This trip into the North wrought epochal change for our bear hunter. He learns now about the tariff, studies and approves the doctrines of protection—rank heresy for a Southerner. Deep water for Davy now! He seems to have had no counsel of prudence, for now he loses no opportunity to chronicle his animosity toward General Jackson.
“Hero—that is a name that ought to be first in war and last in peace,” says he. Commenting on the faithlessness of the government, he flames out: “I had considered a treaty as the sovereign law of the land, and now I hear it considered as a matter of expedience.” This was in reference to the treatment accorded the southern Indians by the United States government.
“This thing of man-worship I am a stranger to,” says he, with personal allusion, of course, to Jackson. In all these sayings he is, it may naturally be supposed, heartily applauded by the Northerners, who rejoice in this notable accession to their own ranks.
Davy Crockett, bear hunter and congressman, has now had his chance. He takes himself seriously, even when he jokes about his being the next president of the United States. Crockett represents now the success of perfect digestion, of the perfectly normal nervous system. Nothing irritates him. The world to him runs smoothly, as it does to any hardy animal. He cares not for the past and has no concern for the physical future. His big brain, so long fallow, so long unstirred, begins now to fill up with thoughts and ideas and comparisons and conclusions. His reason is clear and bright. He presents to the world the startling spectacle of a middle-aged man educating himself to the point of an intelligent statesmanship, and that within the space of a few brief months or years. He displays a clarity of vision nothing short of marvelous. His memory of names, of dates and data is something startling. The world of books remains closed to him, so that he learns by ear, like a child, but he surprises friends and foes alike. The husk of the chrysalis has been broken. The Westerner has been born into the American!
Davy Crockett had thus far never met any danger of a nature to inspire fear, any difficulty he could not overcome, any hardship he could not lightly endure. He now encountered one enemy greater than any to be met with in the wilderness—that great and menacing foe, the political machine. He found to his sorrow that honor and manhood will not always serve, and at the summit of his success he met his first and irremediable defeat.
Crockett, once the politician, now grown into Crockett the eager student, the earnest statesman, had stirred up animosities too great for him to overcome. The relentless hand of Jackson smote hard upon Crockett’s district. There was talk of money, and of votes influenced by its use. Poor Davy, who went into this last campaign of Congress as blithely and as sure of success as ever in his life, learned that he had been defeated by a total of two hundred and thirty votes! Then there arose from the honest and generous soul of this strange child of the wilderness a great and bitter cry. He was among the first to exclaim against the creed of politics pursued as politics, of statesmanship that is not statesmanship—the creed of party and not of manhood.
“As my country no longer requires my services,” he writes, “I have made up my mind to leave it.” Expressing his determination forthwith to leave Tennessee and to start for the distant land of Texas, he says, “I have a new row to hoe, a long and rough one; but I will go ahead.” He adds as quaintly as ever, “I told my constituents they might all go to hell, and I would go to Texas.”
We come now to the third and closing stage of the life of David Crockett, and in order to understand it we must bear in mind the nature of the opinions then current concerning the new land that to the Southerners of that time was “The Great West,” the land beyond the Mississippi. Texas, a magnificent realm eight hundred and twenty-five by seven hundred and forty-five miles in extent, already had an American population of nearly forty thousand; and of all wild populations ever gathered together at any place or time of the world, this was perhaps the wildest and the most indomitable. There was hardly a soul within the borders of that great land who was not a fighting man and who had not come to take his fighting chance. It was fate that Davy Crockett should drift into this far Southwest and take his chances also.
As to the chances of it, they were not so bad. It was almost sure that Texas would ultimately be won from Mexico. In 1813 an expedition of Americans had fought Spain and killed some hundreds of Spaniards, on the strength of the general claim that the territory of Louisiana extended westward as far as the Rio Grande, and not merely to the neighborhood of the Sabine River, as was claimed by Spain. The latter river was in 1819 generally accepted as the boundary line, but this fact did not serve to stop the Americans.
In 1823 Stephen A. Austin was settling his Mexican grant with his new colony. These families drew after them the inevitable train of relatives and friends, so that the great River Road to the South and Southwest soon began to be pressed by the feet of many pilgrims. In 1821 Lafitte made his rough settlement at Galveston, and the pirates of Lafitte were no worse than the average Texas population of that time. There were no schools, no courts, no law. One writer states that he sat at breakfast with eleven men, each of whom had pending against him in another state a charge of murder. Then originated the etiquette of the wild West that demanded that no one should inquire into his neighbor’s past, nor ask his earlier name.