American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (21 page)

With his first session as a congressman looming on the horizon, Crockett said good-bye to Elizabeth and entrusted John Wesley to chaperone her back home to Tennessee. His own illness had taken up so much time that he would be unable to backtrack to the west and make it to Washington City by the start of the session on December 3rd. Elizabeth and John Wesley departed with three young slaves her father had given her, and Crockett, weakened once more, remained some time to allow doctors to again treat him with blood-letting. A tough man accustomed to bearing significant pain and discomfort, Crockett rode toward Washington City, accompanied by Sam Carson, Lewis Williams, and probably Nathaniel Claiborne.
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The journey should have been exciting and adventurous, Crockett happy to be traveling with a good companion in Carson and an experienced statesman in Williams, but a relapse in his condition made the trip across the mountains excruciating for the frontiersman. By the time he finally arrived in Washington Crockett was nearly dead, and along the way he feared the worst: “I have thought twice that I was never to see my family anymore,” he admitted later in a letter to Blackburn. The illustrious bear hunter had lost a good deal of body weight. He experienced “the worst health since I arrived here that I ever did in my life,” and he went on to report “I am much reduced in flesh and have lost all my Red Rosy Cheeks that I have carried so many years.”
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Still, Crockett managed to suffer through the arduous journey, and just before the opening of the session he took a room at Mrs. Ball’s boarding house on Pennsylvania Avenue, along with a handful of fellow representatives that included Nathaniel Claiborne, Thomas Chilton of Kentucky, and William Clark of Pennsylvania,
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as well as Gabriel Moore of Alabama, and Joseph Lecompte of Kentucky.
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Some of the men Crockett caroused with and shared lodgings with would go on to achieve greatness, and the upstart congressman felt humbled and perhaps even a little intimidated by the stature of those around him. Yet he was never one to cower before anyone or anything, and quite soon he managed to convince himself that he belonged. “I think I am getting along very well with the great men of the nation,” he told Blackburn in confidence, “much better than I expected.” What he likely did not expect was the difficulty of the political waters he would soon be forced to navigate. Quite soon he would be paddling upstream against a heady current.

STILL PALE AND FEEBLE, Crockett nonetheless went straight to work, enthusiastic and optimistic that he would be able to make a difference and effect change working alongside those “great men” to whom he had alluded. Just three days into his first session, Crockett began hammering away on his pet project, the Tennessee Vacant Land Bill. The freshman congressman was still wet behind the ears, and naïve enough, to make the following unrealistic claim: “I have Started the Subject of our vacant land on the third day after we went into Session I have no doubt of the passage of the Bill this Session I have given it an erly Start.”
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He had grown accustomed to seeing administrative and political processes move with relative celerity at the state level, but he would soon realize that such speed on issues and bills simply wasn’t possible at the national level, and the slow-grinding pace would eventually wear on him. He would complain to friends and constituents about the sluggish movement in Congress, betraying an impatience in his character. “Thare is no chance of hurrying business here . . .” he griped, “thare is such a desposition here to Show Eloquence that this will be a long session and do no good.”
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Crockett quickly, if unhappily, came to understand at least one political reality—change, if it came at all, would take a great deal more time than he’d bargained for. Patience and compromise were two necessities for political success at the highest levels, and Crockett would never possess either. He needed to be going somewhere, moving forward, and no doubt he daydreamed of riding the outlands at sunrise, the call of birds in the air, the sound of his baying hounds echoing through the cane, as the endless murmur of speeches droned on through the stuffy halls.

At least the nightlife was entertaining. A series of hotels and boarding houses strung along tree-lined Pennsylvania Avenue accommodated most politicians, and a vigorous social scene abounded when the gavel fell at day’s end. Once Crockett felt well enough, he ventured out, tugged into a whirlpool of taverns and bars, of backroom gaming, gossip, drinking, and dinner parties. In this milieu Crockett flourished, his gift of gab and magnetic personality and humor perfectly suited to the social scene. Certainly he would have felt a tad self-conscious at his lack of presentable clothes, his redundant outfits compared to the many suits worn by some of his more well-heeled contemporaries, but he compensated by being himself, by plying friends with whiskey and sidling up for an amusing yarn or two.
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While he was having a fine time of it, his eccentricities and rustic manners did not go unnoticed by his peers, some of whom would become his political opponents, even enemies. His uncultured grammar and general lack of refinement became fodder for the papers, and one particular account detailed how, at a gala dinner hosted by President John Quincy Adams to welcome incoming congressmen, Crockett drank from the finger bowls and accused a waiter of trying to steal his food. He was still publicly aligned with Jackson, and the accounts were published by anti-Jacksonians in hopes of casting Jackson’s supporters in an unfavorable light, characterizing them as unruly, barbarous, and generally ill-suited for the gentility of public life.
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Crockett initially ignored the slurs, since his personality was at the same time making him some friends, and he was becoming something of a curiosity, frequently invited to parties, dinners, and social functions for his affability.

The first few months in office also helped Crockett comprehend the divisive nature of partisan politics and the political climate he’d entered. John Quincy Adams had been chosen by the House of Representatives in 1824 when, after Jackson had taken the majority of the popular vote, he’d failed to be confirmed by the Electoral College. At the time, Crockett and many others figured some collusion must have been arranged against Jackson, and he carried that suspicion with him to Washington City, noting that Henry Clay was immediately made secretary of state.
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By 1828 the political camps, formerly called “Republicans,” were now split into two centralized groups, the Democratic Republicans and the National Republicans. Jacksonians, in a holdover from the notions of Jeffersonian Democracy, courted and even embraced the notion of the “common man,” while Adams and Clay came across as elitists, and even “evinced a strong distaste for, if not actual fear of, the rule of the masses, which they often equated with the mob.”
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Crockett paid attention to the camps, noting how allegiances and alignments ebbed and flowed, and was pulled for the moment to follow Jackson and his principles, the man who had won New Orleans, defeated the British, and opened the West to expansion by subduing the Indians. The presidential election of 1828 was on everyone’smind, and Crockett could see the potential benefits of remaining outwardly a Jackson supporter, especially if it might later assist him in pushing through his vacant land bill. Nearly all of Crockett’s fellow Tennessee delegates backed Jackson, and that group included James Polk. Crockett could see that “Old Hickory is rising,”
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and he had no doubt that “Jackson will in a short time begin to receive the reward of his merit.”
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Thus Crockett spent his time between the laborious day sessions and the evening revelry attempting to make sense of where and how he might fit into the scheme of things, all the while trying to remember the desires and needs of his constituents back home in Tennessee. But after a full two months in office he had nothing tangible to offer them, and the painfully slow wheels of bureaucracy drove him to agitation. His introduced land bill still lay on the table, gathering dust, and Crockett noted with great frustration that his colleagues yammered on endlessly about nothing: “Their tongues keep working, whether they’ve got any grist to grind or not.”
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It was painful to bear, and Crockett began to leave early if speeches blathered on and on and seemed mere partisan posturing unrelated to issues. He missed roll calls here and there as well, citing his ill health, which was a fact, but the malaise he suffered from most was a general ennui at the slow proceedings.

One significant acquaintance Crockett made during his first term was with a fellow freshman representative from Kentucky, Thomas Chilton. Chilton enjoyed Crockett’s style and affability. They often voted similarly, and in fact they teamed up on an odd little bill that would provide a pension for the war widow of a man named Major General Brown. On April 2, 1828, Crockett and Chilton argued vehemently against the proposed bill, contending that providing public funds to individuals would be a “special privilege” they weren’t entitled to. Though he voted against the bill, the generous Crockett empathized with the plight of the poor woman and went so far as to offer his own money to aid her, and only Chilton rallied in support. As it turned out, their money wasn’t required; the bill passed and Mrs. Brown was awarded her much-needed pension.
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Crockett and Chilton struck up a friendship, and Chilton began polishing some of Crockett’s writing, assisting with his speeches and other correspondence such as circulars and letters to his constituency. The relationship would develop over time, and Chilton became a ghostwriter for Crockett, ultimately co-authoring his autobiography. Chilton stayed at Mrs. Ball’s boarding house whenever he was in Washington City, and the two men spent a great deal of time together.
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The union also marked the development of a kind of split personality in Crockett, a conscious construction of the dual nature of his persona. He understood that it was the bear hunter from the canebrakes who managed to get elected, but Crockett felt the tug of the gentry, the need to be accepted by his peers, and, ironically he wanted to be like the very people he despised and criticized. Chilton’s assistance in the formal writing refined Crockett’s voice, grammar, punctuation, and spelling, smoothing out his rough edges, at least superficially.

It isn’t difficult to understand why Crockett would have felt compelled to appear slightly more refined, given the company he was keeping. Among these was Duff Green, an eclectic renaissance man (variously a surveyor of public lands, a lawyer, and an editor and publisher) who had purchased the
United States Telegraph
in 1825, was politically well-connected and powerful, and was increasingly chummy with John C. Calhoun of South Carolina (Calhoun’s son would eventually marry Green’s daughter).
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Green had recently been appointed public printer, a position awarded by the House, replacing Joseph Gales, who returned to his post as publisher the Washington
National Intelligencer.
Joseph Gales and his partner William Winston Seaton were brothers-in-law and enemies of the Jacksonians, and on Crockett’s arrival in Washington, still spewing party rhetoric, he had called them “treasury pap Sucking” editors. Crockett wrote this lovely epithet to a friend before he had ever met the men, and he would later get to know both Gales and Seaton well; Seaton referred kindly to Crockett as an “odd but warm-hearted old pioneer.”
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Seaton, like Chilton, tightened and edited Crockett’s speeches for publication in
Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates in Congress.
The Clerk of the House at this time was the recently reelected Matthew St. Clair Clarke of Pennsylvania, with whom Crockett also struck up an acquaintance. And finally there was James Polk, an aggressive Presbyterian delegate and a remarkably quick learner with an uncanny knack for the legislative process and the intricacies of political posturing.
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Crockett had no way of knowing, of course, that his contemporary and fellow delegate would rise to greatness, eventually to be elected governor of Tennessee, Speaker of the House, and ultimately President of the United States, and earning the nickname “Young Hickory.” For now, he was simply someone to squabble with over the land bill.

And squabble they would. Initially, the views of the two men were somewhat in concert concerning public lands, and in fact Crockett was a member of a select committee, chaired by Polk, formed to deal with the state of Tennessee’s request to cede lands in the Western District to the state, which would inject any profits from their sale into “common schools” rather than colleges or universities. Crockett stood behind this notion, especially regarding common schools over universities; he contended that the children of West Tennessee farmers and squatters would be unlikely ever to tromp their muddy work boots inside a university.
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Crockett believed that should the vacant lands ultimately be offered up and sold, it would be at prices the poor squatters might be able to afford. He soon came to understand that the state had other intentions, as did other members of Congress.