II.—THE STATESMAN IN A STATE OF NATURE.
David Crockett was born in the wilds of Tennessee, August 17, 1786. He toughened rapidly, like a bear’s cub, but he showed in addition to the usual woodsman’s instincts the unusual qualities of great tenderness of feeling and generosity, with a remarkable gift of wit and love of fun. The incredible stories of his hardships at the age of twelve and thereafter we have not room to recount. In the best sense he was a tough boy. The closing scene of his home life—if a hut presided over by a drunken father, and a mother who left no impression on the boy’s character that showed itself in after years can be by any courtesy called a home—was a dissolving view of a ragged, bare-footed urchin of fourteen chased through the brush by a father with a large goad and a large load of liquor. Thus David Crockett set out upon the world for himself.
With Crockett’s story as a bear-hunter, nomadic woodsman, soldier and Indian-fighter, exciting and marvelous as are these incidents of the first thirty years of his life, we shall not much concern ourselves. But I do wonder that his life-like, quaint narrative of these has not become standard juvenile literature, along with Robinson Crusoe and Mayne Reid’s stories of adventure. Through all these exciting though isolated years, the young woodsman picked up a good deal of practical knowledge, not one scrap of which he ever forgot; and withal was developing a strange quality of unpretentious self-esteem. “The idea seemed never to have entered his mind that there was any one superior to David Crockett, or any one so humble that Crockett was entitled to look down upon him with condescension. He was a genuine democrat, and all were in his view equal. And this was not the result of thought, of any political or moral principle. It was a part of his nature, like his stature or complexion. This is one of the rarest qualities to be found in any man.”[H]
He also was developing oratorical powers. He acquired unbounded popularity at musters and frolics, in camp and in the chase by his fun-making qualities, his homely, kindly, keen wit. His retentive memory was an inexhaustible store-house of anecdote, and he always had an apt illustration for any point he wanted to make. He began to taste the sweet consciousness of power over his fellows, and to easily fall into the position of leadership, for which nature designed him.
His first official position came to him at about the age of thirty. There were a good many outlaws in the region where he at that time had his cabin and claim, and society began to cohere for self-protection. The settlers convened and appointed Crockett and others to be justices of the peace, and a corps of stalwart young men to be constables. These justices were really provost-marshals in power. There were no statute laws nor courts; but there was authority enough, and Crockett says everybody made laws according to his own notions of right. For shooting and appropriating a hog running at large, for instance, the sentence was to strip the thief, tie him to a tree and give him a flogging, burn down his cabin and drive him out of the country. Soon after, the new territory was organized into counties and Crockett was regularly commissioned a justice by the legislature. His account of his administration is interesting:
“I was made a squire according to law; though now the honor rested on me more heavily than before. For, at first, whenever I told my constable, says I, ‘catch that fellow and bring him up for trial!’ away he went, and the fellow must come, dead or alive. For we considered this a good warrant, though it was only in verbal writing. But after I was appointed by the Assembly, they told me my warrants must be in real writing and signed; and that I must keep a book and write my proceedings in it. This was a hard business on me, for I could just barely write my own name. But to do this, and write the warrants too, was at least a huckleberry over my persimmon. I had a pretty well informed constable however, and I told him when he should happen to be out anywhere and see that a warrant was necessary and would have a good effect, he needn’t take the trouble to come all the way to me to get one, but he could just fill one out, and then on the trial I could correct the whole business if he had committed any error. In this way I got on pretty well, till by care and attention I improved my handwriting in such a manner as to be able to prepare my warrants and keep my record books without much difficulty. My judgments were never appealed from: and if they had been they would have stuck like wax, as I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law learning, to guide me; for I had never read a page in a law-book in all my life.”
Crockett made his first stump speech when he was about thirty-four years old. A militia regiment was to be organized, and a Captain Mathews, after promising Crockett the majority of the regiment if he would support him for its colonel, turned against Crockett in favor of his own son. At a great muster prepared by Mathews, he made a stump speech in his own and his son’s favor. Crockett, entirely unabashed, mounted the stump as soon as Mathews finished, and on the captain’s own grounds proceeded to expose his duplicity and argue the total unfitness of both him and his son for the command. The speech was fluent, witty, full of anecdote, and carried the rude audience by storm. It effectually beat both father and son. The fame of this maiden effort traveled fast in a community where oratory was the great, if not the only engine of popular control, and the result was that a committee soon waited on Crockett and asked him to stand for the legislature then about to be elected (1821). Some of his first electioneering adventures illustrate the frankness and tact so queerly combined in him, and also show how he got his education in politics. Hickman county wanted to change its county seat. He says: “Here they told me that they wanted to move their town nearer to the center of the county, and I must come out in favor of it. I did not know what this meant, or how the town was to be moved, and so I kept dark, going on the same identical plan that I now find is called non-committal.”
On one occasion the candidates for governor of the State, Congress, and several for legislature, some of them able stump-speakers, were announced. As he listened, a sense of inferiority for the first time, probably, penetrated him; he drank in all they said, and remembered it. He says:
“The thought of having to make a speech made my knees feel mighty weak, and set my heart to fluttering almost as bad as my first love scrape with the Quaker’s niece. But as luck would have it, these big candidates spoke nearly all day, and when they quit the people were worn out with fatigue, which afforded me a good apology for not discussing the government. But I listened mighty close to them, and was learning pretty fast about political matters. When they were all done I got up and told some laughable story and quit.”
He was elected, and in the legislature proved a good story-teller, a formidable antagonist in repartee, and above all a good listener. He says the first thing that he took pains to learn was the meaning of the words “judiciary” and “government,” as up to that time he had “never heard that there was any such thing in all nature as a judiciary.” The halls of the Tennessee legislature were again brightened in 1823-24 by the wit and good sense of “the gentleman from the cane” as an opponent derisively dubbed him, very much to his subsequent regret.