There never was a land more fruitful in animal life than this South which supported the early Westerners. In such surroundings life was a simple matter. The chase and the rude field of corn offered sufficient returns to satisfy the frontiersman.
One day as Crockett happened to be in a settlement, some forty miles from his home, it was suggested that he run once more for the legislature. He agreed, and forthwith announced himself as candidate. His early methods were again successful. Discovering in himself now certain latent powers whose existence he had not suspected, he later agreed to run for Congress, but was defeated by his late supporter and friend, Colonel Alexander, by the scant margin of two votes. Cotton was high, and Alexander said it was because of the 1824 tariff. Davy did not know what the tariff was, and could not answer!
Crockett at this time is described as a “finely proportioned man, about six feet high, forty-five years of age, of very frank, pleasing and open countenance.” He was dressed in homespun and wore a black fur cap on his head, when seen by a traveler who met him at his house. He now began to show “an unusual strength of mind and a memory almost miraculous.” Uncultured, ignorant, terribly handicapped by lack of training and opportunity, he overcame it all. He got his ammunition from the enemy. He received his sole political education from his opponent’s political speeches, as witness his second campaign for Congress. Cotton dropped in price. Davy promptly found that the tariff argument would work both ways, and he took his advantage. He was elected to Congress, and re-elected, the second victory showing a majority of three thousand five hundred votes.
It is at this stage of his career that we may speak of the birth of the second or real David Crockett. These wild surroundings have now begotten in him a rugged sense of self-reliance and a personal independence that henceforth manifest themselves unmistakably. He is a politician, but an independent politician. “I would as soon be a ’coon dog as to be obliged to do what any man or set of men told me to do,” he says. “I will pledge myself to support no administration.” “I would rather be politically dead than hypocritically immortalized,” he declares; and in yet another instance he says that he “will not submit to the party gee-whoa-haw;” that he will be “no man’s man, and no party’s man.”
In spite of all these personal dicta he is elected. His election costs one hundred and fifty dollars, all in borrowed money. It costs David Crockett, congressman, an additional one hundred dollars, also borrowed, to get to the national Capitol at Washington, where he arrives perhaps the most unique specimen of Congressman ever produced in this broad land of ours. His first act is to pay his debts—which not all Congressmen since then have done so promptly. It is hard for the backwoods congressman at Washington, yet he has good sense, good tact, good-nature and a magnetic temperament. His motto, “Be sure you are right, then go ahead,” wins for him sudden fame. Perhaps it is fame too sudden. Now we must bid good-by to Davy Crockett, bear hunter. He is bitten of the fatal poison of political ambition. From this time on the record of his life is for a while public, plain and well known.
Crockett was a Southerner and, as has been stated, at first a friend of the Jacksonian Democracy. Naturally he should have been expected to prove loyal to the doctrines of the South, and the South at that time was held in the hollow of Old Hickory’s hand. Note now a sudden sternness of fiber in the bear hunter’s character that entitles him to a better name than that of time-serving politician. As a matter of conviction and principle he differs from the autocratic leader then sitting in the president’s chair. He opposes President Jackson’s Indian bill, and the proposition to withdraw the deposits from the United States banks. Indeed, instead of being a follower of Jackson, he comes out boldly as an opponent of his former leader.
The North hails him joyously as a Southerner with a Whig heart. Let Davy make the most of it; none the less he loses the next contest for Congress in his district. Yet he fights again, gets the nomination for the next term, wins once more and hastens rapidly toward the height of a national popularity. Realizing his own ignorance of the North and East, in 1834 he undertakes a journey to those sections. At Baltimore he sees a railroad for the first time in his life, and witnesses the tremendous feat of seventeen miles made by a railway train in the time of fifty-five minutes! At Philadelphia crowds meet him at the wharf and cheer him to the echo. He is banqueted repeatedly, wined and dined times without number, and made the recipient of countless attentions. The young Whigs of Philadelphia come close to his heart when they make him a present of a fine rifle, the very rifle that took the place of “Old Betsy” and was with Crockett in his last fight at the Alamo.
In New York, in Boston and the larger manufacturing towns of Massachusetts, Crockett repeats his Philadelphia triumphs. He is now a national figure. His sayings and doings are quoted throughout the land. If his Northern speeches are correctly reported, he has at this time suddenly become the possessor of an easy and not undignified oratorical style, though all his speeches are still well sprinkled with quaint epigrams and homely illustrations.
We see in the Crockett of 1834 a figure not approached by any other American statesman so nearly as by that other rugged Westerner, Abraham Lincoln. These crude, virile, tremendous, human men, product of the soil, born of the hard ground and the blue sky—how they do appeal, how they do grow, how they do succeed.
Crockett is asked to visit Harvard College, but refuses for quaint reasons of his own. Andrew Jackson has been made an LL. D. by Harvard, and Crockett says that “one LL. D. is enough for Tennessee.” He is the guest of Lieutenant-governor Armstrong, and chronicles naïve surprise that Mr. Armstrong “did not charge him anything,” for entertaining him. He states that in New England he found “more liberality than the Yankee generally gets credit for.” He expresses his gratitude for the kindly reception accorded him in New England and chronicles his admiration for the thrift and industry of that country, which seems to have made a vivid impression on his mind, different as these scenes were from the wild surroundings in which he himself had grown up.