The legendary Davy Crockett is one of Tennessee’s earliest and greatest heroes, and he lived significant periods of his life in each of Tennessee’s Grand Divisions. A tireless champion of justice for the poor and powerless, he was a trailblazer of both the Tennessee frontier and the frontier of justice.

David Crockett was born on Aug. 17, 1786, in East Tennessee’s Greene County, then a part of North Carolina. His grandparents were killed in a 1777 Creek Indian raid. When a flood destroyed his father’s gristmill, the family relocated to Jefferson County and co-owned a tavern. At 12 he ran away to Virginia, but two years later he reappeared, initially unrecognizable by his family, and worked for neighbors to help pay his father’s debts.¹

David Crockett (1786-1836) by William Henry Huddle, 1889

After his marriage proposal was refused, Crockett bemoaned: “I was only born for hardship, and disappointment.”² But he recovered, married and started a family. In 1809, he moved to a farm in Lincoln County in Middle Tennessee. He relocated in 1813 to adjacent Franklin County to a homestead 10 miles north of Winchester. From there, he volunteered for the Tennessee militia under Gen. Andrew Jackson and fought in the bloody Creek War in the dense forests of Alabama from 1813 to 1815.³

Tennessee Frontier Judge

In 1815, Crockett’s wife died. He remarried the next year, and the restless Crockett and his growing family moved west to a frontier settlement on Shoal Creek in an area that on Oct. 21, 1817, became Lawrence County.4 He later recollected that “without any law at all; and so many bad characters began to flock in upon us, that we found it necessary to set up a sort of temporary government of our own.”⁵

Crockett’s “rough and unpolished honesty” and “infectious straightforwardness”⁶ impressed his fellow pioneers. They elected him to his first public office: county judge. His selection was ratified by the legislature on Nov. 25, 1817.⁷ He thenceforth adopted the motto: “Never seek, never decline, office.”⁸

A biographer observed, “That Crockett got selected as magistrate testifies to the solid nature of his character, since he was uneducated in the law, but rather operated from a platform of common sense and decency.”⁹ Another concluded, “his honesty and sense of justice made him popular.”¹⁰

Crockett soon exhibited “his great capacity for on-the-job training.”¹¹

He proudly recalled:

My judgements were never appealed from, and if they had been they would have stuck like wax, as I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law learning to guide me; for I had never read a page in a law book in all my life. ¹²

Judge Crockett heard a varied docket: domestic disputes, including child custody cases, debt collections, issued marriage licenses, granted bounties for wolves and presided over a trial deciding title to slaughtered hogs.¹³ Although confessing to be “nearly illiterate,”¹⁴
he said of his time as a judge: “In this way I got on pretty well, till by care and attention I improved my handwriting in such manner as to be able to prepare my warrants, and keep my record book, without much difficulty.”¹⁵
Nonetheless, he abruptly resigned his judgeship on Nov. 1, 1819, to devote himself to his flourishing frontier businesses: a gristmill, distillery and gunpowder factory.¹⁶

Young James K. Polk. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

Pioneer for the Poor and Powerless

With an eager boyishness and a talent for extemporaneous stump speaking and a “broad backwoods humor,” Crockett was elected to Lawrenceburg’s town commission and, in 1821, to the Tennessee House representing Lawrence and Hickman counties, winning by a two-to-one landslide.¹⁷

Traveling from Lawrence County to the state capital of Murfreesboro, he encountered James K. Polk of Columbia, a young lawyer and the newly appointed clerk of the state senate. During their ride, the enthusiastic Polk remarked that the General Assembly would most likely adopt major reforms of the judiciary. Crockett later remembered: “Now so help me God, I knew no more what a ‘radical change’ and a ‘judiciary’ meant than my horse, but looking straight into Mr. Polk’s face as though I understood all about it, I replied, I presume so.’”¹⁸

Laughed at for wearing “a tanned-skin hunting jacket” in the house chamber, Crockett “surfaced as an outspoken and vehement champion of the underclass, the poor, dispossessed and disenfranchised, groups with whom he would always align himself.”¹⁹ During his first session, he was an effective member of the committee dealing with land ownership, debt collection and the rights of widows and divorced women.²⁰ He opposed judges receiving court costs, voted against anti-gambling legislation and worked to aid the poor “squatters” filling West Tennessee by backing improved land surveys of the area, tax relief and a constitutional convention to correct their inequitable taxation and serious underrepresentation in the legislature.²¹

In 1822’s special session, Crockett proposed a bill to award financial aid to “Mathias, a free man of color” and fought against bills to repeal protections against fraud in the execution of wills and the weakening of the rights of widows and orphans in probate matters. He strove to keep the price of public land low so settlers could afford to purchase the land they cleared and farmed. Consequently, he opposed state land sales designed to raise as much funds as possible for primary and secondary education, which his constituents saw of little benefit. And he supported measures fostering emerging industries such as iron works.²²

When a flash flood washed away his distillery and gunpowder and grist mills, Crockett moved his family to the lush, game filled wilds of West Tennessee he had eagerly explored between sessions of the legislature.²³ In 1822, he built a cabin on an 800 acre tract he purchased on the Obion River, near today’s Rutherford’s Fork, in the western part of the then expansive Carroll County that was divided and became Gibson County the next year. ²⁴ Crockett and his eight adored hunting dogs, in one season, killed 105 bears, thereby providing meat for the entire community for the winter.²⁵

Tennessee Gov. William Carroll

Pioneer of Access to Justice

Crockett was reelected to the Tennessee House of Representatives in 1823 by West Tennesseans after he denounced his “aristocrat” opponent for having a rug on his floor instead of a bearskin. In Murfreesboro, he opposed a bill to use inmates on state projects since many were incarcerated only for debt, and he proposed a bill to release “honest debtors” and abolish debtors’ prison completely.²⁶ He sought to lower property taxes, criminalize the sale of liquor on Election Day, outlaw dueling and called for the establishment of a state bank with rural branches.²⁷

Crockett condemned the General Assembly’s practice of granting divorces and, much ahead of his time, he advocated for the state paying lawyers for the poor in domestic cases.²⁸ Therefore, he was a true pioneer in America’s long and ongoing struggle to provide skilled attorneys for those unable to afford one and thuswise fulfill the promise of “justice for all.”    

In 1823, Crockett boldly showed independence from Jackson’s formidable political organization by voting for the unsuccessful reelection of U.S. Sen. John Williams when Jackson challenged Williams. Crockett would come to believe Jackson and his camp were servants of the wealthy and dishonest land speculators who took advantage of poor settlers.²⁹

Because Crockett represented the politically weak, he proposed, opposed and seldom won enactment of legislation. Yet much of his imaginative and humanitarian agenda ultimately became law due to the efforts of arguably Tennessee’s greatest governor and Crockett’s close friend, the reforming William Carroll of Nashville. Most of the reforms, including the abolishment of debtors’ prison and the adoption of a new and more democratic and egalitarian state constitution, were achieved after Crockett had left the General Assembly and during the latter years of Carroll’s extraordinary 12-year governorship.³⁰

President Andrew Jackson

Pioneer of Justice for All

In the seesaw battlefield of West Tennessee politics, Crockett was defeated in 1825 when he ran for the U.S. House challenging Congressman Wilson Alexander but was victorious against Alexander in 1827 and was reelected to Congress in 1829. In clear opposition to President Jackson, he was defeated for reelection in 1831 by William Fitzgerald. He credited the loss to the intrigues of area “small-fry lawyers,” but in 1833 gleefully reclaimed the seat from Fitzgerald.³¹

In Congress, Crockett became a cultural icon due to his immensely popular autobiographies, novels, stage plays and his speaking tour of the northeastern cities, all recounting his frontier feats, such as wrestling wild bears.

Even though Congressman Crockett regularly provoked Jackson and favored the Whig program of federally funded internal improvements, such as roads and canals, he never formally affiliated with the Whig Party. But in political circles he was deemed a potential 1836 Whig presidential nominee to oppose Jackson’s handpicked successor, Vice President Martin Van Buren, and Whig operatives facilitated Crockett’s public relations and publicized his quarrels with the White House.³²

Despite prior disputes, when first in Washington, Crockett was still loosely in the President’s political orbit.³³ But he irrevocably broke with Jackson when opposing Congressman Polk’s bill for the sale of land in West Tennessee “with all his crude might” to protect the pioneer families who cleared the land without title.³⁴ Like his plan in the General Assembly, Polk sought to transfer public land to the state to be sold in large parcels to the highest bidder with earnings funding colleges. Crockett, condemning the plan as a scheme to profit greedy speculators, fought to permit the settlers or squatters to buy at the lowest possible price or be given the property outright.³⁵ He argued that “the rich require but little legislation. We should, at least occasionally, legislate for the poor.”³⁶

Crockett’s political opponents thought him naïve, but his dogged obstructionism delayed the land sale until 1841, long past his death, and on terms favorable to the subsistence farming families.³⁷ His break with the administration, and his increasing cooperation with politicians outside Jackson’s faction, served as an impetus for the founding of Tennessee’s Whig Party and eventually a truly competitive two-party system in the state.³⁸

Sen. Hugh Lawson White of Knox County and Congressman John Bell of Davidson County were the chief sponsors in their houses of Congress of Jackson’s Indian Removal Bill authorizing the horrific Trail of Tears.³⁹ Crockett was the only Tennessean in Congress to vote against removal.⁴⁰ He later said, “I opposed Andrew Jackson in his famous Indian Bill … I thought the rights reserved to the Indians were about to be frittered away; and events prove that I thought correct.”⁴¹ He further said his vote would “not make me ashamed in the Day of Judgment.”⁴²

Congressman David Crockett, 1831, from life by James Hamilton Shegogue. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

From Defeat to Destiny

In 1835, by hypocritically faulting Crockett for failing to secure protections for squatters, the Jacksonians attained his defeat by backing Adam Huntsman, a Jackson attorney enlisted and funded for the mission.⁴³ The ballot totals were 4,400 for Crockett to Huntsman’s 4,652.⁴⁴ While Crockett alleged voter fraud, a well-to-do Jackson follower elatedly exclaimed to Polk: “We have killed blackguard Crockett at last.”⁴⁵

Crockett had been undiscouraged by prior election defeats, but this time was different. He was bitter. And always attracted by the adventure and opportunities of the frontier’s cutting-edge, and maybe improved political fortunes, he prepared to head west again. After holding a massive barbeque at his place on the Obion for family and friends, he and a small group of well-armed and provisioned frontiersmen began their journey.⁴⁶ His youngest child lovingly recalled the last time she saw her father: “He seemed very confident the morning he went away that he would soon have us all to join him in Texas.”⁴⁷

In Memphis in late November 1835, the evening before departing Tennessee, he spoke to a boisterous multitude and revealed that his mind was on Texas even before his recent election loss:

My friends, I suppose you are all aware that I was recently a candidate for Congress in an adjoining district. I told the voters that if they would elect me, I would serve to the best of my ability; but if they did not, they might go to hell, and I would go to Texas. I am on my way now^.48

Donning his famous coonskin cap, Crockett, at the age of 49, crossed the Mississippi River at Memphis and forever left Tennessee to soon discover his fate and glory on the new frontier of Texas.⁴⁹ A historian has reasoned that “David Crockett should be remembered not only for what he did at the Alamo, but also for his efforts to help the people of Tennessee.”⁵⁰ He made the expansion of justice and access to it early and enduring Tennessee values. Courageously ethical and just, Crockett was constantly faithful to, and will be eternally remembered for, another of his mottos representing the pioneering spirit of Tennesseans then and now: “Be always sure you’re right — THEN GO AHEAD!”⁵¹ |||

NOTES
1. J. Ralph Randolph, “David Crockett” in Heroes of Tennessee 69, 72 (Billy M. Jones ed., 1979); Michael A. Lofaro, “Crockett, David ‘Davy’” in The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture 219 (Carroll Van West ed., 1998); Buddy Levy, American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett 12 (2005).
2. Randolph at 72.
3. Id. at 72-74; Michael A. Lofaro, “Crockett, David ‘Davy’” in The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture 219 (Carroll Van West ed. 1998).
4. Buddy Levy, American Legend: The Real-Life Adventures of David Crockett 84 (2005).
5. Id.
6. Id.
7. Id.; Randolph at 74; John H. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition 269 (2001).
8. Levy at 86.
9. Id. at 84.
10. Randolph at 74.
11. Levy at 86.
12. David Crockett, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee: A facsimile Edition with Annotations and an Introduction by James A. Shackford and Stanley J. Folmsbee 135 (1973).
13. Levy at 85, 87.
14. Randolph, “David Crockett,” 74.
15. Levy at 87.
16. Id.
17. John H. Finger, Tennessee Frontiers: Three Regions in Transition 296 (2001).
18. Walter R. Borneman, Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America 11-12 (2008).
19. Levy at 94, 96.
20. Randolph at 74-75.
21. Levy at 96; Randolph at 75.
22. Levy at 104-05.|
23. Id. at 96-99.
24. Randolph at 75-76; see Marvin Downing, “Davy Crockett in Gibson County, Tennessee: A Century of Memories” in XXXVII West Tennessee Historical Society Papers 54 (1983).
25. Id. at 77.
26. Id. at 75-76; Levy at 118.
27. Levy at 117-18; Michael Wallis, David Crockett: The Lion of the West 186 (2011).
28. Id.
29. See Randolph at 76.
30. See Harriet Stern, “William Carroll” in Governors of Tennessee, ed. Charles Crawford 135-36 (1979); Levy at 99.
31. Id. at 76-79.
32. Randolph at 79; Lofaro at 219.
33. See Robert E. Corlew, Tennessee: A Short History 160 (1982).
34. Thomas Perkins Abernethey, From Frontier to Plantation in Tennessee 259-60 (1955).
35. Id. at 260; Randolph at 77-78; Finger at 270.
36. Randolph at 78.
37. Abernethey at 260.
38. Wallis at 253; see Corlew at 180.
39. Corlew at 152.
40. Randolph at 78; see Finger at 270-71; see Wallis at 218-23.
41. David Crockett, The Autobiography of David Crockett 173 (Hamlin Garland ed., 1923).
42. David Crockett, Narrative of the Life of David Crockett 206 (6th ed. 1834).
43. See Randolph,” David Crockett,” 80.
44. Levy at 227.
45. Id. at 227-28.
46. Id. at 232.
47. Manley F. Cobia Jr., Journey into the Land of Trials: The Story of Davy Crockett’s Expedition to the Alamo 25 (2003) 25.
48. Levy at 236.
49. See Michael A. Lofaro, “Crockett, David ‘Davy’” in The Tennessee Encyclopedia of History & Culture 219 (Carroll Van West ed., 1998); Levy at 235-38.
50. Randolph at 81.
51. Id. at 69.