A Time to Stand by Walter Lord Read Free Book Online

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    The Greys stood firm, arguing hotly against halfway measures. They hadn’t come this far to fight under any flag of Mexico. Sterne mildly protested, but the men noticed that he joined the rest when the wine appeared and they roared a toast, “To the Republic of Texas!”
    It was the same with all who came. Men who had never given a thought to Texas three months earlier suddenly found themselves the most violent patriots. “I am over the Rubicon and my fate is now inseparably united with that of Texas,” wrote young John Sowers Brooks only three days after he arrived from Virginia. “I have resolved to stand by her to the last, and in a word, to sink or swim with her.”
    And trying on their new patriotism, men felt an exhilaration, a tingling satisfaction that many had never known before. Micajah Autry—aesthete, poet, violinist, business failure—wrote his wife Martha from Nacogdoches, “I have become one of the most thorough-going men you ever heard of.” He closed his letter with a piece of exciting news: “P.S. Colonel Crockett has just joined our company.”
    If the postscript was meant to impress her, it must have succeeded. There could be no stronger reference for a reformed poet than Colonel David Crockett, lately Congressman from Tennessee. His syntax jolted people even in an era that cared little about spelling and grammar. His coonskin cap, buckskin shirt and Indian moccasins made a virtue of backwoods ignorance. His rifle was his substitute for learning—it had brought him political success, national fame. He was the man who shot forty-seven bears in one month … who killed six bucks in one day … who rode alligators for exercise …who grinned a bear into retreat … who once aimed up a tree, only to have the coon come down and surrender.
    Typical Crockett humor. Unfortunately, most of his jokes were just a façade. A brave front for a simple man who had swum far out over his head. For warm, kindly David Crockett was as naive as they came. Born with all the right instincts, he had little depth and was too lazy or restless to acquire it. He loved politics, but it was so much easier to get by with a joke, or the backwoods role he so carefully cultivated.
    “When a man can grin and fight, flag a steamboat, or whip his weight in wildcats, what is the use of reading and writing?” he liked to say. Actually, he could do both perfectly well; but here too there was an easier way, and he gradually relied more and more on ghost writers.
    The formula worked all right at first. Uneducated, gregarious, articulate, a marvelous hunter, Crockett was a political natural on the frontier. Appointed a magistrate in western Tennessee in 1817, he was fair, honest, and it took no great depth to referee bounty payments for wolf scalps. He was soon elected colonel of the local militia.
    Advancing to the Tennessee Legislature in 1820, he found that warmth and color were still enough. He had the frontiersman’s love of rough-and-tumble antics, the heavy practical joke. He once delighted his constituents by using his opponent’s speech word for word during a joint stumping tour in the 1823 campaign.
    He moved on to Congress in 1827 and for a while the old magic worked even in Washington. The capital quickly took to this friendly man with the tall stories and coonskin trappings. For his part, Crockett showed little interest in affairs—only a distaste for authority (particularly West Point) and a single-tracked desire to see that the people of the frontier could keep the open land they were squatting on.
    The state and federal governments had other ideas. Theyhoped to raise revenue by selling the land. Bitterly righting this policy, Crockett narrowly lost a bid for re-election in 1831, squeaked in again two years later. Through it all, he never could adjust or compromise. In the Colonel’s uncomplicated mind, every issue took the form of selfish interests against the honest poor. Andrew Jackson and the Democrats