American Legend

They later stopped to visit with friend James Blackburn, and passed a pleasant time reliving old stories and swapping tales of the recent election. Just a day after departing Blackburn’s, Crockett fell violently ill, overtaken by what he later described as “billes feaver” (bilious fever), a presumed liver infection that was actually a recurrence of his old nemesis, malaria. It hit Crockett hard, and though he managed to ride the distance to Swannanoa, North Carolina, he arrived an emaciated figure. Doctors bled him, as was then believed the proper treatment, and he required nearly a month of bed rest before he was up and moving about on his own again.²

When he was finally sufficiently recovered Crockett rose to find himself embroiled in a duel between his good friend Sam Carson and a man named Dr. Robert Vance. Carson, who would later be named the first secretary of state of Texas, had defeated Vance in a congressional race in 1825, and in 1827 the two squared off in a hotly contested rematch that included negative campaigning, verbal jousting, and a flurry of personal attacks and insults that each man took seriously. Vance publicly questioned Carson’s manhood, calling him a coward, and Carson (who had just won the election) responded with a challenge to a duel, to be held in Saluda, North Carolina, dueling being illegal in Tennessee.³ On November 6, 1827, Crockett followed his friend Sam Carson to the field of honor, where he watched the two men step off their paces, turn, and fire. Crockett hardly waited for the gun smoke to clear before he mounted his horse and, still weak from his bout with malarial fever, galloped off to report the news. According to an account from Carson’s daughter, “David Crockett was the first man who brought the news to Pleasant Gardens. He rode his horse almost to death, beat his hat to pieces and came dashing up yelling ‘The Victory is Ours.’ ”⁴ Dr. Robert Vance died the following day.

With his first session as a congressman looming on the horizon, Crockett said good-bye to Elizabeth and entrusted John Wesley to chaperone her back home to Tennessee. His own illness had taken up so much time that he would be unable to backtrack to the west and make it to Washington City by the start of the session on December 3rd. Elizabeth and John Wesley departed with three young slaves her father had given her, and Crockett, weakened once more, remained some time to allow doctors to again treat him with blood-letting. A tough man accustomed to bearing significant pain and discomfort, Crockett rode toward Washington City, accompanied by Sam Carson, Lewis Williams, and probably Nathaniel Claiborne.⁵

The journey should have been exciting and adventurous, Crockett happy to be traveling with a good companion in Carson and an experienced statesman in Williams, but a relapse in his condition made the trip across the mountains excruciating for the frontiersman. By the time he finally arrived in Washington Crockett was nearly dead, and along the way he feared the worst: “I have thought twice that I was never to see my family anymore,” he admitted later in a letter to Blackburn. The illustrious bear hunter had lost a good deal of body weight. He experienced “the worst health since I arrived here that I ever did in my life,” and he went on to report “I am much reduced in flesh and have lost all my Red Rosy Cheeks that I have carried so many years.”⁶ Still, Crockett managed to suffer through the arduous journey, and just before the opening of the session he took a room at Mrs. Ball’s boarding house on Pennsylvania Avenue, along with a handful of fellow representatives that included Nathaniel Claiborne, Thomas Chilton of Kentucky, and William Clark of Pennsylvania,⁷ as well as Gabriel Moore of Alabama, and Joseph Lecompte of Kentucky.⁸

Some of the men Crockett caroused with and shared lodgings with would go on to achieve greatness, and the upstart congressman felt humbled and perhaps even a little intimidated by the stature of those around him. Yet he was never one to cower before anyone or anything, and quite soon he managed to convince himself that he belonged. “I think I am getting along very well with the great men of the nation,” he told Blackburn in confidence, “much better than I expected.” What he likely did not expect was the difficulty of the political waters he would soon be forced to navigate. Quite soon he would be paddling upstream against a heady current.

STILL PALE AND FEEBLE, Crockett nonetheless went straight to work, enthusiastic and optimistic that he would be able to make a difference and effect change working alongside those “great men” to whom he had alluded. Just three days into his first session, Crockett began hammering away on his pet project, the Tennessee Vacant Land Bill. The freshman congressman was still wet behind the ears, and naïve enough, to make the following unrealistic claim: “I have Started the Subject of our vacant land on the third day after we went into Session I have no doubt of the passage of the Bill this Session I have given it an erly Start.”⁹ He had grown accustomed to seeing administrative and political processes move with relative celerity at the state level, but he would soon realize that such speed on issues and bills simply wasn’t possible at the national level, and the slow-grinding pace would eventually wear on him. He would complain to friends and constituents about the sluggish movement in Congress, betraying an impatience in his character. “Thare is no chance of hurrying business here . . .” he griped, “thare is such a desposition here to Show Eloquence that this will be a long session and do no good.”¹⁰

Crockett quickly, if unhappily, came to understand at least one political reality—change, if it came at all, would take a great deal more time than he’d bargained for. Patience and compromise were two necessities for political success at the highest levels, and Crockett would never possess either. He needed to be going somewhere, moving forward, and no doubt he daydreamed of riding the outlands at sunrise, the call of birds in the air, the sound of his baying hounds echoing through the cane, as the endless murmur of speeches droned on through the stuffy halls.

At least the nightlife was entertaining. A series of hotels and boarding houses strung along tree-lined Pennsylvania Avenue accommodated most politicians, and a vigorous social scene abounded when the gavel fell at day’s end. Once Crockett felt well enough, he ventured out, tugged into a whirlpool of taverns and bars, of backroom gaming, gossip, drinking, and dinner parties. In this milieu Crockett flourished, his gift of gab and magnetic personality and humor perfectly suited to the social scene. Certainly he would have felt a tad self-conscious at his lack of presentable clothes, his redundant outfits compared to the many suits worn by some of his more well-heeled contemporaries, but he compensated by being himself, by plying friends with whiskey and sidling up for an amusing yarn or two.¹¹

While he was having a fine time of it, his eccentricities and rustic manners did not go unnoticed by his peers, some of whom would become his political opponents, even enemies. His uncultured grammar and general lack of refinement became fodder for the papers, and one particular account detailed how, at a gala dinner hosted by President John Quincy Adams to welcome incoming congressmen, Crockett drank from the finger bowls and accused a waiter of trying to steal his food. He was still publicly aligned with Jackson, and the accounts were published by anti-Jacksonians in hopes of casting Jackson’s supporters in an unfavorable light, characterizing them as unruly, barbarous, and generally ill-suited for the gentility of public life.¹² Crockett initially ignored the slurs, since his personality was at the same time making him some friends, and he was becoming something of a curiosity, frequently invited to parties, dinners, and social functions for his affability.

The first few months in office also helped Crockett comprehend the divisive nature of partisan politics and the political climate he’d entered. John Quincy Adams had been chosen by the House of Representatives in 1824 when, after Jackson had taken the majority of the popular vote, he’d failed to be confirmed by the Electoral College. At the time, Crockett and many others figured some collusion must have been arranged against Jackson, and he carried that suspicion with him to Washington City, noting that Henry Clay was immediately made secretary of state.¹³ By 1828 the political camps, formerly called “Republicans,” were now split into two centralized groups, the Democratic Republicans and the National Republicans. Jacksonians, in a holdover from the notions of Jeffersonian Democracy, courted and even embraced the notion of the “common man,” while Adams and Clay came across as elitists, and even “evinced a strong distaste for, if not actual fear of, the rule of the masses, which they often equated with the mob.”¹⁴

Crockett paid attention to the camps, noting how allegiances and alignments ebbed and flowed, and was pulled for the moment to follow Jackson and his principles, the man who had won New Orleans, defeated the British, and opened the West to expansion by subduing the Indians. The presidential election of 1828 was on everyone’smind, and Crockett could see the potential benefits of remaining outwardly a Jackson supporter, especially if it might later assist him in pushing through his vacant land bill. Nearly all of Crockett’s fellow Tennessee delegates backed Jackson, and that group included James Polk. Crockett could see that “Old Hickory is rising,”¹⁵ and he had no doubt that “Jackson will in a short time begin to receive the reward of his merit.”¹⁶

Thus Crockett spent his time between the laborious day sessions and the evening revelry attempting to make sense of where and how he might fit into the scheme of things, all the while trying to remember the desires and needs of his constituents back home in Tennessee. But after a full two months in office he had nothing tangible to offer them, and the painfully slow wheels of bureaucracy drove him to agitation. His introduced land bill still lay on the table, gathering dust, and Crockett noted with great frustration that his colleagues yammered on endlessly about nothing: “Their tongues keep working, whether they’ve got any grist to grind or not.”¹⁷ It was painful to bear, and Crockett began to leave early if speeches blathered on and on and seemed mere partisan posturing unrelated to issues. He missed roll calls here and there as well, citing his ill health, which was a fact, but the malaise he suffered from most was a general ennui at the slow proceedings.

One significant acquaintance Crockett made during his first term was with a fellow freshman representative from Kentucky, Thomas Chilton. Chilton enjoyed Crockett’s style and affability. They often voted similarly, and in fact they teamed up on an odd little bill that would provide a pension for the war widow of a man named Major General Brown. On April 2, 1828, Crockett and Chilton argued vehemently against the proposed bill, contending that providing public funds to individuals would be a “special privilege” they weren’t entitled to. Though he voted against the bill, the generous Crockett empathized with the plight of the poor woman and went so far as to offer his own money to aid her, and only Chilton rallied in support. As it turned out, their money wasn’t required; the bill passed and Mrs. Brown was awarded her much-needed pension.¹⁸Crockett and Chilton struck up a friendship, and Chilton began polishing some of Crockett’s writing, assisting with his speeches and other correspondence such as circulars and letters to his constituency. The relationship would develop over time, and Chilton became a ghostwriter for Crockett, ultimately co-authoring his autobiography. Chilton stayed at Mrs. Ball’s boarding house whenever he was in Washington City, and the two men spent a great deal of time together.¹⁹

The union also marked the development of a kind of split personality in Crockett, a conscious construction of the dual nature of his persona. He understood that it was the bear hunter from the canebrakes who managed to get elected, but Crockett felt the tug of the gentry, the need to be accepted by his peers, and, ironically he wanted to be like the very people he despised and criticized. Chilton’s assistance in the formal writing refined Crockett’s voice, grammar, punctuation, and spelling, smoothing out his rough edges, at least superficially.

It isn’t difficult to understand why Crockett would have felt compelled to appear slightly more refined, given the company he was keeping. Among these was Duff Green, an eclectic renaissance man (variously a surveyor of public lands, a lawyer, and an editor and publisher) who had purchased the United States Telegraph in 1825, was politically well-connected and powerful, and was increasingly chummy with John C. Calhoun of South Carolina (Calhoun’s son would eventually marry Green’s daughter).²⁰ Green had recently been appointed public printer, a position awarded by the House, replacing Joseph Gales, who returned to his post as publisher the Washington National Intelligencer. Joseph Gales and his partner William Winston Seaton were brothers-in-law and enemies of the Jacksonians, and on Crockett’s arrival in Washington, still spewing party rhetoric, he had called them “treasury pap Sucking” editors. Crockett wrote this lovely epithet to a friend before he had ever met the men, and he would later get to know both Gales and Seaton well; Seaton referred kindly to Crockett as an “odd but warm-hearted old pioneer.”²¹

Seaton, like Chilton, tightened and edited Crockett’s speeches for publication in Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates in Congress. The Clerk of the House at this time was the recently reelected Matthew St. Clair Clarke of Pennsylvania, with whom Crockett also struck up an acquaintance. And finally there was James Polk, an aggressive Presbyterian delegate and a remarkably quick learner with an uncanny knack for the legislative process and the intricacies of political posturing.²² Crockett had no way of knowing, of course, that his contemporary and fellow delegate would rise to greatness, eventually to be elected governor of Tennessee, Speaker of the House, and ultimately President of the United States, and earning the nickname “Young Hickory.” For now, he was simply someone to squabble with over the land bill.

And squabble they would. Initially, the views of the two men were somewhat in concert concerning public lands, and in fact Crockett was a member of a select committee, chaired by Polk, formed to deal with the state of Tennessee’s request to cede lands in the Western District to the state, which would inject any profits from their sale into “common schools” rather than colleges or universities. Crockett stood behind this notion, especially regarding common schools over universities; he contended that the children of West Tennessee farmers and squatters would be unlikely ever to tromp their muddy work boots inside a university.²³ Crockett believed that should the vacant lands ultimately be offered up and sold, it would be at prices the poor squatters might be able to afford. He soon came to understand that the state had other intentions, as did other members of Congress.

On April 24, after Polk debated the issue within the committee and had done some independent research as to the relative worth of the vacant Tennessee lands, he rose to speak for the bill when the House finally agreed to open up discussion on it. Polk’s position was concise and simple: the state of Tennessee had been shorted significant public lands—the so-called “set aside” lands left over from the 444,000 acres provided for when it seceded from North Carolina in 1806. The infamous North Carolina warrants claimed all but 22,000 acres, and the bulk of what was claimed was the best available ground. It wasn’t fair, Polk argued.²⁴ Crockett offered an enthusiastic second, adding that much of the remaining ground was low-lying, prone to flooding, and so thickly timbered as to render it devoid of worth. “The low ground or bottoms, contiguous to the streams in this western division, are frequently from one to two miles in with; but an important reason why they neither are, nor can be, valuable, is . . . that they are usually inundated. This I know to be fact personally, having often rowed a canoe from hill to hill.”²⁵ Some heated discussion ensued, Polk essentially deferring to Crockett and allowing him the limelight on the issue. Crockett concluded emphatically and with a touch of emotion: “The rich require but little legislation. We should, at least occasionally, legislate for the poor.”²⁶ His appeal was that the bill would finally allow these poor farmers to own their own property, the squatters being a class of people that Crockett felt should be compensated for their courage. Crockett considered squatters “the pioneering advance guard of the American nation . . . that in return for their services they were entitled to the plot of land which they had improved, and on which they made their homes.”²⁷

However eloquent his entreaties, they fell on the deaf ears of the Adamsites, who on May 1 managed to get the bill tabled until the second session, which would not begin until the following December. They feared making special provisions for Tennessee, and wondered if it might create a domino effect, with other states falling in behind. Crockett was indignant, insulted, and frustrated with the pace of the process. On May 10 he tried a different tactic, requesting that the Committee on Public Lands ponder donating 160 acres to each and every settler in the Western District, including improvements made upon the land. It was a bold, if last-ditch, attempt, but again Crockett was skirted, as the session adjourned without addressing his suggestion.²⁸

The emotional malaise of Crockett’s failure to get movement in Congress was compounded by his physical maladies, which had returned during the session on at least three occasions. Neither he nor the doctors who attended him could have known that the illness they diagnosed as “pluricy” (pleurisy) was actually malarial relapse, coupled with probable pneumonia, and to counter it they “took two quarts of blood” from him, diminishing his condition even more. He felt so ill and weak that he remained in Washington City after the close of the session, trying to recover for the journey home.

When he finally did make it home, he was met with the wrath of a wife now worn threadbare by taking care of literally everything—from the mundane domestic duties to the more complex and tedious bookwork and business affairs—without a stitch of help from her husband. To make matters worse, though he was fairly well compensated in his job at around $8 per day, he arrived back in Gibson County nearly penniless, having paid a $250 debt to Marcus Winchester. Debt would never be a stranger to Crockett, and he immediately had to borrow more money when he sold his Gibson County place to finance a newer, bigger spread to the north, in Weakley County, and hired men to fabricate a new gristmill, this one run by horse-power.²⁹ Crockett spent the remainder of the summer and fall on these projects and others necessary to move his family into the new place and get it and the 225 acres up and running. There remained little time for hunting, and he idled at the new farmstead, Elizabeth all the while tongue-lashing him for his drinking and poor business acumen, which she attributed to his lack of religious conviction. Crockett must have slunk around the place like a scolded dog with his tail between his legs, promising her he would try to improve himself, because by the time the second session came around on December 1, 1828, Crockett was a man with new convictions. Actually, he was a week late, arriving December 8, the beginning of the second week.³⁰ His tardiness remained unexplained, though he certainly could have been detained visiting relatives and stopping to see friends in Nashville along the way. At any rate, Crockett intimated in a letter to George Patton that he was going to mend some of his ways, including swearing off spirits stronger than cider, and even making allusions, however vague, to religious conviction. He would need all the strength he could muster against the hostilities he was about to receive from his opponents in Washington.

Things grew complicated as soon as the session started. On November 25, 1828, the Nashville-based National Banner and Nashville Whig ran the story about Crockett’s coarse behavior at the Executive Mansion while he dined with President Adams and four other dignitaries, citing his uncouth claim that the waiter was trying to steal his food and that he had drunk the water from all the finger bowls. Nurturing a backwoods reputation was one thing, but these blatant lies were another matter entirely. Crockett was outraged, and he immediately enlisted two prominent Republicans, James Clark and Gulian Verplank, to write statements of retraction in the papers attesting to the falsity of these accounts and assuring that Crockett had behaved with perfect and gentlemanly propriety. “I would not make this appeal,” he assured them, but “I have enemies who would take much pleasure in magnifying the plain rusticity of my manners into unparalleled grossness and indelicacy.”³¹ The two men, close allies of Clay and ardent Whig Republicans in opposition to Jackson, agreed to pen the letters, which they did, the retractions appearing in the National Banner after January 9 and 23, 1829.³²

Crockett may have saved some face among his colleagues, but the damage was already done, and many of his constituents, aware of his colorful behavior and antics, found the accounts of his decorum plausible, if slightly embellished. Readers of the newspapers understood partisan apparatus in place, and were quite accustomed to lampooning, but certain images, despite their relative truth or falsity, were hard to shake, and these stuck. Already the papers had run exaggerated stories of the new representative from Tennessee who claimed he could “wade the Mississippi, carry a steamboat on his back, and whip his weight in wild-cats.”³³

Crockett was in the midst of being penalized and lampooned for the very boasts that he had employed to such salutary effect in the stump speeches that got him elected. The Nashville Republican of January 27, 1829, published right on the heels of the retractions by Clark and Verplank, claimed that “Col. Crockett, a member of Congress from this state, arrived at Washington City on the 8th day of Dec. and took his seat. It was reported before his arrival there, that he was wading the Ohio towing a disabled steamboat and two keels.” The jargon and vernacular that he had honed, the conscious construction of his aura, were already posing problems for him in Washington. He would need to attend to his image, that was for certain, to rein in the flatboat drawl and show a more gentlemanly countenance. Or at the very least, temper it in specific contexts.

Crockett’s behavior during the second session heralded a changed man, one even more fiery and independent than before, with new personal convictions perhaps foisted upon him by a spouse losing her patience. The messiness in the papers had peeved him, and made him a trifle paranoid, too, for it wasn’t precisely clear who could have orchestrated the mudslinging and manipulated the press. The obvious culprits were the National Republicans, on the surface his opposition, but two of their party had agreed to write retraction letters. It seemed unlikely that the insults and lies would have been spearheaded by the Clay-Adams contingent, who were perhaps considering wooing the gullible Crockett over to their side when the time was right. Whoever it was, Crockett would need to be looking over his shoulder more often in the coming sessions.

In early January, Crockett presented a formal amendment to Polk’s land bill, stubbornly including a resolution that the government would provide 160 acres to anyone who settled on vacant Western District land, and produced improvements, on or before April 1, 1829. Polk and others warned Crockett that it went too far and would never pass. Crockett, reveling in his contradictory, even obstinate nature, went ahead, generating a circular (with the help, as was becoming custom, of Gales and Seaton) to his constituents and delivering a rousing if uncharacteristically formal speech on the merits of his proposed amendment. He referred to his people in ennobling language, calling them “hardy sons of the soil, men who entered the country when it lay in a state of native wilderness; men who had broken the cane, and opened in the wilderness a home for their wives and children.”³⁴

Impassioned as his speech and circular were, his delegation opposed him, suggesting a compromise, but Crockett would not budge. Polk began to become suspicious of Crockett, wondering if he might not have another agenda altogether, one that pandered to the Republicans. There was little overt evidence of this, though Polk had observed Crockett in public fraternizing with enemy factions of prominent Whigs. Crockett, driven by a combination of hubris and political naïveté, was marooning himself. His amendment took immediate criticism, and while the experienced and erudite Polk attempted to soften the measure by including a provision that the lands be ceded to the state, Crockett balked at this last feature.³⁵

Delegates Pryor Lea and John Blair of East Tennessee came out nettled, taking firm positions against Crockett, and subsequently each member in turn spoke out against Crockett’s amendment. Crockett’s bullheadedness turned pathetic when he offered to trade votes with members of his delegations straight across: anything they wanted him to vote for in exchange for a yes vote on his version of the land bill. Polk viewed this action as deceitful, commenting of Crockett, “He associated himself with our political enemies, and declared . . . he would vote for any measure any member wished him to vote for, provided he would vote for his foolish amendment against the original bill.”³⁶

Crockett appeared desperate. For nine days heated argument raged, and then it waned. The slim chance of being passed that the bill had had in its original incarnation, was now gone. Polk placed the blame for the bill’s failure squarely on the shoulders of Crockett, whom he suspected of being coddled by Adamsites and “opporated [operated] on by our political enemies.” The vitriolic Polk, convinced that Crockett has betrayed his own party, went on to attack vigorously:

The cause of its defeat is to be attributed in great degree to the course taken by our man Crocket . . . You may suppose that such a man under no circumstances could do us much harm . . . but in this instance many of the Adams men . . . seized upon the opportunity to use Crockett, and to operate upon him through his measure, for their own political purposes . . . Rely upon it he can be and has been operated upon by our enemies. We can’t trust him an inch.³⁷

Polk added a personal attack on Crockett’s inability to speak in “measured language,” citing this as a reason that he could not understand the remarks he made “against his own state.”³⁸ On January 14 the bill was tabled in a vote of 103 to 65. It was a defeat from which Crockett derived misguided pleasure, thinking its failure might pave the way for him to introduce in a future session his own, reconstructed version.³⁹ Crockett was deceiving himself, however, and things would get worse before they got better. Polk had fair reason to believe rumors circulating about Crockett’s inclination to vote Gales and Seaton in the upcoming election for House printer over Democrat Duff Green.⁴⁰

Crockett was getting a real taste of business-as-usual in Washington. His own party affiliations, or those tenuous links he had managed to establish, were unraveling around him. His constituents, swayed by published materials that showed Crockett being lured from the Democrats, now had cause to doubt his intentions, and whether he had their best interests in mind. Pryor Lea followed Polk’s lead and continued to attack Crockett, intimating that he’d deserted his delegation and was sleeping with the enemy. The argument got ugly, the papers spanning the region running particularly effusive and lively exchanges between the two men. Crockett took particular offense to some of Lea’s charges, finally calling him “a poltroon, a scoundrel, and a puppy,” and challenging Lea to a duel or a fight when they next crossed paths.⁴¹ The public tête-à-tête unraveled into something of a circus, with no verifiable winner in the verbal skirmish. But an already frustrating and unproductive session had drawn to a close, with Crockett doubtful of his abilities to persuade his delegates and insecure about his own effectiveness.

But above all Crockett’s optimism always shone through, despite the circumstances, and he was heartened by his improving health. Though he received devastating news from home that his niece, Rebecca Ann Burgin, had been killed in a tragic accident at Crockett’s mill (her head crushed by oxen), he maintained his pledge to Elizabeth to swear off hard alcohol, and was quite obviously moved enough by the event to reconsider his own behavior:

I have altered my cours in life a great deal sence I reached this place and have not tasted one drop of Arden Spirits sence I arrived here nor never expect to while I live nothing stonger than cider I trust that god will give me fortitude in my undertaking I have never made a pretention to religion in my life before I have run a long race tho I trust that I was called in good time for my wickedness by my dear wife who I am—certain will be no little astonished when she gets information of my determination.

Crockett added in the same letter to George Patton, in reference to his niece, his heartfelt and honest condolences, relating how much he cared for the young girl: “I thought almost as much of her as one of my own I hope she is this day in eternal happiness where I am endeavoring to make my way.”⁴² Crockett’s references to religion, and to his pride in staying on the straight and narrow, suggest that Elizabeth gave him some ultimatums before he left for the session. He would mend his ways as he could, curtailing his consumption so as to remain in control, even if he never quit altogether. And the language in his letter to Patton reveals that, for all his bravado, Crockett had a sensitive, vulnerable streak.

Crockett loitered in Washington City long enough to see one positive political outcome, the inauguration on March 4 of Old Hickory as the seventh president of the United States. Large crowds lined the streets, and many packed the White House to get a chance to shake hands with the great military leader about to lead a nation. Crockett would have been among the throng, but for him the victory was likely bittersweet, since he was now at the very least feeling uncertain about his role in party politics, and probably suspicious about whether he belonged to any party at all. He might have raised his eyebrows at part of Jackson’s inaugural address, when the new leader declared “I shall keep steadily in view the limitations as well as extent of executive power.”⁴³ In Jackson he saw a powerful statesman, a man of his kind in theory but in fact above his rank and station, with his elegant and sprawling Hermitage, his libraries and guest quarters, his separate cooking rooms. Crockett could only dream of such dwellings, still wondering whether he could catapult himself to planter status, while questioning whether or not that was his real goal. He would have time to think about it on the road. And so David Crockett rode for home, the confusing and contradictory halls of Congress behind him as he clomped along for yet another temporary reunion with his family in the new Weakley County home where they had settled, at least for a time.