David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [100]
Almanac illustration with text. (Photograph by Dorothy Sloan, Dorothy Sloan Rare Books)
PART IV
TWENTY-EIGHT
MAN WITHOUT A PARTY
CROCKETT WAS STAGE CENTER beneath a shining light. After yeoman political performances in Tennessee—where he honed and perfected his craft—the homespun forty-year-old found himself in the best theater of all: the nation’s capital. Here all sorts of forces and influences, such as a curious national press, a bevy of hack writers, and a gaggle of self-serving partisan politicians, waited in the wings. All of them recognized the unrefined backwoodsman’s raw magnetism and potential as a kind of political prop and populist mouthpiece. They saw that Crockett’s antics, eccentricities, and colorful style would propel him to national and eventually international acclaim and ridicule. Dealing with such attention required a willing participant with a healthy ego able to fend off critics and detractors. At the same time, it also meant that Crockett had to put up with some manipulation and allow his public image and persona to be molded and choreographed.
When he first arrived in Washington City to take his seat in the Twentieth Congress, many of his colleagues found that Crockett certainly possessed a natural charm but also often exhibited rather unconventional behavior. His conversations and speeches were peppered with his folksy and sometimes clever idioms and expressions, many of which seemed peculiar to others who came from the larger urban areas of the country. While it was true that Crockett had his share of quirks, many of his so-called eccentricities were blown out of proportion and exaggerated by political enemies both in the press and political arena. Contrary to many written accounts and most of the Crockett film portrayals, he did not go to Congress wearing a hunting shirt and coonskin hat, but turned out in the standard high collared coat, dress shirt, vest, and cravat of the time.
“I remember David Crockett well and always with pleasure,” recounted William L. Foster, whose father, Senator Ephraim H. Foster, had been a friend and associate. “He was very often a guest of my father, always a pleasant, courteous, and interesting man, who, though uneducated in books, was a man of fine instincts and intellect…. I never saw him attired in a garb that could be regarded as differing from that worn by a gentleman of his day—never in coonskin cap or hunting shirt.”1
No matter the wardrobe he chose, the robust backwoodsman in gentleman’s clothes puzzled his detractors and skeptics. Some of them seriously questioned if he had the intellect to survive the cutthroat world of Washington. They believed Tennessee would have been better served by having Crockett back at Reelfoot Lake.2
As it turned out, the question was not so much whether Crockett was ready for Washington but whether Washington was ready for Crockett. It is true that, during his three terms in the U.S. Congress, Crockett failed to get a single piece of legislation passed, even his beloved land bill for poor settlers and squatters. However, he emerged as a national celebrity, and served as an unwitting voice of and living symbol for a concept that, until nine years after Crockett’s death in 1836, did not have an official name—Manifest Destiny.
Influential magazine editor John L. O’Sullivan coined the name for this disputed political philosophy in an 1845 editorial when he wrote of “the right of our manifest destiny to over spread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us…. This is our high destiny, and in nature’s eternal, inevitable decree of cause and effect we must accomplish it.”3 Manifest Destiny became a rallying cry throughout the nation for all