Posted on 03/23/2009 6:09:02 AM PDT by valiant4thetruth
One day in the House of Representatives, a bill was taken up appropriating money for the benefit of a widow of a distinguished naval officer. Several beautiful speeches had been made in its support. The Speaker was just about to put the question when Crockett arose: “Mr. Speaker--I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living.
(Excerpt) Read more at fee.org ...
Nah, thank Wikipedia. They had a link to the specific pages in their article on the story. I simply posted the pages on my Photobucket page.
Crockett was known for embellishing things, and Ellis himself may well have done so (as was common with so many 19th Century authors). And certainly Ellis never got the story directly from Crockett, having been born 4 years after Crockett's death. So, whether there were other, extant, Crockett materials Ellis was privy to, or whether Ellis embellished the story to make it more readable will likely never be known. But if it came from Crockett, then there must have been something we're unaware of...
Ok, I stand corrected. I did not search the records he found that in.
That’s alright. Interestingly, Here’s a page about the Gales and Seaton era of being the chroniclers of debate in Congress. You need to go to the 5th paragraph to find where it begins...
Was there supposed to be a link?
Some additional points: The link in my post #23 identifies the “Reports of Debate” as “an abstract of most House and Senate floor statements”. Being an abstract we can assume it does not detail the entirety of debates or a representative’s complete statements on an issue.
Thus, where the abstract reads (first image) “The latter [Crockett] offering to subscribe his quota, in his private character, to make up the sum proposed”, this could be a simplification of an actual speech given by Crockett similar to the story where he supposedly states “I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object...”.
OTOH, in the story Crockett responds with ““Several years ago I was one evening standing on the steps of the Capitol with some other members of Congress, when our attention was attracted by a great light over in Georgetown.” when asked about the vote he cast. The “Reports and Debate” record shows a date of April 2, 1828 for the record. Crockett was first elected to Congress in 1827. There is no way he was accosted by an angry voter during a re-election campaign “Several years [before]”.
Also, the story implies the bill was voted down (applying strength to Crockett’s argument and veracity). The “Reports and Debate” record shows the bill as passing, although Crockett did indeed vote against it.
Thus, we have kernels of truth among a great deal of embellishment.
I agree with your assessment.
As I showed in post #25, there’s some commonality to the two versions, yet a timeline that doesn’t stand up in the story version.
BTTT for an excellent essay - well worth the read, even if you’ve read it before!
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DAVY CROCKETT WAS RIGHT ON TARGET AS ALWAYS.
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