Davy Crockett

Davy Crockett: The Congressman Who Voted Alone

In 1830 the entire Tennessee delegation in the United States House of Representatives voted for Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act, with a single exception. The exception was a barely schooled frontiersman from the cane country who had run away from home at thirteen. It cost him his seat the following year. "I believed it was a wicked, unjust measure," he wrote. "I voted against this Indian bill, and my conscience yet tells me that I gave a good honest vote, and one that I believe will not make me ashamed in the day of judgement."

An Indentured Boyhood

David Crockett was born on 17 August 1786 in Greene County, Tennessee, near the Nolichucky River, of French Huguenot, Scotch-Irish and English descent. His father John, born around 1753 in Frederick County, Virginia, had fought at the Battle of Kings Mountain in the Revolutionary War and was, by the time his son was twelve, sufficiently in debt to indenture the boy to a man named Jacob Siler to work the money off. David drove cattle and apprenticed as a hatter in Christiansburg, Virginia. In 1800, aged thirteen, he ran away from home. He married Polly Finley on 16 August 1806 and had three children with her; after her death in March 1815 he married Elizabeth Patton and had three more. His son John Wesley Crockett would himself become a United States Congressman.

Militia Years

On 20 September 1813 he enlisted as a ninety-day scout with Francis Jones's Company of Mounted Riflemen during the Creek War. He re-enlisted on 28 September 1814 as a third sergeant for six months with the Tennessee Mounted Gunmen under Captain John Cowan. On 27 March 1818 he was elected lieutenant colonel of the Fifty-seventh Regiment of Tennessee Militia — a rank that in the politics of the era was less a military qualification than a constituency.

The Gentleman from the Cane

He entered the Tennessee General Assembly in 1821 representing Lawrence and Hickman counties and was appointed that September to the Committee of Propositions and Grievances. A second term, from 1823 to 1824, covered Carroll, Humphreys, Perry, Henderson and Madison counties. In 1827 he took a seat in the United States House of Representatives after defeating the incumbent Adam Rankin Alexander, and served from 1827 to 1829 and 1829 to 1831. His consistent cause was land: the impoverished settlers of west Tennessee who had cleared and occupied ground they could not prove they owned, and who could be dispossessed by better-connected claimants. He pushed for legislation easing the tax burden on the poor. It was not an abstract programme; it was his own biography, legislated.

The Vote That Ended a Career

Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830 was the defining measure of the era and, in Tennessee, a test of party loyalty that only Crockett failed. The Cherokee chief John Ross wrote to him on 13 January 1831 in gratitude. His district was less impressed, and William Fitzgerald took his seat that year. Crockett won it back in 1833, beating Fitzgerald, and served until 1835, when Adam Huntsman beat him in the August election. His response was published in the newspapers and has outlived every bill he ever sponsored: "I told the people of my district that I would serve them as faithfully as I had done; but if not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas."

Author of His Own Legend

Crockett was famous before he was dead, which in the 1830s was still an unusual condition. Stage plays and popular almanacs circulated larger-than-life exploits attributed to him, and rather than resist the caricature he capitalised on it. During his final congressional term he collaborated with the Kentucky Congressman Thomas Chilton on an autobiography, published in 1834 as *A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, Written by Himself*. The almanacs printed between 1835 and 1856 supplied him with a motto that outlived the man: "Always be sure you are right, then go ahead." He was a Freemason, initiated while serving in the House, and left his masonic apron with a Tennessee friend before setting out west.

Texas

He reached Nacogdoches on 14 January 1836 and swore a six-month oath to the Provisional Government of Texas. On 6 February he rode into San Antonio de Béxar with five other men; two days later he was at the Alamo Mission. Santa Anna's army arrived on 23 February and laid siege. On 25 February Crockett helped repel Mexican soldiers attempting to establish artillery positions. The final assault came at dawn on 6 March 1836 and lasted about ninety minutes. He was forty-nine.

How he died is genuinely unresolved. A formerly enslaved man named Ben, cook to one of Santa Anna's officers, reported finding Crockett's body ringed by no fewer than sixteen Mexican corpses with his knife buried in one of them. The memoirs of the Mexican officer José Enrique de la Peña, discovered in 1955 and published in 1975, state instead that Crockett survived the battle and was executed afterwards — an account corroborated by some contemporaries including the survivor Susannah Dickinson. Santa Anna's own memoir says only that Crockett's body was among the corpses. Historians acknowledge voluminous evidence on both sides and no resolution.

Why Davy Is Called a Genius

The claim requires honesty about what he was not. Crockett had almost no formal education, ran away from home at thirteen, and left no body of thought; his autobiography was written with a collaborator. Nothing in his record suggests analytical brilliance.

What he had instead were two rarer things. The first is a practical political intelligence about ordinary people that credentialled men of his era conspicuously lacked — he grasped that the settler with no title deed was a constituency, not a nuisance, and he legislated for that constituency consistently across two state and three congressional terms. The second is the invention of a durable American technique: the politician as folk character. He recognised that the almanac caricature was an asset, cooperated with it, and published his own book to control it, decades before anyone had a word for personal branding. The genius, such as it is, is one of self-presentation and moral nerve rather than intellect.

And the nerve is the part that survives inspection. The lone vote against Indian Removal was cast in full knowledge of what it would cost, against his own party, his own president and his own district, and it cost him exactly what he expected. He remained persuaded he was right for the rest of his short life. A man who understood public opinion that well and defied it anyway was doing something harder than being clever.

Legacy

He became one of America's best-known folk heroes, a status confirmed by Walt Disney's 1954–1955 television miniseries starring Fess Parker, which put a coonskin cap on a generation of children. Crockett County exists in both Tennessee and Texas; there is a David Crockett Birthplace State Park and a Davy Crockett National Forest; the Postal Service issued a five-cent stamp in 1967. The legend has thoroughly eaten the man. What deserves to outlast both is a single roll-call vote in 1830.