attention required a willing participant with a healthy ego able to fend off critics and detractors. At the same time, it also meant that Crockett had to put up with some manipulation and allow his public image and persona to be molded and choreographed.

When he first arrived in Washington City to take his seat in the Twentieth Congress, many of his colleagues found that Crockett certainly possessed a natural charm but also often exhibited rather unconventional behavior. His conversations and speeches were peppered with his folksy and sometimes clever idioms and expressions, many of which seemed peculiar to others who came from the larger urban areas of the country. While it was true that Crockett had his share of quirks, many of his so-called eccentricities were blown out of proportion and exaggerated by political enemies both in the press and political arena. Contrary to many written accounts and most of the Crockett film portrayals, he did not go to Congress wearing a hunting shirt and coonskin hat, but turned out in the standard high collared coat, dress shirt, vest, and cravat of the time.

“I remember David Crockett well and always with pleasure,” recounted William L. Foster, whose father, Senator Ephraim H. Foster, had been a friend and associate. “He was very often a guest of my father, always a pleasant, courteous, and interesting man, who, though uneducated in books, was a man of fine instincts and intellect…. I never saw him attired in a garb that could be regarded as differing from that worn by a gentleman of his day—never in coonskin cap or hunting shirt.”
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No matter the wardrobe he chose, the robust backwoodsman in gentleman’s clothes puzzled his detractors and skeptics. Some of them seriously questioned if he had the intellect to survive the cutthroat world of Washington. They believed Tennessee would have been better served by having Crockett back at Reelfoot Lake.
²

As it turned out, the question was not so much whether Crockett was ready for Washington but whether Washington was ready for Crockett. It is true that, during his three terms in the U.S. Congress, Crockett failed to get a single piece of legislation passed, even his beloved land bill for poor settlers and squatters. However, he emerged as a national celebrity, and served as an unwitting voice of and living symbol for a concept that, until nine years after Crockett’s death in 1836, did not have an official name—Manifest Destiny.

Influential magazine editor John L. O’Sullivan coined the name for this disputed political philosophy in an 1845 editorial when he wrote of “the right of our manifest destiny to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us…. This is our high destiny, and in nature’s eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it.”
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Manifest Destiny became a rallying cry throughout the nation for all of those who ardently believed that it was the exclusive right of the white population of America to invade, occupy, and settle all the land reaching westward across the continent to the Pacific shore. As cultural critic and historian Richard Slotkin noted, “men like Davy Crockett became national heroes by defining national aspiration in terms of so many bears destroyed, so much land preempted, so many trees hacked down, so many Indians and Mexicans dead in the dust.”
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Yet at the same time, Crockett also symbolized the poor and downtrodden whom he had always stood up for throughout his life. He was not afraid to buck the system or oppose authority, including those at the top of the chain of command. In fact, it was Crockett’s inability to compromise that resulted in such a dismal showing when it came to getting his own pieces of legislation passed in Congress and enacted into law. His Scots-Irish stubbornness, frontier pride, and a tendency to speak directly, even if it came out as an insult, did not serve him well and often resulted in loss of votes and support in congressional committees and on the floor of Congress. Still, numerous hardworking settlers in his home district never lost faith in Crockett, and found their man in Washington endearing.

“Crockett emerged as a symbol of the dawning ‘Age of the Common Man,’” wrote Paul Hutton. “His generation, the first to face the future without the guidance of the Republic’s Founding Fathers, looked to the frontier for the regenerative values once associated with the revolutionary generation. Westerners like Crockett were the flag bearers of a ‘Manifest Destiny’ reaffirming that this new generation was the master of both the environment and its own future. The rise of the West—along with men like Jackson, Clay, Sam Houston, and Crockett—represented the triumph of American democracy and a final rejection of decadent European values of class and aristocracy.”
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Crockett had little notion that he was symbolic of anything when he first took up residence in Washington, although his confidence in himself increased daily as he became more comfortable with his new surroundings. Early in his first term, while still recovering from recurrent malaria, he dashed off a letter to his friend James Blackburn in Tennessee. After giving Blackburn a medical update, Crockett wrote, “I think I am getting along very well with the great men of this nation[,] much better than I expected.”
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It did not take long before Crockett’s opinion changed and much of his optimism disappeared.

“There’s too much talk,” he complained after just a short time in Congress. “Many men seem to be proud they can say so much about nothing. Their tongues keep working, whether they’ve any grist to grind or not. Then there are some in Congress who do nothing to earn their pay but listen day after day. But considering the speeches, I think they earn every penny, amounting to eight whole dollars a day—provided they don’t go to sleep. It’s harder than splitting gum logs in August, though, to stay awake.”
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Crockett found that in the halls of Congress a genial disposition and quick wit could get him only so far. His vast repertoire of frontier yarns served him well when on the campaign stump but did not have the same impact or import in Washington. He never learned how to compromise. His fiercely independent spirit and belief that he was obligated to vote his conscience even if it was contrary to his own party took a heavy toll.

Crockett’s stubbornness even extended to his own political party, much to the annoyance of the Democratic leadership. To win the passage of his land bill, he needed all the help he could muster, especially from the rest of the Tennessee delegation and from the supporters of Andrew Jackson, poised to become the next president of the United States. Even before he publicly broke from the Jackson crowd, Crockett took issue with key Jackson supporters and anyone else unwilling to fully support squatters’ rights in the western lands. This stance put Crockett squarely at odds with the wealthy planters and land speculators who financially supported Jackson.
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When Crockett’s break with Jackson and the others became known in 1830, Congressman James K. Polk, later to become President Polk, sniffed: “I have no other feelings towards Col. Crockett than those of pity for his folly.”
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Throughout 1828 and into 1829, however, Crockett tried to maintain a relationship with everyone he could in order to push his land legislation. That definitely still included Old Hickory, who finally defeated his nemesis John Quincy Adams in the bitterly contested presidential election of 1828 and was sworn into office the following March. Jackson’s campaign had positioned the often-arrogant Tennessean as a self-made man of the people and the first president to be born in a log cabin. Adams, on the other hand, was characterized as an aloof aristocrat who, much like his father, lacked the political savvy required to garner support for any of his pet programs.

Although Crockett’s political life consumed much of his time and energy during this period, he also had issues to face back in Tennessee. He wrestled with a substantial debt, and also tried placating Elizabeth, who was tired of her husband’s continued inability to keep the family solvent. She blamed much of Crockett’s troubles on his penchant for drink, lack of any business sense, and failure to maintain any semblance of a spiritual life.

While Crockett had to endure Elizabeth’s personal assaults at home, he also had to suffer an onslaught of scurrilous stories and fabrications about his character, concocted by political enemies who smelled blood. Finally, on November 25, 1828, about a week before Jackson’s victory at the polls, Crockett reached his breaking point and struck back. On that date, the
National Banner and the Nashville Whig
published an embarrassing description of Crockett’s crude behavior at a dinner hosted by President Adams almost a year earlier, on November 27, 1827, to welcome new members of Congress to the capital.
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The planted newspaper stories presented Crockett as a complete bumpkin who sipped from the finger bowls and accused a waiter of stealing his dinner when the man was simply clearing the table for the next course. “I then filled my plate with bacon and greens,” Crockett was alleged to have said. “And whenever I looked up or down the table, I held on to my plate with my left hand” so no one else would take it away.
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President Adams’s meticulously kept diary indicates that no such behavior occurred on that date. Adams noted that he received Congressman Lewis Williams of North Carolina, accompanied by “Crocket [
sic
] a new member from Tennessee.” In other notations about the occasion Adams wrote that “Colonel Crockett was very diverting at our dinner,” which more than likely meant the freshman legislator told some of his better frontier tales.
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Humiliated by the guffaws in Washington circles, Crockett was upset when some of his constituents posed questions about his outlandish behavior at a presidential event. To counter the published stories, he contacted two highly respected congressmen who also were in attendance and asked them to write letters refuting such blatant lies. On January 4, just a day after they received Crockett’s request, Congressman James Clark, of Kentucky, and Congressman Gulian Crommelin Verplanck, of New York, responded with letters supporting Crockett.

“I was at the same dinner, and know that the statement is destitute of every thing like truth,” wrote Clark, who had filled the congressional seat vacated by Henry Clay’s elevation to secretary of state and was an early organizer of the Whig Party in Kentucky. “I sat opposite to you at the table, and held occasional conversation with you, and observed nothing in your behavior but was marked with the strictest priority.”
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Verplanck, not only a veteran political figure but a respected man of letters, wrote in his letter of support to Crockett, “Your behavior there was, I thought, perfectly becoming and proper; and I do not recollect or believe that you said or did anything resembling the newspaper account.” Verplanck was a skilled writer of satire and a member of the “Knickerbocker group,” along with Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and James Kirke Paulding, an author and public official who would soon become intimately involved with Crockett’s life.
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The letters of denial eventually were printed in various newspapers, including the
Jackson Gazette
, but as Crockett geared up for a reelection campaign for another two-year term, yet another story, written by someone using the pen name Dennis Brulgrudery, described Crockett’s politicking style as a mixture of flattery, drunkenness, venality, and dishonesty.
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In early 1829, while forced to defend his reputation and counter personal attacks, Crockett composed one of the more difficult letters he would ever have to write. It was scrawled to his brother-in-law George Patton in Buncombe County, North Carolina.
¹⁶
In the long epistle Crockett spoke of the tragic news “of the death of our poor little niece Rebecca Ann Burgin.” The little girl had been killed in a horrible accident at Crockett’s farm in Tennessee while playing near the ox-driven grain mill that had been built several months earlier. “She was with my children…walking round after the oxen and stopped opposite one of the outside posts and caught her head against the post and mashed it all to peaces [
sic
]. Poor little creature never knew what hurt her. I thought almost as much of her as one of my own.”

In the same letter, Crockett also explained that he was attempting to alter the course of his life by giving up spirits and that he intended to imbibe nothing stronger than cider. “I trust that god will give me fortitude in my undertaking,” he wrote. “I have never made a pretention [
sic
] to religion in my life before. I have run a long race tho I trust that I was called in good time. I have been reproved many times for my wickedness by my dear wife who I am certain will be no little astonished when she gets information of my determination.”
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In March 1829, just after he watched the swearing-in of Andrew Jackson as the seventh president of the United States, along with Vice President John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, Crockett launched his own campaign for reelection to the Twenty-first Congress of the House of Representatives. When newspaper smears accused him of every sin imaginable, including adultery, drunkenness, and gambling, Crockett replied with humor and sarcasm. “They accuse me of adultery! It’s a lie. I never ran away with any man’s wife that wasn’t willing…they accuse me of gambling! It’s a lie; I always plank the cash…and, they accuse me of being a drunkard! It’s a d—d lie, for whisky can’t make me drunk.”
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