Main currents in American thought An interpretation of American literature from the beginnings to 1920
He spoke rarely in the House and the few records in the _Congressional
Debates_ are sadly commonplace. Until after he broke with Jackson his
political influence at Washington was negligible. But that fortunate
break was the beginning of his fame. He had unwittingly made himself.
He had become a valuable asset to the Whig party. To find a native
Tennesseean, a real coonskin democrat, one who had served under Jackson
and been sent to Congress as a Jacksonian, as authentic a Westerner as
the General himself, at bitter personal odds with Old Hickory, ready to
talk out in meeting and eager to repudiate the latter’s attack upon the
Bank, was a find indeed to the hard-pressed Whigs; and they would have
been no politicians if they had not used what God sent. In consequence
Davy soon found himself talked about. His picturesque eccentricities
began to be exploited. His rugged western honesty was applauded; his
shrewd backwoods intelligence was praised; his frontier humor was
skillfully touched up; his characteristic motto, “go ahead,” was seized
upon as an expression of the progressive spirit of the lusty young Whig
party. In short he was speedily turned into a myth by ways not unknown
in our time, and sent forth as useful campaign material in the fight
for political righteousness. Davy was vastly surprised at his sudden
rise to fame. He had never realized how great a man he was; but he
accepted it as an agreeable fact and went ahead.
The work had already begun with the publication of the _Sketches and
Eccentricities of Col. David Crockett_, that came from the clever pen
of some journalist with a liking for the new vein of backwoods humor.
A Whig bias runs through the pages, but the book is more a character
sketch than a political document. The first embroiderings laid upon
the original homespun are seen in an extravagance of picturesque
language--an extravagance quite lacking in the more realistic
_Narrative_. A well-known passage professing to relate an occurrence
on Davy’s first trip to Washington will serve to reveal an early stage
of the myth-making process--the fathering upon Davy of a type of humor
then being exploited by clever young writers:
I was _rooting_ my way to the fire, not in a good humour, when some
fellow staggered towards me, and cried out, “Hurrah for Adams!”
Said I, “Stranger, you had better hurrah for hell, and praise your
own country.” Said he, “And who are you?”
“I’m that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods,
half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the
snapping-turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon
a streak of lightning, and slip without a scratch down a honey
locust; can whip my weight in wild-cats--and if any gentleman
pleases, for a ten-dollar bill, he may throw in a panther--hug a
bear too close for comfort, and eat any man opposed to Jackson.”
(_Ibid._, Chapter XIII.)
The touching up of the picturesque in the _Sketches_ seems to have been
a little too much for Davy, who resented the note of clownishness; but
he was not the man to permit undue modesty to blight so agreeable a
myth in its tender stage. He loved to swagger in the public eye too
much for that, and he joined heartily with his new political friends
to clothe it in more dignified dress. His incredible egotism was
aroused and he swallowed the Whig bait, hook, line and sinker. He began
to take himself seriously and set about the business of propagating
the myth. He conceived the plan of issuing in his own name books
which he humorously claimed to have written in the same way that the
President wrote his state papers. Some wag having suggested his name
for the presidency to succeed Jackson, Davy was at great pains to
advertise the fact to the world. To link himself with Jackson in the
public eye and to contrast his own rugged honesty with the latter’s
reputed abandonment of democratic principles, was the single purpose
of these Whig documents. The autobiography was quickly followed by
the _Tour_, and this by the _Life of Martin Van Buren_, each more
obvious propaganda than the last, and frankly designed to undermine
the popularity of the President and his advisers with the coonskin
democracy. Who the writer was that lent his pen to the work has never
been determined. A recent student has adduced testimony to prove that
it was Augustin S. Clayton, a Georgia Congressman, a ready talker and
writer, a man of sound culture, a close friend of Longstreet and fond
of the backwoods vernacular. The argument is plausible, but the case
is not established.[416] In the _Life of Martin Van Buren_ the mask
is dropped and all the malicious gossip of the Congressional lobby is
poured out on “little Van,” the “heir-apparent to the ‘government.’”
The backwoods character is retained only in an occasional coarseness
or deliberate lapse of grammar inserted in a text that is written
with vigor and skill. The book is far less amusing than Kennedy’s
_Quodlibet_. Davy is pretty much lost out of its pages and its
contribution to the myth was probably slight.
It is in the _Tour_, on the title page of which Davy formally accepts
the brevet dignity of Colonel conferred upon him by the writer of the
_Sketches_, that the myth expands more genially. A clever and amusing
campaign document, it is a masterpiece of Whig strategy to gull the
simple. The loquacious Davy joined heartily with his managers to cash
in on his reputation. His egotism was played upon at every turn and
he was quite unconscious that he had become a mere cat’s-paw to pull
Whig chestnuts out of the coals. He was paraded at meetings with
Daniel Webster, given great dinners, applauded for his rustic wit and
homespun honesty, presented with a fine rifle; and he seems never to
have realized how grossly he was being exploited. His self-esteem was
proof against disillusionment and he accepted the applause greedily.
Wherever he went he was taken in charge by the young Whigs. Everything
was carefully arranged beforehand. News was sent forward that he was
coming; crowds were gathered to greet him; publicity was attended to;
morning, noon, and night he was invited to speak, and the speeches were
carefully reprinted--not the authentic speeches, probably, but good
campaign material nevertheless. It was a gratifying experience and Davy
swelled up like a turkey cock.
As a result of his tour he was immensely strengthened in his new
political faith and became a staunch nationalist. When he first went
to Congress he was anti-tariff and had won his seat on that issue; but
he was invited to Lowell, shown an idyllic picture of contented and
prosperous mill-hands, dined, given a prepared table of statistics
proving how industrialism “is calculated not only to give individual
happiness and prosperity, but to add to our national wealth and
prosperity,” and bidden Godspeed in the work of spreading the true
gospel among the honest, simpleminded and patriotic frontiersmen.
After having been presented by Mr. Lawrence with a fine suit of
domestic broadcloth, Davy would have been an ingrate not to vote for a
protective tariff. But alas! the opportunity never came. A backwoods
constituency that had never been dined by Lowell capitalists and
had little use for fine broadcloth, a constituency that persisted
in throwing up coonskin caps for Old Hickory in spite of Lowell
statistics, resented his apostasy from the Democratic faith and at
the next election invited him to stay in the canebrakes. The gorgeous
bubble was pricked. Davy had expanded under prosperity and could not
now endure adversity. In a fit of anger he quitted his family and the
state of Tennessee, went off on the mad chase to Texas and in March
of the next year fell at the Alamo. Vain, ignorant Davy Crockett! A
simple-minded frontiersman, he went down to Jericho and fell among
thieves, and when they were done with him they left him despoiled
politically but invested with a fame that has grown to this day. After
his death other hands took up the work, wove around his name the humor
and romance of the frontier, and made of him a legendary figure. It
would have pleased Davy to know how the myth had prospered.[417]
Yet from this crude romanticism, this picturesque propaganda of
coonskin days, one solid contribution remains--the autobiography. It
is a striking bit of realism, done after the manner of the Longstreet
school. There is politics in it, of course. Written just after Davy had
gone through a bitter campaign from which he had emerged triumphant, it
is a bold pronouncement that he wears no collar marked “My dog--Andrew
Jackson.” In the campaign of 1830 he had been defeated by the
Jacksonians, but two years later he “made a mash” of his opponents, and
the elation of that victory adds a certain cockiness to his habitual
swagger. But it is much more than a political tract; it is a vital
frontier document. The main facts of his biography, as set down there,
may be accepted as true, and the general picture of backwoods existence
in Tennessee; but the humor has been elaborated and the effect of the
picturesque heightened by his collaborator. Such added touches were
only natural. The real Davy was very far from romantic. An honest
picture of the Tennessee democracy in its native habitat would reveal
few idyllic features. It was a slovenly world and Davy was pretty
much of a sloven. Crude and unlovely in its familiar details, with its
primitive courtships and shiftless removals, its brutal Indian campaign
and fierce hunting sprees, its rough equality, its unscrupulous
politics, its elections carried by sheer impudence and whisky, the
autobiography reveals the backwoods Anglo-Irishman as an uncivilized
animal, responding to simple stimuli, yet with a certain rough vigor of
character. Wastefulness was in the frontier blood, and Davy was a true
frontier wastrel. In the course of successive removals he traversed the
length of Tennessee, drinking, hunting, talking, speculating, begetting
children, scratching a few acres of land to “make his crap,” yet living
for the most part off the country; and his last squatting place on the
Obion River, seven miles from the nearest neighbor, was as primitive
as the first. Willing to endure almost incredible hardships to obtain
a keg of gunpowder to celebrate Christmas, risking his skin to kill a
bear with a butcher knife, he was never much given to mending fences
or enlarging his plow lands. He was a hunter rather than a farmer,
and the lust of killing was in his blood. With his pack of hounds he
slaughtered with amazing efficiency. A later generation would call
him a game-hog. His family must have had Gargantuan appetites to have
consumed one-tenth of the meat that fell before his beloved Betsy; the
rest went to the dogs and hogs and buzzards. His hundred and five bears
in a single season, his six deer shot in one day while pursuing other
game--two of which were left hanging in the woods--serve to explain
why the rich hunting grounds of the Indians were swept so quickly
bare of game by the white invaders. Davy was but one of thousands who
were wasting the resources of the Inland Empire, destroying forests,
skinning the land, slaughtering the deer and bear, the swarms of
pigeons and turkey, the vast buffalo herds. Davy the politician is a
huge western joke, but Davy the wastrel was a hard, unlovely fact.
Strip away the shoddy romance that has covered up the real man and the
figure that emerges is one familiar to every backwoods gathering, an
assertive, opinionated, likable fellow, ready to fight, drink, dance,
shoot or brag, the biggest frog in a very small puddle, first among the
Smart Alecks of the canebrakes. Davy was a good deal of a wag, and the
best joke he ever played he played upon posterity that has swallowed