American Rifle - Alexander Rose [53]
But a catchy variety-hall ditty and a few thrillers did not a legendary weapon make. Timing had much to do with Americans’ newfound love for the rifle. The fiftieth anniversary of 1776 fell in 1826, and Americans were celebrating a half-century of independence. A fast-diminishing number of the Revolution’s band of brothers were still alive—James Monroe, the country’s fifth president between 1817 and 1825, was the last incumbent to have been an adult at the time of the Declaration of Independence—and it was only natural for the next generation of Americans to look back and wonder what had gone right, and what wrong, and compare their achievements to those ideals envisaged by the Founding Fathers.75 Would they have been disappointed in their children? Proud, or merely bemused? The heroism of Jackson’s boys in carrying out yet another whupping of the British suggested that George Washington himself would have been proud of his republic’s citizens.
Politics, too, intruded. Anti-Jacksonian Whigs—heirs to the Hamiltonian Federalists and the National Republicans—caviled at Jackson’s appropriation of the famous song’s lyrics to serve his own ends, but they appreciated the Kentucky riflemen’s self-reliance and ethical uprightness. While Jacksonians tended to assign responsibility for poverty and inequality to socioeconomic factors beyond the individual’s ken, Whigs were adamant that personal flaws—laziness, priapism, godlessness—were the real cause. No such failings were evident among the riflemen, they argued.
In order to demonstrate their loyalties to the Common Man and to outflank Jackson, the Whigs coopted their own superstar rifleman and congressman: Davy Crockett, described by one contemporary reviewer of his memoirs as a “product of forests, freedom, universal suffrage, and bear-hunts.”76 Outsiders found his celebrity status inexplicable: Tocqueville, author of the classic Democracy in America, wonderingly recorded that Tennessee voters had rejected a candidate “of wealth and talent” in favor of a man who “has had no education, can read with difficulty, has no property, no fixed residence, but passes his life hunting . . . and dwelling continuously in the woods.” But Crockett—bluff and plain spoken, possessed of a mother wit, perseverance, and courage—ran against Jackson, and the country took him readily to heart.77 When he traveled to Philadelphia for a tour of the East during his last congressional term in 1834, it was only natural that the city’s Whigs presented him with Pennsylvania’s finest product: a Kentucky rifle that he quickly dubbed “Pretty Betsey” to distinguish it from her predecessor, “Old Betsey,” given to him by his constituents back in 1822. Describing it as “just about as beautiful a piece as ever came out of Philadelphia,” Crockett told the adoring crowd that “I love a good gun, for it makes a man feel independent, and prepared either for war or peace.” It was exactly what they wanted to hear.78
Jackson’s Democrats were uncomfortably aware of the corruption and favoritism endemic in American politics, just as they were disturbed by the rise of gauche stockjobbers, rich slaveowners, and merchant princes. It was understandable that they, like the Whigs, exalted the manly, selfless, simple patriotism of grizzled frontiersmen volunteering for duty armed only with their trusty Kentuckys. The British troops vanquished at New Orleans could even be conveniently reimagined as proxies for bankers’ capitalism and royal despotism.
Once looked down upon by civilized easterners as a brute, the rifleman had transformed into an American, and his firearm, a symbol of independence and tradition, not of backwoods wildness. The irony was that the nineteenth century was a time of tumult and displacement, of the rise of machines and centralized management. That brave new world beckoned enticingly (or beguilingly), and John Hall’s children—the modern-minded mechanics and managers of the Rifle Works, and those manufacturers and officials who learned the secrets of interchangeability