David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [90]
One of Crockett’s favorite ploys, developed early on in his political career, was to campaign in a buckskin-hunting shirt with two large pockets. In one pocket he kept a big twist of tobacco and in the other a bottle of liquor. “When I met a man and offered him a dram, he would throw out his quid of tobacco to take on, and after he had taken his horn, I would out with my twist and give him another chaw,” explained Crockett. “And in this way he would not be worse off than when I found him; and I would be sure to leave him in a first-rate good humor.”7
Throughout the campaign, Crockett and Butler remained cordial and respectful. When Crockett was on the stump in Jackson, he received an invitation to dine at the Butler residence, a much larger and elegant home than the Crockett cabin. When he arrived for dinner, Crockett was so impressed with a luxurious carpet covering most of the floor that he refused to tread on it and spent the evening stepping around it and keeping his feet on the rungs of the chair. Later, at one of the rallies, Crockett drew on this episode and talked of Butler’s lavish home and a carpet that was nothing like the bearskins that adorned most cabin floors. “Fellow citizens, my aristocratic competitor has a fine carpet, and every day he walks on finer truck than any gowns your wife or your daughters, in all their lives, ever wore.”8
As the campaign progressed, two more candidates—Messrs. Shaw and Brown—entered the race, but Crockett and Butler remained the front-runners. During months of traveling from one small settlement to the next and making joint appearances, the candidates became well acquainted with each other’s standard speech. Crockett cleverly seized on this at one of the many stops and instead of giving his talk last as he always preferred, he agreed to speak first and allow Butler to have the last word. Crockett rose and proceeded to deliver Butler’s stock speech almost verbatim, which, of course, left the flustered doctor scrambling for something else to say when his turn came to speak.9
All of the shenanigans and outlandish speeches paid off for Crockett. When the votes cast in the two-day-long August 1823 election were tallied, the two minor candidates managed to get only a few votes, but Crockett was at the top and beat Butler by a 247-vote majority.10
“This reminded me of the old saying—‘A fool for luck, and a poor man for children,’”11 Crockett observed. The hackneyed adage may have had a ring of truth, but luck rarely comes to fools. Crockett was no fool. He was a risk taker who never let his rifle get out of reach. He became the epitome of a man who could lick any problem with his own two hands and his wits. Crockett was one of the first politicians to perfect the tactic of “branding” opponents as being “too elite” to connect with and represent the general populace. That was why he appealed to the hardscrabble folks living on the frontier in the nineteenth century.
Crockett certainly did not know it at the time, but with his victory in 1823 he was well on his way to becoming a folk hero in a nation that had heroes, such as George Washington, but no genuine folk heroes. There were plenty of mythologized heroes from the past, and the Founding Fathers, including some who were still alive, were admired and respected but not, other than Washington, the stuff of legend. Even the admirable Daniel Boone, who had died an old man just a few years before in Missouri, seemed distant and removed, particularly since he much preferred solitude to the legend that overshadowed him. Andrew Jackson and other notable political leaders of the were the objects of hero worship in many circles, but people—especially the so-called common man—saw something else in the brash yet unpretentious David Crockett of Tennessee. The common man was on the rise, as Jackson’s political success revealed, and Crockett also had all the makings to become one of America’s first heroes for the masses.
Although he clearly grasped