American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett (24 page)

WITH HIS MEASURE TABLED until the following session, the fall/winter of 1830-1831, Crockett’s frustration led him into a pattern of monkey-wrenching that alienated him even further from his peers. He vehemently opposed the Military Academy at West Point, his feelings toward officers and privilege developed back in the Creek War when his own reconnaissance was ignored, but that of an officer’s was listened to attentively and then acted upon by his commander. Crockett believed that West Point was an institution reserved for the sons of the nobility and the wealthy, and that only graduates of the academy were granted commissions as officers, so that it became a self-perpetuating mechanism where once again the poor were shortchanged.
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Crockett went so far as to propose the abolishment of the entire academy, adding in a qualification that sounded insulting, that “gentlemen were not up to the task of commanding soldiers” because they were frail and “too delicate, and could not rough it in the army because they were too differently raised.”
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His motion struck his typical contrary chord, and it was summarily tabled and eventually died a quiet death.

Having lived his entire life in far-flung outposts many miles from civic centers or even modest-sized towns, Crockett knew the importance of viable roadways and navigable rivers and canal systems to encourage transportation and commerce. From his brief time in the East, Crockett could see the benefits brought by “internal improvements” such as good roads, workable harbors, and an organized infrastructure. Especially in his region, navigable rivers were paramount for transportation and for the sale and trade of personal goods.

Additionally, Crockett had long believed that the pioneers, who were the nation’s brave and underappreciated scouts, forging a life out of a dangerous wilderness, deserved at least some of the benefits enjoyed by inhabitants of the more established and developed East, since pioneers were the ones literally grubbing the way for western expansion. Crockett favored a bill for a national road extending from the famous port city of New Orleans all the way to Buffalo. But in a regionally motivated provision, Crockett went so far as to propose, for the good of the people in his area, that the road section originating in Washington should end in Memphis. He suspected that once again, the people of his district were being bypassed. “I cannot consent to ‘go the whole hog,’ ” he said, “but I will go as far as Memphis.”
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He also reasonably argued that winter frosts and drifts rendered roads impassable, whereas rivers tended to be navigable year round. And he posed an interesting observation rife with foreshadowing, asking anyone to explain to him the usefulness

of a road which will run parallel with the Mississippi for five or six hundred miles. Will any man say that the road would be preferred to the river? And if the road should so terminate [that is, at Memphis], it would be on the direct route from this city to the province of Texas, which I hope will one day belong to the United States, and that at no great distance of time.
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His amendment failed, and when the original bill surfaced again for a vote, Crockett grudgingly voted for the entire route, since it was once again the best he could do for his constituents. Crockett’s side lost badly, and the grim pattern of his ineffectuality persisted.

And something else was afoot. In April, Jackson had vetoed the Kentucky Maysville Road Bill, taking a firm position against internal improvements, and, unquestionably, in a political maneuver to spite Henry Clay, whose own position on such improvements mirrored Crockett’s for the most part.
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Jackson himself, in a move that catered to Southern and Eastern Jacksonians, argued that local projects ought not be funded with federal monies. During the early part of Jackson’s first term, one of his primary concerns was paying down the national debt, and he viewed internal improvements as unnecessary expenditures counter to his aims. That was his official, public position. But behind the scenes, his veto was intended to undermine the Clay-Adams allegiance; at the same time, the move illustrated to Crockett that Jackson was a political opportunist, an equivocator, a leader who would flip-flop on an earlier position (prior to his election Jackson had supported improvements as long as they were for defense)
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if it was personally and politically advantageous, even at the expense of the good of the nation. At least that’s how Crockett perceived the situation. And though up until this point Crockett had remained a supporter of Jackson’s administration and its central goals and platforms, now a serious rift began to form, one which would ultimately define Crockett as a rogue individualist and leave him politically isolated, a lone flag flapping helplessly in the wind.

The impending debates over the controversial Indian Removal Bill would hammer a wedge into that rift, splitting it violently into splintered cordwood.

ANDREW JACKSON HAD MADE NO SECRET about his position on Indians. His desire to subjugate them dated back to before his military victories in the Creek War, a position he voiced during the Jefferson administration when he resoundingly declared that if the Cherokee could not be civilized, “we shall be obliged to drive them, with the beasts of the forests into [the] Stony [Rocky] mountains.”
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Now, having waited long enough and finally in a position of enough power to realize his desires, Jackson seized his opportunity for action. On February 22, 1830, Senator Hugh Lawson White of Tennessee, a man whom Jackson had earlier considered for secretary of war and who currently chaired the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, put forth a bill that would come to be known as Jackson’s Indian Removal Act, and which set off a nationwide controversy.
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Between late February and mid-May rancorous debate raged through the House. Many members, Crockett included, opposed the unbridled authorization of a $500,000 to carry out the relocation of remaining peaceful tribes to lands west of the Mississippi. In the first place, the sum was drastically insufficient to perpetrate such a scheme; relocation would ultimately require millions of dollars. Furthermore, the money would be allocated devoid of congressional accountability.
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Opponents of the bill also contended that Jackson himself was meddling dangerously close in the due processes of legislature, intruding in the proceedings “without the slightest consultation with either House of Congress, without any opportunity for counsel or concern, discussion or deliberation, on the part of the coordinate branches of the Government, to dispatch the whole subject in a tone and style of decisive construction of our obligations and of Indian rights.”
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Indian rights—now that was a novel concept. Senator Theodore Frelinghuysen spearheaded the opposition, objecting not only to Old Hickory’s heavy-handed intrusions, but also on basic principles: the government had broken a string of treaties with these people, yet continued to marginalize them, herding them south and west while devouring their land by forcing them to sign it over. Senator Frelinghuysen rightly noted the hypocrisy of calling them “brothers” while simultaneously stealing their sacred homelands.
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Jackson’s cleverly worded position on the issue had couched the “removal” in a positive, hopeful way, one bent not on destroying these remaining, generally peaceful tribes of Choctaw, Creek, and Cherokee, but rather designed to save them and their culture from complete assimilation. He noted the fate that had befallen the Eastern tribes, including the Mohegans, the Delawares, the Narragansetts, and warned that extinction awaited the Southern tribes if they were not voluntarily removed to

an ample area west of the Mississippi, outside the limits of any state or territory now formed, to be guaranteed to the Indian tribes, each tribe having distinct control over the portion of land assigned to it. There they can be Indians, not cultural white men; there they can enjoy their own governments subject to no interference from the United States except when necessary to preserve peace on the frontier and between the several existing tribes; there they can learn the ‘arts of civilization’ so that the race will be perpetuated and serve as a reminder of the ‘humanity and justice of this Government.’
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Crockett and many others could see through the wording to the reality for the tribes in question. And Crockett himself had been shepherded from place to place long enough to understand what such forced migration felt like. It was true that his grandparents had been slain by the Creeks, and it was true that he had fought against the Indians in the Creek War, sent on special missions to “kill up Indians,” but David Crockett possessed a basic, central morality that told him this bill was unfair and unethical. He empathized with the Indians because in many ways he was exactly like them. At his core, all he really wanted was a modest piece of ground he could call his own, some likely and productive cane where he could hunt when he wanted, and the freedom to move about unencumbered by undue governmental regulation and jurisdiction. Additionally, Indians had saved his life more than once, picking him up and carrying him to the safety of an Alabama farmhouse as he lay dying from malarial fever, and aiding him and his starving men as they staggered through Florida. No, Crockett believed that this was an unjust measure—bad politics and bad for the country—and it would not stand. The Indian Removal Bill would be Crockett’s public break with Jackson.

When the bill finally came to a vote in late May, it passed by the excruciatingly slight margin of 102 to 97, falling along strict party lines and creating plenty of tension vis-à-vis alliances and coalitions, especially with the specter of election ramifications looming in the next cycle. Crockett antagonist Pryor Lea referred to the debate and vote on the bill as “one of the severest struggles that I have ever witnessed in Congress.”
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Crockett himself, as he would to the very end of his days, stuck to his principles:

I opposed it from the purest motives in the world. Several of my colleagues got around me, and told me how well they loved me, and that I was ruining my self. They said it was a favorite measure of the president, and I ought to go for it. I told them I believed it was a wicked, unjust measure, and that I should go against it, let the cost to myself be what it might. That I was willing to go with General Jackson in everything that I believed was right; but, further than this, I wouldn’t go for him, or any man in the whole creation; I would sooner be honestly and politically d-nd, than hypocritically immortalized.
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It was a bold and noble act. With the verbal stroke of a “nay,” Crockett had conspicuously cast the only Tennessee vote against the Indian Removal Bill, effectively hanging himself politically. After the contentious passage, Jackson wasted no time, signing the monumental bill on May 28, 1830. It was a deeply dividing event in the history of the United States, one that made legal the efficient and expeditious expulsion of entire Southern Indian peoples from their ancestral homelands.
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The victory for Jackson propelled into motion a series of events that would culminate in the tragic Trail of Tears.

Crockett would later reflect on the proceedings, steadfast in his belief that he had done right: “I voted against the Indian bill, and my conscience yet tells me that I gave a good and honest vote, and one that I believe will not make me ashamed in the day of judgment.”
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Perhaps not, but before long he would have plenty of people, including his confused and angered constituents, to answer to. He had publicly snubbed the will of the executive leader Andrew Jackson, and the decision would go neither unnoticed nor unpunished.

Within the next month Crockett would attempt to assuage the fallout from his singular dissention within his state, penning a speech in which he attempted to simultaneously clarify his position and placate the voters. He acknowledged openly that it was an unpopular position to take, and that it would be difficult for him to find a person within 500 miles who agreed with his decision, yet he stuck by his vote to the end. In the speech, published in the
Jackson Gazette
on June 19, less than a month after the vote, he implored his electors to understand that “If he should be the only member of that House who voted against the bill, and the only man in the United States who disapproved it, he would still vote against it; and it would be a matter of rejoicing to him till the day he died, that he had given the vote.”
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He eloquently added that he could not bear to see “the poor remnants of a once powerful people” driven from their land and homes against their desires. He honestly told the people that “If he did not represent the constituents as they wished, the error would be in his head and not his heart.”
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The editors of the
Gazette,
while willing to publish Crockett’s speech, vehemently disagreed with him, and printed a note saying they “regretted” his stance. The headstrong Crockett never regretted his stance, unpopular as it was.