Davey Crockett, Constitutional Scholar?

By David Prange

We all know something about Davey Crockett. Frontiersman, the Alamo, shooting bears, TV star. He also served a couple of terms as a congressman from Tennessee. This is where he showed his grasp of the Constitution. After this story you’ll wonder where his heirs are.

One day Congress was on the verge of passing a bill to grant $10,000 to the widow of a naval officer. Then Crockett’s turn to speak came. He said they could not appropriate that money without the “grossest corruption” as the Constitution gave them no “semblance of authority” to spend the public’s money, much of it obtained from people worse off than the widow, on charity.

“Mr. Speaker,” Crockett concluded, “we have the right to spend as much of our own money as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.”

Nobody took Crockett up on his suggestion that they contribute their own money to the charity that was so easy to support with other people’s money. But most of them were sufficiently shamed to withdraw their support from the bill, and it was defeated. Afterwards a reporter, outraged at the bill’s defeat, asked Crockett what had possessed him to make that speech.

Crockett explained that he had been enlightened one day by a farmer he encountered while out campaigning for reelection.

“Don’t waste your time,” the farmer, Horatio Bunce, told Crockett. He said he had voted for Crockett the last time, but would not do so again. Stunned, Crockett asked him what was the matter.

“You gave a vote last winter which shows that either you have not the capacity to understand the Constitution or that you are wanting in honesty or firmness to be guided by it,” Bunce responded. He was referring to Crockett’s support of a bill that gave $20,000 to people whose homes had been damaged by a fire in Georgetown.

“But certainly nobody will complain that a great and rich country like ours should give the insignificant sum of $20,000 to relieve the suffering of women and children,” said Crockett in defense of his vote.

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