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By Root 293 0

how his homespun demeanor appealed to people, hero worship was not Crockett’s immediate agenda in September 1823 when he made his return to Murfreesboro for the Fifteenth General Assembly. He took his seat as the duly elected state legislator now representing the five counties of Carroll, Humphreys, Perry, Henderson, and Madison. The entire western region was expanding quickly, and by the close of the second session Crockett’s own legislative district would swell to a total of eleven new counties with the addition of Gibson, Fayette, Dyer, Tipton, Haywood, and Hardeman.12 Throughout the first session, which concluded in late November 1823, as well as during the second session, lasting only a month in September–October 1824, Crockett continued his “squatter’s rights” crusade. His primary focus remained helping West Tennessee settlers buy land at a reasonable cost.

During both sessions, he took an active role in various committee assignments and on many issues, including a vote against using prisoners as laborers. Many of the convicts were debtors, a group that obviously had Crockett’s sympathy. Although he stood in opposition to a proposal to prohibit “tippling houses,” he endorsed another measure banning the retail sale of spirits on election day, an odd stance given Crockett’s generous use of whiskey as a vote-getting device. In the second session, he introduced a measure to improve the navigation of the rivers of the Western District and sponsored other bills promoting marriage with widows, opposing divorce in general, and banning the archaic custom of dueling, an activity not foreign to Crockett’s former commander, Andrew Jackson.13

Jackson had steadily become the most powerful political force in Tennessee, and it was during the initial legislative session in the fall of 1823 that Crockett had his first public sparring match with some of Jackson’s most ardent supporters over the election of the next U.S. senator from Tennessee.14

Incumbent U.S. senator John Williams was intent on running for a second six-year term. Jackson, however, a longtime political foe of Williams dating back to the Creek War, when Colonel Williams served with Sharp Knife, wanted Williams gone. So did the political machine grooming Jackson for a run for the presidency of the nation in 1824. Another election victory for the most vocal of Jackson’s critics would seriously harm his image and prospects nationally. As time for the election neared and no strong candidate to stand against Williams had emerged, Jackson reluctantly agreed to become the spoiler and run for the Senate. Jackson won the October 1 election and then promptly resigned, having managed to keep Williams from returning to Washington.15 It did not go unnoticed that one of Williams’s vocal supporters had been State Assemblyman David Crockett, who had recently beaten one of Jackson’s relatives in an election.

“I thought the colonel [Williams] had honestly discharged his duty, and even the mighty name of Jackson couldn’t make me vote against him,” Crockett wrote several years later when he and Jackson, by then president, were at loggerheads and bitter enemies. “I never would, nor never did, acknowledge I had voted wrong; and I am more certain now that I was right than ever. I told the people it was the best vote I ever gave; that I had supported the public interest, and cleared my conscience in giving it, instead of gratifying the private ambition of a man.”16

Crockett gutted out the rest of the first legislative session, working as hard as he could on a myriad of proposed legislation and making more friends as well as enemies, such as James K. Polk, who pushed for the sale of public lands to finance universities.17 Crockett opposed Polk on this issue, firmly believing that universities were the realms of the upper classes and that subsidizing land-grant institutions did not help the poor and the squatters in his ten-county district. To Crockett and others like him from the backcountry, formal education was not nearly as important as the experience a man could garner from everyday