Crockett of Tennessee Page 36

  “Well, I don’t like to hear it. You needn’t read more on my account.”

  David didn’t even hear her. He began reading again. “‘But there were other “wise men” who objected, saying that the central government should give the land to Tennessee, who should in turn deal with the occupants—thus giving all Tennessee politicians, and not just David, the glory for ever and ever. But David became angry at their, resistance to his scheme and vowed vengeance.’” He slammed down the paper. “God! It makes my blood boil!”

  “Then for heaven’s sake, quit reading it!”

  Again he ignored her. “Listen to this part—they’ve got me talking to ‘Daniel, surnamed Webster, a “prophet of the Order of Balaam” … here it is: ‘And David lifted up his eyes and wept, and said, O Daniel! live forever. If the wise men and rulers had given my occupants the lands according to the manner I beseeched them, I could have been wise man and chief ruler in the river country for life. But if I join the wise men, and give it to the state of Tennessee, then they will share the honor with me, and the council of the State will give it to the occupants for twelve and one half cents per acre, and they will receive the honor instead of me, then the people of the river country will not have me for their wise man and chief ruler forever, and it grieveth me sore.’”

  He stopped reading, to Elizabeth’s relief, and lowered the paper. He drew in a deep breath and exhaled it slowly and loudly. “Hang it, it’s hardly worth getting so mad over, I suppose. I’ll be shot if I don’t have to admit that old Huntsman has a bit of cleverness in his ‘Chronicles.’ But it’s hard to take this kind of mockery in good spirit. The reeking old Jacksonians are seeking to make my motives look low and selfish. I don’t see the humor in that.”

  “Don’t lose the ability to laugh at yourself, husband. There are those who say one of the reasons you lost your last race was that you lost your good humor.”

  David glanced at her rather sharply; his loss remained a touchy subject even yet. He laid the satirical paper aside and grumpily mumbled something about “Huntsman the one-legged jackass” as he dug in his pocket for his tobacco twist and knife. When he had found both and settled a chew into his jaw, he pulled a crumpled letter from another pocket and began reading it silently.

  Elizabeth was at work at her spinning wheel near the fireplace. As she labored she thought about the material her husband had just read. Written by Adam Huntsman, a Tennessee attorney, political wit, and avid Jacksonian, the simply titled “Chronicles” were clever political satires written in imitation of the King James Old Testament. Elizabeth had read them in private several times, and found them terribly funny. The real reason she had tried to make David quit reading them aloud to her just now was not that she was offended, but that she had feared she would chuckle at some of the portions, which David wouldn’t like at all. In an odd way, Elizabeth had to appreciate the peg-legged Huntsman. If his satire succeeded, he might just keep David out of Congress and here at home with her. Of course, she could let nothing of this attitude show itself to David. He assumed she was just as supportive of him this time as she had been during the first congressional race.

  She glanced up, watching him read the letter. She knew what letter it was. It had come in a week ago from David’s Washington friend and mentor, Dr. Campbell Ibbotson. David had read most of it aloud to her; it was full of Washington gossip touting David’s presidential possibilities, the ongoing Whig efforts to build up his reputation as the archetypal American frontiersman and common-sense representative of the common man, and of Ibbotson’s own eagerness to see his Tennessee friend return to office. He had missed him much these past two years, Ibbotson wrote, and looked forward to evenings of whiskey and fireside conversation of the sort they had enjoyed before. Elizabeth resented this very much; what of her need to have David by her fireside? What of the time she would have to spend apart from him while he was miles away, warming a chair in Ibbotson’s parlor?

  Such things apparently didn’t matter. They were “women’s concerns,” as she had heard it put. Why they should count less than men’s was something she hadn’t yet figured out.

  August 1833

  There was one trait of border men that David was keenly aware of: their resentment of all attempts to manipulate them. That stubborn trait, he believed, accounted largely for his success in the congressional race just finished.

  The celebrations were done and David was alone now with Elizabeth. She had smiled often through the day and congratulated him, but it was all without vigor. She was of lower spirits than he would have expected … but what of it? Women were moody at times, and he had other things on his mind, in particular, his analysis of the successful campaign.

  “I believe it was the matter of the districts that helped me, Betsy,” he explained. “The people of Madison County aren’t the kind to be toyed with, or shifted about like hogs or cattle in the market.”

  He was referring to a legislative action that had been clearly designed to hurt his chances for victory. The Ninth District had been split up, but Madison County had been left in the Twelfth—a clumsy gerrymandering obviously based on Madison County’s history of voting against David Crockett. The trick hadn’t worked; it was far too transparent, and enough Madison Countians had turned around and given a protest vote to Crockett to let him win. Or so went his analysis.

  “I’m happy, Betsy,” he said. “I’m on the verge of great things. You’ll be proud of me before I’m done.”

  “I’m already proud of you, Davy.”

  He went to her and put his arms around her. “My Betsy,” he said. “I’ve not always been the best of husbands to you—politicking, running off to campaign, or off to Washington when I’m in office … and never do you complain.”

  She smiled. “I do sometimes. You just don’t always hear me.”

  “Do you? Well, if you do, it’s in the softest and most gentle way. I love you, Betsy. I couldn’t make it without you—whoa! Have I made you sad?”

  “No, no. Just the opposite. I’ve needed to hear these things from you. I miss them when I don’t hear them.”

  “I don’t say them enough.”

  “Well … no. You don’t.”

  He grinned broadly, eyes crinkling around the corners, the ruddy streaks that had colored his cheeks in boyhood revealing themselves again. He had the glow of health about him now, and a vigor he hadn’t shown in two years. It came to Elizabeth that perhaps it was a good thing after all that he had won. Even though there would be time apart, might it not be compensated for if the time they did share was of heightened quality? When David was not happy, their relationship was not as good. There was distance between them that was almost as difficult to endure as physical distance.

  She smiled at him, and with a deliberate inner act of volition, yielded him up. It was nothing she had planned to do, but now that she had, she knew it had been inevitable and right. If there was a destiny for David Crockett, she would not resent him for claiming it. She loved him too much for that.

  He kissed her. “I’d like to spend time with you tonight,” he said. It was his standard, euphemistic way of expressing his intimate desires, a shy and almost boyish way of speaking that she found endearing.

  “I want to spend time with you too.”

  He kissed her again. “I love you a mighty lot, Betsy Crockett. I wish I could just put you in a big old sack, throw it over my shoulder, and tow you off to Washington City with me.”

  “I wish I could go—even in a sack, I’d go.”

  “Maybe you can, sometime during my term coming up—not in no sack, of course.” He chuckled, then looked deeply into her eyes and gave an excited little shiver. “Lord have mercy, Betsy … ‘my term coming up’—it feels good to be saying that! I get frustrated with Congress when I’m in it, but I know now it’s exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. It was writ out for me before I was born, I swear it was. I can just tell it.”

  She laid a finger across his lips, nodding. “I know.
I understand that. And I love you, Davy.”

  “I love you, Betsy. I love you dearer than anything else in this world.”

  She wondered if it was true. She hoped it was. Often she had suspected that she held third place in his affections, behind his love for politics and power, and his love for the long-departed Polly. Even now she suspected this burst of affection was spurred as much by his excitement over victory as it was by her presence.

  But he had said the words she wanted to hear, and that was enough. She would not probe them too deeply, nor ask for more. Laying her head against his chest, she hugged him tight, loving him with a painful intensity and wishing she would never, never have to let him go.

  Chapter 46

  December 1833

  In the cool of the evening David Crockett walked alone through the streets of Washington. He was in a reflective mood, out for no purpose but to reabsorb the atmosphere of this city of power, to reaffirm to himself that he truly was here again, and to mull what had changed and what had remained the same since he had last walked these avenues.

  He reached the White House and paused, looking across at the official residence of his fellow Tennessean and greatest political enemy. Old Hickory had won his second term, to David’s chagrin, and back on a bitter cold day in March had been inaugurated for four more years. The only consolation David found in the situation was his knowledge that Jackson surely had winced when he learned that Crockett of Tennessee had regained his own office and would be back to plague him. Sometimes a crushed beetle learned how to crawl again—and how to pinch.

  David gave a contemptuous snort as he viewed the executive residence. Jackson’s White House was much different than the one John Quincy Adams had occupied when David first came to Washington. In Adams’s day the incomplete White House had been surrounded by workers’ sheds built up against the very walls, and was frequently rung by the tied-up horses of clerks for the Treasury and State departments. The combination of horse and manure stench had done nothing positive for the ambience of the place. Adams’s East Room had been substantially empty of furniture, and the wings of the house had been unfinished, leaving a building that was plain and downright unsightly.

  Jackson had changed that, inside and out. He had built the North Portico and filled the house with chandeliers, gilded tables, expensive drapes and carpets, costly cutlery, dishware, and glassware. Throughout his first term he had hosted many lavish political and diplomatic dinners, catered by slaves brought up from his home in Tennessee and featuring meats such as turkey, partridge, and canvasback duck. The outer sheds had come down, and government workers had been told to find new places to tether their horses. Certainly Jackson’s efforts had improved the White House’s appearance and made it function in a more proper diplomatic fashion, but at the same time it had provided David and his fellow anti-Jacksonians much to point at when they made their common charge that President Jackson lived more like a “King Andrew” than a common man.

  Jackson had given his critics little fuel for their fires in his second inauguration, though. From what David had read in the papers and heard from Ibbotson, those ceremonies had been extremely low-key and simple, quite a contrast to the wild celebration that had marked his first entry into office.

  David had heard stories galore of the madhouse quality of that first-term inaugural, which Jackson had thrown open to the public at large. The openness policy had brought a rabble, a mob, crushing into the White House itself, stripping the East Room reception tables of cakes, flavored ices, punch, ice creams. The crowd of commoners had spat tobacco juice on the floor, along with plenty of chewed-out quids. They had climbed on the furniture in their booted, mud-coated feet. An estimated twenty thousand people, from the haughtiest dignitaries to the most humble representatives of the Great Unwashed, trampled the White House lawns and passed through the White House, where Andrew Jackson had to be shielded from his public by a circle of friends who linked arms to make a barrier around him. He had been a sick and weary man at that time, and indeed a few weeks before the inauguration was rumored to have died, throwing the city into a short-lived panic. Jackson wasn’t dead, of course, but was in poor health and a deep state of depression. His wife Rachel had died recently, her name besmirched by charges that she was a common adulteress and that her marriage to Jackson had been illegal. Jackson was devastated and furious, believing that the harsh campaign warfare waged by John Quincy Adams and his Secretary of State, Henry Clay, had been the cause of her death. Even so, he had borne up with typical strength through that first inaugural celebration, making his final escape through a window because the crowd was too dense to penetrate.

  His second inaugural, not surprisingly, was closed to the public. But Jackson again was ill, and more weary even than he was during the first celebration. David had heard that he didn’t even attend his own inaugural balls, but headed for bed very early, where he lay and read his late wife’s Bible before falling asleep.

  David turned and continued walking. It was darker now, and cooler. He had a quick deep chill that reminded him of his malarial attacks. No, no, not again. But the chill quickly passed and he was relieved.

  After roaming another hour, he found himself nearing Ibbotson’s office and residence. He hadn’t planned to call here this evening, but now that he was close, he was tempted to stop by and see his old friend. Yet part of him was reluctant, for two reasons. The first was that Ibbotson had suffered an attack of apoplexy during David’s two-year absence from Washington, and had not yet recovered fully. His speech was slurred; the left side of his face drooped. Sometimes he would drool without noticing it; all in all he seemed much older and more decrepit, and it disturbed David to see it. Ibbotson’s decline reminded David of his own mortality, and that he was approaching a half century of life himself. It didn’t seem all that long ago that he was romping with his brothers and sisters back in Greene County, and here he was now, growing old.

  The second reason was even more personal, but also political. Ibbotson had developed a set of fears about David and his career. He continually warned David about the supposed perils of his current political pathway. David actually found Ibbotson’s warnings insulting. According to the increasingly plain-spoken old doctor, he was naive, easily led by those who flattered him and made him promises. Such traits made him a man easily used, Ibbotson warned, but also one who could be easily thrown away like a broken tool if ever his usefulness ceased. Ibbotson had seen it happen to others before. “Be wary of your alliance with the Whigs,” he had cautioned. “Whatever you do, don’t let yourself become useless. Beware that they don’t build your pedestal high, only to let it blow down in changing political winds.”

  David was irritated by such chatter from Ibbotson, and handily attributed it to senility and the effects of apoplexy. So Ibbotson thought him naive, thought that the Whigs were using him! Bah! He knew it to be precisely the opposite. The Whigs weren’t using him; he was using them. Already they had promised to help him push through his land bill in turn for letting their press and propaganda machine bolster his reputation as a possible presidential candidate. What could be wrong with that? What was Ibbotson so worried about?

  David turned on his heel and headed for his rented Washington quarters. He wouldn’t call on Ibbotson tonight after all. In fact, perhaps it would be best not to call on Ibbotson as frequently as he had in prior days. Being with the man simply dragged down his spirits and raised inner doubts that were certainly not useful. David Crockett was on a rise. He needed no one grabbing at his coattails, trying to hold him down.

  Returning to his rooms, he undressed for bed, then poured himself a glass of whiskey. Settling in a chair near the fire, he sipped slowly, looking into the flames. At length, with his glass empty and his body relaxed and warm, he lowered his head and began to slip toward slumber. At such times his mind ran free, random images and thoughts playing through his mind. The images were of one of the earliest incidents in his memory, when he was a very small boy st
ill living in the cabin where he was born, beside the banks of the Nolichucky River. His older brothers and a neighbor boy had once taken a canoe into the river and gotten caught in the swift current near a small waterfall, and David had stood on the bank, watching the neighbor boy struggle vainly with the paddle, trying to turn the canoe to the bank. As small as he had been at the time, he had thought: If only he would let my brothers have the paddle, they could get the canoe to the bank. But the neighbor boy, though inept at canoeing, had refused to relinquish the paddle, and the canoe had continued to sweep closer and closer to the waterfall: A neighbor, plowing in a field nearby, had seen the impending accident and waded out into the swift river to the canoe, which he muscled back to safety. David had been greatly relieved.

  He opened his eyes and jerked up straight. The empty whiskey glass clattered to the floor. Gazing into the fireplace flames, he gripped the arms of his chair and took deep gasps of breath. An inexplicable feeling of panic came over him; he peered around the room as if assassins lurked in the shadows of the corners.

  God above, what am I doing here? Why did I ever leave my family and home? What am I doing, turning the paddle over to others who don’t know how to row? Why am I putting myself in their hands, when all I really want is … is …

  There his thought faded away. What did he want for himself? He wasn’t at all certain. Since boyhood, certain images, certain human themes, had attracted him. He recalled the old frontiersman he had seen leading a pack train during his boyhood roaming days; he recalled how the fringe and beadwork on the buckskin jacket of the treacherous Indian trader Fletcher had seemed so appealing and beautiful when he first saw it. He remembered how pleased he had been each time he had brought in another bear or two in his many hunts in West Tennessee. “There’s nobody can hunt bear like Davy Crockett,” people would say, and it gratified him deeply. Gratified him … how often had politics done that? Almost never. Generally it had left him frustrated.