David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [123]
The Whigs carefully choreographed every stop along the way. Although the name “Whig” had been in use for at least two years, it was formally adopted as the official name of the party just eleven days before the start of Crockett’s tour.17 Whig leaders fully expected Crockett to attract even more disenfranchised voters to their ranks from the anti-Jackson forces, including former members of the National Republican Party who supported states’ rights, Democrats who disagreed with Jackson over the Second Bank of the United States, northern industrialists, and southern planters.
Several months before the book tour, a delegation of Whigs from Mississippi had asked Crockett if he would consider running for president of the United States. They wished to offer his name as a candidate in 1836.18 The Mississippians told Crockett they wanted a candidate as popular as Jackson in the west to offset the anticipated Democratic contender, Martin Van Buren of New York. They promised “to go the whole hog” for Crockett.
“You speak in the strongest possible terms of my fitness for the office of President of the United States, and a discharge of its duties,” Crockett wrote in response to the Whig offer. “In this you may be right, as I suspect there is likely something in me that I have never yet found out. I don’t hardly think, though, that it goes far enough for the Presidency, though I suppose I could do as the ‘Government’ has done—make up a whole raft of Cabinet Ministers, and get along after a manner…. It is the way with all great men, never to seek or decline office. If you think you can run me in as President, just go a-head. I had a little rather not; but you talk so pretty, that I cannot refuse. If I am elected, I shall just seize the old monster party by the horns, and sling him right slap into the deepest place in the great big Atlantic sea.”19
Besides their mutual hatred of Jackson and his inner circle, the Whigs and Crockett shared few other interests. Still, the party leadership believed that the best alternative to Jackson and his probable successor, Martin Van Buren, was, indeed, Crockett. While he may have been guided by a different set of interests and philosophies than the mercantile-oriented Whig Party, Crockett also saw his Whig alliance as a chance to finally get his land bill passed in Congress. As others have said, Crockett may have been politically naive, but he was not a fool simply seeking public praise and acting as a Whig puppet. He wanted to sell books and make some money.
Everywhere Crockett went on the tour, there were large and adoring crowds of well-wishers. Many of these admirers were drawn by Crockett’s colorful personality, others invited by local Whig Party officials. From the first night of the tour, spent at Barnum’s Hotel in Baltimore, where a dinner was held in Crockett’s honor, his official hosts were Whig friends. They made up a large part of the crowd when he delivered a speech beneath the imposing white marble statue of George Washington perched atop a 160-foot column at Mount Vernon Place. The same was true the next morning when a large delegation of Whigs escorted him to a waiting steamer that took him across Chesapeake Bay. Crockett then boarded a train to Delaware City and cruised up the Delaware River to Philadelphia. In the City of Brotherly Love, he drew larger crowds than even the two-headed kitten on display in a nearby hotel lobby, where the creature was predicted to “turn