Mr. Dunlap, of Tennessee, replied to Crockett with heated language, and Crockett again took the floor to reply, saying that he wished it to be distinctly understood that he took back nothing that he had said, but that he would reassert everything and go even further. Standing in his place for almost the last time, he lifted his hand in passionate protest against the proposed use of the public funds, and took his seat with these words:
“We have no Government, no Government at all. God only knows what is to become of the country in these days of misrule. Sir, I am done.” Such attitude as this accounts for the infinite pains with which the opposition fought him two years later in his campaign for a fourth term. While he was attending to his Congressional duties, his political fences were demolished by the stay-at-homes, and in their places were set up what in these days of such unsightly nuisances might be called the bill-boards of partisan defamation.
The comparatively inactive life of a Congressman had begun to tell upon the scout and bear-hunter of the Mississippi cane. He decided to take a trip through the Eastern States for the benefit of his health. Although it was in the midst of the spring session of Congress, he left Washington on the 25th of April, 1834, and did not return until the latter part of June. He says of this proposed journey:
“During this session of Congress, I thought I would take a travel through the Northern States. I had braved the lonely forests of the West, I had shouldered the warrior’s rifle in the far South; but the North and East I had never seen. I seemed to like members of Congress who came from these parts, and wished to know what kind of constituents they had.”
Up to this time his knowledge of the East was confined to Baltimore and Washington. He had read and heard much of the wonders of the greater cities of the Atlantic seaboard, but he had never felt free to describe them to his fellow-citizens of western Tennessee. He has left no word regarding his impressions of the nation’s capital. It would be interesting to compare his views with those of Charles Dickens, who visited many of the same cities a few years later. This is what Dickens thought of Washington in 1842:
“Take the worst parts of the City Road and Pentonville, or the straggling outskirts of Paris, where the houses are smallest, preserving all their oddities, but especially the small shops and dwellings, occupied in Pentonville (but not in Washington) by furniture-brokers, keepers of poor eating-houses, and fanciers of birds. Burn the whole down; build it up again in wood and plaster; widen it a little; throw in part of St. John’s Wood; put green blinds outside all the private houses, with a red curtain and a white one in every window; plow up all the roads; plant a great deal of coarse turf in every place where it ought not to be; erect three handsome buildings in stone and marble, anywhere, but the more entirely out of everybody’s way the better; call one the Post Office, one the Patent Office, and one the Treasury; make it scorching hot in the morning, and freezing cold in the afternoon, with an occasional tornado of wind and dust; leave a brick-field without the bricks, in all central places where a street may naturally be expected; and that is Washington.”
From this sort of place, perhaps even less beautiful, Davy was whirled away on the April morning before mentioned, viewing from his seat on the top of a great coach the roadside scenes between Washington and Baltimore. Upon arriving at the latter city, he put up at Barnum’s Hotel, kept by “Uncle Davy,” whom he gladly hailed as a namesake. He says that no one could find better quarters or a more hospitable city. He was asked to dine with his friend Wilkes and other Baltimore gentlemen, and spent the evening pleasantly in their company.
The next morning he was up early, in order to take the steamboat to Philadelphia. At this time only seventeen miles of railroad existed between the two cities, crossing the land in the vicinity of Wilmington and Havre de Grace. It was called the Charlestown and Augusta Railway. The departure from Baltimore seems to have given Davy a sense of lonesomeness. He felt what so many others since have felt—poor human mites among a swarm of busy ants!—that the loneliest place in all the world is a great city. He realized, and tells us so, that the tens of thousands who passed him by in the noisy streets neither knew nor cared who he might be, and that at the best he might expect to be valued at about the price of a coon-skin. This we have already seen to be no more than a York shilling, or a quart of New England rum.
“The steamboat,” says Davy, “was the Carroll of Carrollton, a fine craft, with the rum old Commodore Chaytor for head man. A good fellow he is—all sorts of a man—bowing and scraping to the ladies, nodding to the gentlemen, cursing the crew, and his right eye broadcast upon the ‘opposition line,’ all at the same time. ‘Let go!’ says the old one, and off we walked in prime style.”