American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (27 page)

Crockett’s timing, as usual, was fortunate. When the electioneering season rolled around in 1833, he surfaced refreshed but famished, like a bear rousing from hibernation. Shaking off his slumber, Crockett would have been pleased to note that his alter ego Nimrod Wildfire had indeed caught fire, expanding Crockett’s own reputation.
The Lion of the West
proved a blockbuster, drawing strong reviews and huge crowds wherever it went; even where it didn’t play, excerpts of the text were printed and reprinted in hundreds of newspapers all across the nation, including prominent papers like the New Orleans
Picayune
and the St. Louis
Reveille.
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The general public began to associate Crockett with passages from the play, including variations on the boasts “I can whip my weight in wildcats and leap the Mississippi.” By April of 1833 the play had swept the nation and even leapt the mighty Atlantic, playing at the famous Covent Garden in London.

At the same time, Crockett adopted the phrase “Be always sure you’re right—THEN GO AHEAD,” which he had scribbled innocuously on two bills of sale back in 1831, as his own motto, and the aphorism stuck. He would use it as his own credo, and it defined his attitude of right and forward thinking.
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As he had known all along, from the moment he lost the election to William Fitzgerald in 1831, he would “go ahead” and run again. Now that he had officially announced, and Fitzgerald would be his opponent once again, everyone else in the land knew it, too. And this time the tables were turned—it was Crockett’s chance to unseat an incumbent.

The electioneering during the 1833 campaign immediately took on a courteous and convivial tone, a complete reversal from the previous combat. Apparently, Fitzgerald himself, and his colleague Adam Huntsman—author of the previously damaging
Book of Chronicles
—had agreed in principle to a verbal ceasefire with Crockett, each camp accepting the terms of the treaty and promising none of the dirty sabotage and mudslinging that had typified the 1831 contest.
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For the most part the parties would stick to the truce. And if he was going to take the moral high road, to better combat the considerable opponent he knew he had in Fitzgerald, Crockett would need something to find some political nugget or vulnerability within the Jackson administration. A couple of issues and circumstances immediately presented themselves.

First, in 1832 Jackson had been elected for a second term, amid some controversy and administrative unrest. John C. Calhoun, who had served as vice president for four years under John Quincy Adams, rode his position right into the first term of Jackson’s presidency, “in an unprecedented and never repeated event.”
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The ambitious Calhoun, himself coveting the presidency, had erroneously assumed that the gaunt and aged Old Hickory was a one-term president, and it rankled him when Jackson stuck around, and tensions strained their relationship further as Jackson began to rely on the shrewd counsel of Martin Van Buren. The division with Calhoun bore into Jackson deeply, for he was a military man who insisted on loyalty and viewed dissent as treason. Late in his life, reflecting on his presidency, Jackson made the offhand but ominous comment that his one main regret “was not having ordered the execution of John C. Calhoun for treason.”
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When the smoke had finally cleared and Jackson’s new cabinet materialized, Calhoun was out and the slick Van Buren was in. Crockett would want to exploit the turmoil within the administration to see if he might undermine the man he now viewed as a nemesis.

This process found legs in the controversy over the Second Bank of the United States, which Crockett supported in principle, partly because the bank offered loans to cash-poor squatters who subsisted on credit to keep their meager parcels of land running, and partly just so that he might oppose Jackson, a known antagonist of the Bank. Jackson viewed the bank, which by now was headed by Nicholas Biddle of Philadelphia, as a monolithic “monster” and vowed to kill it, and stop the bleeding of the national debt in the process.
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Jackson believed in hard currency over debt, thinking the latter contributed to economic downturns, even depressions. Crockett viewed Jackson’s position on the bank as greedy and nepotistic, and he made that case clearly and passionately in stump speeches, intimating that Jackson’s intention to remove the deposits was illegal.

By Crockett’s own admission the campaign of 1833 was “a warm one, and the battle well-fought.”
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Though Crockett still used some scathing language (he referred to Fitzgerald as “That Little Lawyer” and Jackson’s “puppy”), he played fair, sticking to the issues for the most part, and he benefited from the fact that Fitzgerald had not succeeded in pushing through any vacant-land legislation.

Simultaneously a fortuitous series of publishing events, one of them quite likely orchestrated by Crockett himself,
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conspired to rally support for Crockett, at the very least providing momentum for his surging notoriety. January 1833 heralded the release of a new book,
Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee.
The anonymously authored book flew off the shelves, selling out its initial print run immediately, and appearing later that year in New York and London with the revised title:
Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee.
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Though Crockett would later use the publishing of
Life
rather disingenuously as his rationale for publishing his own
Narrative,
he very likely knew that the book was being written, having contributed anecdotes and factual information, and sanctioned its development and publication, knowing it stood to contribute to his reputation. In the preface to his
Narrative,
Crockett made the following clever claim:

A publication has been made to the world, which has done me much injustice; and the catchpenny errors which it contains, have been already too long sanctioned by my silence. I don’t know the author of the book—and indeed I don’t want to know him; for he has taken such a liberty with my name, and made such an effort to hold me up to public ridicule, he cannot calculate on anything but my displeasure.
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Crockett’s tongue could not have been more firmly in his cheek. It was all part of an elaborate spoof, for Crockett most certainly knew the author of the book in question, and had likely provided him, verbally, with much of the subject matter.
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He had met Matthew St. Claire Clarke back in 1828, during the early years of Clarke’s lengthy post as clerk of the House of Representatives. Clarke was a close friend of Nicholas Biddle, president of the Second Bank of the United States, and a Whig sympathizer. Clarke was also something of a raconteur, a literary mind, and a writer.
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Crockett liked trading stories with Clarke, and he sent personal letters to the man as early as spring of 1829, during his first term in Congress.
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The book itself was riddled with clichés, offering little new about Crockett the man but contributing greatly to Crockett the myth. Plenty of readers made the reasonable assumption that Crockett had written the book. Though Crockett publicly scoffed at the content and pretended to be affronted by the clownish caricature it made of him, he secretly could not have been happier with the timing and the attention the work received.

Almost as if on cue, a New Englander named Seba Smith (who incidentally shared Crockett’s politics, first sanctioning and later splitting with Jackson) created a character by the name of Major Jack Downing, a down-home and likable country bumpkin who unwittingly stumbled into public life. The Portland, Maine,
Daily Courier
ran the letters of Major Downing, and the Yankee audiences ate the stuff up, loving the homespun vernacular and more than willing to chuckle at the unsophisticated and unrefined mind and manners of the character.
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The good-humored Crockett went along with the ruse, even responding to a letter from Major Jack addressing him personally and requesting that they meet in Washington to observe the political climate. An excerpt from the 1833 diary of John Quincy Adams reveals that Crockett remained playful and true to the artifice. Adams wrote that on leaving the Capitol building he

Met in the Avenue . . . David Crockett of Tennessee. I did not recognize him till he came up and accosted me and named himself. I congratulated him upon his return here, and he said, yes, it had cost him two years to convince the people of his district that he was the fittest man to represent them; that he had just been to Mr. Gales and requested him to announce his arrival and inform the public that he had taken for lodgings two rooms on the first floor of a boarding-house, where he expected to pass the winter and have for a fellow-lodger Major Jack Downing, the only person in whom he had any confidence for information of what the Government was doing.
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Crockett must have had difficulty keeping a straight face as he related this conceit to Adams. The Downing letters became widely popular, reprinted in newspapers across the eastern seaboard, filtering across the entire country, and people immediately linked Major Jack Downing with Colonel David Crockett. The country was ready for frontier heroes, real or imagined, and Crockett filled the role as best he could, confirming in human form the desired ideals of freedom, commoner-gentleman, and values like courage and independence.
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The opportunistic Crockett took the attention and ran with it, and his campaign opponent Fitzgerald, though a strong incumbent, could do little to counter the onslaught of printed matter keeping Crockett’s name and image in the news. Commoners flocked to the polls to confirm and appreciate someone in their own mold, this bumpkin of a gentleman, this enigma named David Crockett. Crockett squeaked past in an extremely close vote, winning by a mere 173 votes out of nearly 8,000 cast, the interest in David Crockett verging on feverish. He was poised to become a cult figure, a folk hero, and bona fide celebrity, the first person in American history famous for being famous, a media-manufactured “personality” with the potential to make a living from his celebrity.
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It was clear that Crockett had earned his celebrity status, and even had a hand in its construction. What wasn’t clear was how the notoriety would affect him, or what he intended to do with his fame. One way or another, it was time to cash in on his persona.

Crockett arrived back in Washington in November 1833 newly confident. Two years before he’d slunk home sheepishly, spiritually broken and bitter with the loss, and only a few months earlier he’d been financially strapped, paying for a crude wooden shanty on a hardscrabble tract of leased ground. His enthusiasm showed in his early arrival, well before the December 2 opening of the session. He had plenty of reason to celebrate. For Crockett, victory always salved a variety of wounds, and defeating William Fitzgerald this time around, even if by a small margin, was a kind of affirmation. But something more significant had happened just months after his successful election: members of Mississippi had come forward and requested that they be authorized to put forth his name as a potential candidate for the presidential election of 1836.
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Could they possibly be serious? Crockett possessed enough vainglory to think so, and in his own
Narrative
he alluded to it, connecting himself and the presidency several times. But at this point he would have taken the suggestion as an enormous compliment and also seen the political rationale behind the Whig courtship. After all, what were their other options?

Everyone knew that Van Buren would be offered up at the end of Jackson’s second term. He represented the moneyed, propertied class of people that Crockett outwardly criticized yet paradoxically wished to be accepted by and become a part of. His known vitriol toward both Jackson and Van Buren made him an obvious choice, and it would be impossible to find someone with greater media cachet, even if his political effectiveness was dubious. If his image and popularity could be sustained, and even expanded, over the next few years, who knew what might happen? As Crockett had proved more than once by his very presence in Washington, nothing was impossible.

At the session’s commencement, happily ensconced at his familiar lodgings in Mrs. Ball’s Boarding House, Crockett took up some old scores and readdressed one that had raged during his absence, the issue and ongoing argument over the Second Bank. Crockett’s position, and his vehement opposition to Jackson, had been faithfully trumpeted by Henry Clay, John Calhoun, and Daniel Webster, who had railed mightily against Jackson by calling him a despot, nicknaming him “King Andrew,” and aligning him with dictators like Napoleon.
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He would let that ride for a time, concentrating his attentions instead on his old obsession: land. On December 17, he introduced a pair of motions, one proposing a select committee of seven members to investigate the most prudent and equitable method for disposal and distribution of lands west and south of the Congressional Reservation Line, and the second insuring that all files, papers, and correspondence of the House related to the Tennessee Land Bill be referred to this committee.
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