David Crockett_ The Lion of the West - Michael Wallis [97]
During the campaign, a sharp decline in the price of cotton hurt Alexander, whose past support of the tariff law came back to hurt him, just as Crockett had long predicted. Both Arnold and Alexander also helped Crockett’s cause by largely ignoring him and focusing on each other. At one campaign stop, Gen. Arnold spoke and directed his remarks at Alexander as if Crockett were not even there. After a time, a large flock of noisy guinea fowls happened upon the scene and made such a clatter that the flustered Arnold had to stop talking until the birds could be driven away.9 Crockett recalled,
I let him finish his speech, and then walking up to him, said aloud, “Well, colonel, you are the first man I ever saw that understood the language of fowls.” I told him that he had not had the politeness to name me in his speech, and that when my little friends, the guinea-fowls, had come up and began to holler “Crockett, Crockett, Crockett,” he had been ungenerous enough to stop, and drive them all away. This raised a universal shout among the people for me, and the general seemed mighty bad plagued. But he got more plagued than this at the polls in August.10
That was exactly the folksy style that the crowds found so appealing. Crockett had become a seasoned campaigner who spoke the language of the voters. All of his speeches sounded much like the autobiography that he and Thomas Chilton would pen just a few years later, peppered with country expressions and his own peculiar brand of idioms and phrases. He was affable and did not seem to take himself too seriously. All of it worked in his favor. Crockett defeated both his opponents by a substantial margin. Arnold had 2,417 votes, Alexander received 3,646, and Crockett polled 5,868 votes, giving him a plurality of 2,222 votes.11
David Crockett, “the gentleman from the cane,” most comfortable, it seemed, hunting bears, appeared to be as strange a congressman-elect as there ever would be in American history. Some people, in fact, who recalled the seemingly impossible occurrence in 1811 when the great earthquake caused the Mississippi to run backward, were even more shocked by the news of Crockett’s election. Crockett himself may even have been surprised, though it might have been another instance of feigned modesty when, years after the election, he told a friend that “he never knew why the people of his district elected him to Congress, as it was a matter he knew precious little about at the time and had no idea what he would be called on to do when he arrived in Washington.”12
Early nineteenth-century pundits scratched their heads and wondered what had happened. The answer appeared clear. What had happened was that from the ranks of eligible voters, a huge number of white men—many encouraged by wives still almost a century away from being permitted to cast votes—turned out for Crockett. His vote count more than doubled the number of votes he had received just two years before, and, even more impressive, more than 12,000 voters cast ballots on election day, twice the number who voted in 1825. At least half of them supported Crockett.13 That is what made the difference—those hardscrabble farmers, squatters, stave makers, coon hunters, militia privates, storekeepers, tavern owners, and so many more. In their minds, and espousing early progressive sentiment, they were sending one of their own to Congress. At last they would have their own champion—and one without landholdings and aristocratic pretensions—fighting on their behalf. Crockett defined what it meant to be a populist—an advocate for the rights and interests of ordinary people. Flushed with victory in the autumn of 1827, Crockett felt invincible.
Just a few weeks after the election, Crockett surprised and delighted Elizabeth with a trip to her family home in North Carolina. His eldest son, twenty-year-old John Wesley, accompanied them.