David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [130]
Back in Philadelphia for Independence Day, Crockett was in fine form, mingling with Daniel Webster and other Whig luminaries. He delivered his standard speech attacking Old Hickory and received thunderous applause. Crockett departed a couple of days later, after acquiring an elegant pitcher imported from China for his wife Elizabeth (Betsy) and meeting gunpowder manufacturer E. I. du Pont, a director on the board of the Second Bank of the United States, who gave him a dozen canisters of powder for the new “Pretty Betsey” in his life.25
After a circuitous journey mostly by train and steamboat, and several stops in Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, Crockett finally set foot nearly three weeks later in Tennessee on July 22 at the Mills Point boat landing, where his son William waited with a wagon to make the thirty-five-mile trip home.26 Family members, especially those who had seen the comings and goings of Crockett for so many years, provided a lukewarm reception, and no sooner had he unpacked than he was forced to face what had become the constant round of legal actions over promissory notes past due. Sales of his autobiography had yielded some relief, but Crockett’s poor fiscal judgment and lack of money management skills trumped any easing of his financial miseries.
In this aspect of his life, Crockett had become his father, the debt-ridden John Crockett who had eventually followed his son and other family members to the land of the shakes, where he died in September of 1834.27 Just as had happened in the case of his father-in-law’s passing, David was named the administrator of his father’s estate, which not surprisingly amounted to very little. Prior to leaving that fall of 1834 to return for the next session of Congress, Crockett had to borrow even more money just to make the trip.
Besides his financial problems, Crockett was aware that he would face strong opposition in the approaching congressional elections in August of 1835. Word on the streets of Washington City and in the hills and canebrakes of Tennessee was that one of Crockett’s main political enemies, Adam R. Huntsman, was ready to do battle for the Twelfth Congressional seat. Nicknamed “Old Black Hawk” by Crockett and a lawyer by trade, Huntsman, after having lost a leg in the Creek War in 1813, had gone on to become a powerful figure in the fledgling Democratic Party in Tennessee. He was a close friend of Andrew Jackson and James K. Polk, and was reputed to be a forceful campaigner, practical joker, and excellent speaker.28
“Adam Huntsman is out in opposition to David Crockett for Congress, in the district represented by the Colonel,” announced a front-page blurb in the Gettysburg Adams Sentinel of November 24, 1834. “We take it the Colonel will care very little about such a ‘varment as that are.’ He will ‘chaw him up in a flash.’”29
However, before he could concentrate on another political campaign, Crockett once more had to get his finances in order. His publishers denied him any further cash advances, so he schemed with another of his boardinghouse friends, Pennsylvania Congressman William Clark, to write yet another book—this time a work based on the event-packed Crockett tour of the eastern cities. After a good deal of cajoling, Crockett was able to convince Carey and Hart to publish such a book and Clark to write it. The agreement with Clark was for Crockett to provide him with a collection of newspaper accounts, speeches given on the tour, and any other odd notes and documents that could be organized and cobbled together to form a book.
Yet at the expense of his congressional duties, including efforts to pass his notorious land bill, Crockett spent almost all of his time working on the book. Throughout his years spent in Congress, his top priority had been to make sure that the land of western Tennessee was made available and affordable to the settlers who had tamed it. Still unrealized, that unattainable dream seemed further jeopardized because of the financial exigencies of turning out another book.
Laboring under the unrealistic