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win votes and instead allowed his anger to take over, putting out the word that if Fitzgerald made any more false charges he would receive a good country thrashing.24 On a scorching July afternoon at a joint appearance in Paris, Tennessee, Fitzgerald was scheduled to speak before Crockett, who was present with a large number of his partisans. Fitzgerald was well aware of Crockett’s threat, and when he rose to address the large crowd, he placed an object wrapped in a handkerchief on the table. Fitzgerald began his remarks by explaining that all the charges made against Crockett were true, and that he was going to repeat them despite Crockett’s threat of violence. He began his stock stump speech, and when he reached the part where he heaped insults on his opponent, Crockett, as promised, rose from his place in the audience and began advancing on Fitzgerald. When Crockett was just a few feet from him, Fitzgerald reached down and pulled a pistol from the handkerchief, leveled it at Crockett’s chest, and warned that if he took one more step forward it would be his last. Fitzgerald’s action was so sudden and unexpected that a surprised Crockett stopped. He briefly hesitated and turned around and retreated into the crowd. Word of the incident at Paris became the chief topic of discussion throughout the district. It did more to damage Crockett’s reputation than all the outlandish newspaper stories, chicanery, and other ploys combined.

It was hardly a surprise that Crockett was defeated in the August 1831 election. According to official returns, Fitzgerald received 8,534 votes to Crockett’s 7,948. Despite Crockett winning the majority in seventeen of the eighteen counties of his district, Madison County voters—and the Jackson Gazette—put Fitzgerald over the top, with 1,214 votes to just 429 for Crockett. It was close enough for Crockett to contest it, but the 586 margin of votes held.25

Only a few days after his defeat, Crockett declared in a letter, “I would rather be beaton [sic] and be a man than be elected and be a little puppy dog.”26 Crockett’s other consolation in defeat was the gift of time. He would be able to get out of debt, or at least try. He could hunt bears, see about family needs, and mend the broken political fences on the home front with the voters upset about his support of the Cherokees. And, most of all, there would be time to watch the Crockett legend expand.

THIRTY

LION OF THE WEST

AFTER SAILING INTO the harbor at Newport, Rhode Island, in May of 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, the renowned French historian and political scientist, began his tour of the United States to both study the prison system and observe American democracy in action. During nine months of traveling from the East Coast to the Mississippi River, Tocqueville filled fourteen notebooks with his observations and interview notes from more than two hundred Americans he met along the way, and his recollections are particularly germane to this story.

“Europeans think a lot about the wild, open spaces of America, but the Americans themselves hardly give them a thought,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. “The wonders of inanimate nature leave them cold, and, one may almost say, they do not see the marvelous forests surrounding them until they fall beneath the ax. The American people see themselves marching through wildernesses, drying up marshes, diverting rivers, peopling the wilds, and subduing nature.”1

Tocqueville’s visit came at a time of great upheaval and change in America’s political system, with the birth of the Democratic Party under Jackson’s leadership and the rise of the anti-Jackson Whigs. The young nobleman, from an aristocratic family that had managed to survive the French Revolution, marveled at “the constant agitation of parties,” and the necessity for party candidates to “haunt the taverns, drink and argue with the mob” in order to attract votes. The lack of a hierarchical social order, so different from Europe, particularly impressed the more patrician Frenchman. When he entered the House of Representatives