He took his seat in Congress, a central object in the political field. His position was anomalous. Party ties were closely drawn, and party rancor bitter as it can be only when nothing but plunder is at stake between parties. The Democrats could not claim Crockett so long as he antagonized their god, Jackson; and the alliance of the Whigs he most distinctly repudiated. He was an independent, an “unattached statesman;” the prototype of an element which has now become formidable in our politics, but a character for whom there was no place in those times. He was, like all eccentrics, ahead or apart from his age, and was at first feared, then shunned, and then called crazy by the great body of public men, whose standard of sanity was to sacrifice manhood to party, to betray the Republic for spoils.
It was during this Congress that he created a sensation by antagonizing benevolence of representatives at government expense. A bill had been reported and was about to pass, appropriating a gratuity to a naval officer’s widow. Crockett made an unanswerable argument on the unconstitutionality of this and other such appropriations, and closed by offering, with other friends of the widow, to give her a week of his salary as congressman. Not a member dared to answer or to vote for the bill, and not one followed Crockett’s example of charity at his own expense.
But the independent, honest eccentric had reached the end of his public career. In the next congressional election he was beaten by tricks such as would not be tolerated at this time. One of these devices was to announce fictitiously a large number of public meetings in Crockett’s name on the same day. When he failed to appear, as announced, speakers of the Jackson party, who would always arrange to be present, denounced Crockett as afraid to face his constituents upon his “treacherous and corrupt record in Congress.” The defeat was a surprise to him; more, it almost broke his heart. He wrote, manfully, but pathetically, “I have suffered myself to be politically sacrificed to save my country from ruin and disgrace.” I may add, like the man in the play, “Crockett’s occupation’s gone.”
Shortly after he made a farewell address to his constituents, into which he compressed a good deal of plain speaking, or as he says, “I put the ingredients in the cup pretty strong, I tell you: and I concluded by telling them that I was done with politics for the present, and that they might all go to hell and I would go to Texas.”
“When I returned home,” he adds, “I felt sort of cast down at the change that had taken place in my fortunes; sorrow, it is said, will make even an oyster feel poetical. Such was my state of feeling that I began to fancy myself inspired; so I took my pen in hand, and as usual, I went ahead.” This is
CROCKETT’S FAREWELL TO HOME.
“Farewell to the mountains whose mazes to me
Were more beautiful far than Eden could be;
No fruit was forbidden, but Nature had spread
Her bountiful board, and her children were fed.