David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [107]
By that time Crockett had long abandoned the Jackson ranks and his own congressional delegation. His stand against the Jackson and Polk forces on Indian Removal and the Tennessee vacant land issue would prove costly. Crockett must have seen the proverbial writing on the wall even before he returned home and launched his reelection campaign in the spring of 1831. The break with the popular Old Hickory did not play well on the western frontier of Tennessee, nor did all the time Crockett was spending with Yankee Whigs.
“I found the storm had raised against me sure enough,” Crockett wrote of his 1831 homecoming between sessions of Congress, “and it was echoed from side to side, and from end to end in my district, that I had turned against Jackson. This was considered the unpardonable sin. I was hunted down like a wild varment [sic], and in this hunt every little newspaper in the district, and every little pin-hook lawyer was engaged. Indeed, they were ready to print any and every thing that the ingenuity of man could invent against me.”19
Crockett’s enemies were even more determined to see his defeat. His opponent, handpicked by Jackson and the Democratic leadership, was William Fitzgerald, a thirty-four-year-old lawyer and judge from Dresden, the seat of Weakley County, and a loyal and prominent Jacksonian. From the start of the campaign, it was apparent that Crockett faced not only Fitzgerald but also the entire Jackson machine, including Martin Van Buren, a former U.S. senator and governor of New York who became Jackson’s secretary of state and then replaced John C. Calhoun as vice president in Jackson’s second term of office from 1833 to 1837. Crockett had always looked at Van Buren with a jaundiced eye and usually called him “the little Red Fox,” or “the Magician,” two of the nicknames ascribed to the urbane and squat little man who also was an adept and clever political operator.20 Crockett believed Van Buren manipulated Jackson and was mainly interested in advancing his own career and agenda. Even before his break with Jackson was complete, Crockett wrote, “I am still a Jackson man, but General Jackson is not; he has become a Van Buren man.”21
The campaign of 1831 was ugly from start to finish. Jackson wanted Crockett out of office and said so many times. In an April 23, 1831, letter to his friend Samuel Jackson Hayes, the president wrote: “I trust, for the honor of the state, your Congressional District will not disgrace themselves longer by sending that profligate man Crockett back to Congress.”22
With Jackson’s backing and the support of Polk’s political machine, Fitzgerald made great inroads into Crockett’s base of voter support in the district. Editorial coverage seemed to favor Fitzgerald. The Jackson Gazette, at one time politically neutral, not only threw its support to Fitzgerald but also published many smear stories about Crockett filled with the recurring lurid accusations of his supposed rampant gambling and drinking escapades. In endorsing Fitzgerald, the newspaper first took a swipe at Crockett. “He can’t ‘whip his weight in wild cats,’ nor ‘leap the Mississippi,’ nor ‘mount a rainbow and slide off into eternity and back at pleasure’…but this we believe, that Mr. Fitzgerald will make a better legislator; that he will far excel Col. Crockett upon the floor of Congress, as the Col. does him in the character of a mounte-bank,” the popular word at the time for a charlatan or trickster.
One of the Fitzgerald camp’s favorite dirty tricks was to spread word of where Crockett was going to appear but not inform Crockett. Then, when he failed to show up, Fitzgerald or one of his backers would speak to the crowd and tell them that Crockett was afraid to appear.23
Finally, over the long summer of 1831, Crockett became so frustrated by the barrage of lies that he made a fateful mistake. He stopped relying on his good humor to