David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [129]
In Tennessee, concerned voters began to make inquiries about the land bill. Crockett had no real answers. Any pleasant memories of the recent tour had evaporated. He felt trapped and more and more alone. “I now look forward toward our adjournment with as much interest as ever did a poor convict in the penitentiary to see his last day come,”21 he wrote. “We have done but one act, and that is that the will of Andrew, the first king, is to be the law of the land. He has tools and slaves enough in Congress to sustain him in anything he may wish to effect…. I thank God I am not one of them. I do consider him a greater tyrant than Cromwell, Caesar or Bonaparte…”
In the end, Crockett did not even stay for the rest of the session but bolted the day before the official close. He did not head out west to Tennessee but instead boarded a stagecoach bound for Baltimore and then on to Philadelphia. There he was to meet with his publishers, accept some promised gifts, and deliver a July Fourth speech at Independence Hall along with Senator Daniel Webster and some other resolute Whigs. The anti-Jacksonians, while politically smart enough to figure that Crockett had no real chance of ever becoming president, still considered him a useful weapon to unleash at staged events and political rallies.
Reaching Philadelphia on June 30, Crockett was again escorted to the United States Hotel on Chestnut Street and given the sort of pampered treatment a prized gladiator received before entering the arena. On the evening of July 1 at a special ceremony near the old state house, he was given a special custom-made rifle that had been promised to him during his earlier book tour by the young Whigs of Philadelphia. J. M. Sanderson, the renowned local gunsmith the Whigs had commissioned to create the weapon, presented it to Crockett, along with a silver tomahawk inscribed with the words “Go Ahead Crockett,” a butcher knife, a shot pouch, and an ornate gilded liquor canteen shaped like a bound book and filled with first-rate sipping whiskey. There also was a powder horn with silver mounts inscribed “Tho. H. Benton to David Crockett 1832.”22 The inscription was curious, since by 1832 Crockett was a known Jackson enemy and Tom Benton, despite earlier differences, was one of Jackson’s staunchest supporters. Soon the room broke out in laughter when it became known that it was a bogus inscription etched by some of Crockett’s Whig friends as a political prank.
The richly ornamented rifle was a treasure to behold. The inscription in gold read: “Presented by the Young Men of Philadelphia to Hon. David Crockett of Tennessee.” On the stock, a silver plate depicted an alligator with its open jaws, a deer, and a possum. Sanderson also inlaid a gilded arrow into the barrel near the muzzle, and the words “Go Ahead” were etched near the front sight. Crockett was visibly moved with the gifts, especially the rifle. He vowed to use it in defense of his country and to hand it down to his sons for the same purpose. As was the common custom of most hunters of the time, Crockett gave all his rifles names. The well-used rifle he had been using for many years was called “Betsey,” his favorite moniker for guns, and so he told the crowd that this newest weapon in his arsenal would be called “Pretty Betsey.”23
The following day Crockett and Sanderson traveled just across the Delaware River to nearby Camden, New Jersey, and spent part of the day test-firing the weapon. Crockett was pleased with the gun and told those with him that it operated every bit as well as it looked. “I shot tolerable well, and was satisfied that when we became better acquainted, the fault would be mine if the varmints did not suffer,”24 he