When General Santa Anna, following the final and decisive assault of his Mexican forces upon the Texians barricaded in the Alamo on 6 March 1836, ordered the cremation of enemy corpses, he could hardly have guessed at the consequences that would arise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of that pyre. He had not only added fuel to the flames of insurrection that would soon engulf him and his army on the field of San Jacinto, but he had enflamed the American mythic imagination. A small number of disparate adventurers were elevated to the status of martyrs to the cause of Texas independence and United States expansionism, and at least three of them, Travis, Bowie, and Crockett, were assured a permanent place in the American pantheon. Of these three, David Crockett, as a former member of Congress, had been the most important and influential in life, and through the efforts of contemporary journalists and generations of hack writers, he came to enjoy the richest of afterlives. The exact role Crockett played at the Alamo and the actual circumstances of his death there remain points of contention. Dan Kilgore recently addressed the problem in an admirable scholarly monograph,’ only to arouse the ire of pietistic souls who resented an historian’s tampering with heroic truisms. At the root of such controversies remains the elusive figure of Crockett himself, a man who assumed several masks in the course of his political career and who spoke in a number of voices, ranging in tone from backwoods bluster to the homey eloquence of an unlettered philosopher. The facts of Crockett’s life and death were ready-made for popular mythologizers, and over time purely fanciful tales about Crockett found their way into purportedly factual biographies. Perhaps no single document offers us more insight into the workings of this fruitful dialectic between fact and fiction than Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas (1836), avowedly based on the hero’s own diary, but in reality a clumsy fabrication assembled immediately after the fall of the Alamo out of less than the noblest of motives—pecuniary profit and political gain.

Under various imprints, the Exploits sold steadily and well on both sides of the Atlantic in the decade or so following its appearance and so pervasively was its authenticity accepted at face-value (despite abundant internal and external evidence to the contrary)

that as late as 1956 Crockett’s definitive biographer, James Atkins Shackford, felt compelled to devote an appendix to what he hoped would be "its final refutation."² Shackford cited a reminiscence of the Philadelphia publisher A. Hart as to the work’s genesis:

    The late Richard Penn Smith was in Carey & Hart’s one day, when Edward L. Carey told him that they had a large number of copies of Crockett’s "Tour Down East" which didn’t sell. Crockett had just then been executed by the Mexican authorities at the Alamo, and Mr. Carey suggested to Mr. Smith, that if they could get up a book of Crockett’s adventures in Texas, it would not only sell itself, but get them clear of the other books. They secured all the works on Texas they could lay their hands on, and Smith undertook the work. Mr. Carey said he wanted it done in great haste, and asked him when it would be ready for the printer; his reply was, "Tomorrow morning." Smith came up to the contract, and never kept the printer waiting. The result was that a great many thousands of copies of the book were sold and all the balance of the edition of the "Tour Down East." (Shackford, p. 274)

Who was this Richard Penn Smith who so confidently cranked out a pot-boiler to B. L. Carey’s specifications? He was the son of a prominent Philadelphia lawyer and sometime poetaster, and the son followed in his father’s footsteps, enjoying a good deal more success in the pursuit of the muse. Born in 1799, the younger Smith came of age at a time when the Philadelphia literary and theatrical scene could boast the presence of Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, the magazinist Louis A. Godey, and the dashing actors William E. Burton and Edwin Forrest. New York’s theatrical pre-eminence had not yet approached its zenith, and in this Golden Age of the Philadelphia stage Smith saw at least thirteen of his twenty plays produced in the decade from 1825 to l835.³ Students of the drama in the nineteenth-century America have long granted Smith his due as a shaping force in the historical development of our national theater, but there can be little question that he reached his widest audience and left his most lasting mark on the American literary tradition through his anonymous authorship of Col. Crockett’s Exploits, a book that gave his countrymen a new, sanitized Crockett as a figure worthy of emulation and an early forerunner of one of America’s unique art-forms, the popular western. An unmistakable, if indirect, line of descent connects Smith’s hoax with the works of Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Louis L’Amour, and with the films of John Ford and his less-talented imitators. In retrospect, there seems a degree of historical inevitability in the fact that the quintessential American

cinematic hero, John Wayne, chose to play the role of Crockett in the 1960 movie epic The Alamo.

The patch-work substance of Smith’s book is spelled out in no uncertain terms on the title-page of an 1845 reprinting: COL. CROCKETT’S EXPLOITS AND ADVENTURES IN TEXAS: WHEREIN IS CONTAINED A FULL ACCOUNT OF HIS JOURNEY FROM TENNESSEE TO THE RED RIVER AND NATCHITOCHES, AND THENCE ACROSS TEXAS TO SAN ANTONIO; INCLUDING HIS MANY HAIR-BREADTH ESCAPES, TOGETHER WITH A TOPOGRAPHICAL, HISTORICAL, AND POLITICAL VIEW OF TEXAS.⁴ The page further proclaims that this "FULL ACCOUNT" of Crockett’s final days was "WRITTEN BY HIMSELF," though "THE NARRATIVE [is] BROUGHT DOWN FROM THE DEATH OF COL. CROCKETT TO THE BATTLE OF SAN JACINTO, BY AN EYE-WITNESS." There follows a Preface, in which one Alex J. Dumas, Esq., of New Orleans (the name itself points toward the blatant romanticizing to come) relates how the manuscript of Crockett’s journal "from the time of his leaving Tennessee up to the day preceding his untimely death" (Exploits, p. vi) had been appropriated by the Mexican General Castrillón until liberated and preserved by a fictitious Charles T. Beale following the victory at San Jacinto. It is this Beale, recuperating from his wounds, who urges Dumas to see the manuscript into print.

The conventional groundwork of a literary hoax thus laid, the narrative proper commences with an account of Crockett’s unsuccessful campaign for re-election to Congress in 1835 and his subsequent determination to set out for Texas, presented much in the manner of two previous Crockett books, the Tour to the North and Down East (1835) and the burlesque Life of Martin Van Buren (1835), ghosted by William Clark and Augustin Smith Clayton respectively. Shackford is wrong when he suggests that Col. Crockett’s Exploits was not, at least in part, an attempt to make political capital out of Crockett’s posthumous glory,⁵ for the book abounds in precisely the kind of satiric ridicule of Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren that marked the preceding books as the work of Whig propagandists intent upon turning Crockett’s much-publicized break with Old Hickory to their advantage.⁶ Thus, the Crockett persona—hereafter for convenience’s sake simply Crockett—takes repeated swipes at Jackson’s war on the Second Bank of the United States and his attempts to ensure Van Buren’s election to the presidency. The portrait of Jackson that emerges from the text is inconsistent. At times he is presented with pitying condescension, as a

superannuated statesman whose earlier glory is tarnished by the folly of his administration, but more often he is pictured as haughty and corrupt demagogue who would set himself up as "the Government" and shuffle the Bank deposits for the crassest of political motives. Van Buren, on the other hand, is subjected to the most virulent ad hominem invective throughout. Crockett styles him "the Little Flying Dutchman" or "Little Van" and maintains that Van Buren’s dishonesty and greed know no end: ". . . there’s no beating his snout from the public crib. He’ll feed there while there’s a grain of corn left, and even then, from long habit, he’ll set to work and gnaw at the manger" (Exploits, p. 91).

The stance here is recognizably that of the backwoods eiron whose mother wit sees through the machinations of unscrupulous Jacksonians aimed at hoodwinking the public at large, and the humor employed in the Exploits is, with the exception of occasional passages that are out of character, firmly rooted in the Old Southwest tradition. The popular tale of how Crockett traded the identical coonskin for ten successive quarts of New England rum is recounted, and one early episode is little more than a wholesale plagiarism from A. B. Longstreet’s Georgia Scenes, which had appeared the year before (see Exploits, pp. 35–37).⁷ As Crockett makes his way from Tennessee through Arkansas and Louisiana to Texas, the reader is introduced to an array of comic types already familiar to the readership of The Spirit of the Times and similar outlets for indigenous American humor. There is a fiddle-playing preacher whose charitable nature compels him to overcome his scruples and play for a Punch and Judy show, and who, after narrowly escaping drowning in a swollen stream, agrees to "liquor up" with Crockett: "I set him the example, and he followed it, and in a style that satisfied me, that if he had ever belonged to the Temperance society, he had either renounced membership or obtained a dispensation" (Exploits, p. 70). A little later, Crockett engages in a five-page repartee with an inquisitive tavern-keeper, "one of those fellows who would peep down your throat just to ascertain what you had eaten for dinner" (Exploits, p. 75). This turns out to be none other than Job Snelling, the victim of Crockett’s earlier coonskin scam, described previously as "a gander-shanked Yankee . . . who had been shipped west with a cargo of cod fish and rum" (Exploits, p. 16). This shifty con-artist springs from the best New England stock: his father was the inventor of the wooded nutmeg; his mother, Patience, "manufactured the first white oak pumpkin seeds of the mammoth kind"; and his aunt, Prudence, "was the first to discover that corn husks

steeped in tobacco water, would make as handsome Spanish wrappers as ever came from Havana" (Exploits, p.21). Snelling himself, we are told, perfected the conversion of mahogany sawdust into cayenne pepper.

There is also considerable fun at the expense of a lecherous Jacksonian politician who befriends a young strumpet on the road and puts up at an inn with her as husband and wife, only to find the lady and his horse missing the next morning and himself left holding the bag—and the woman’s mulatto infant. By far the most extended of these humorous sketches, however, concerns Thimblerig, a feckless gambler who had been brought up as a gentlemen, which to Crockett meant simply that "he was not instructed in any useful pursuit by which he could obtain a livelihood" (Exploits, p. 90). After he was disappointed in his hopes of marrying an heiress (her father set the slaves on him), Thimblerig briefly contemplated a career on the stage (until he was type-cast as the hind-end of an elephant); then he gradually degenerated into a denizen of Natchez-under-the-hill, that community of river-rats, desperadoes, and gamblers that had already taken on something of the infamy of Sodom and Gomorrah in the nineteenth-century American imagination. Thimblerig’s description of two-tiered Natchez is a welcome relief from the sober, cribbed accounts of the geography and resources of Arkansas and the populations and commerce of Natchitoches, Nacogdoches, and San Antonio that periodically interrupt the line of narrative. Indeed, as a set piece, it stands as a very creditable example of the comic rhetoric of the Old Southwest:

"Natchez is a land of fevers, alligators, niggers, and cotton bales: where the sun shines with force sufficient to melt the diamond, and the word ice is expunged from the dictionary, for its definition cannot be comprehended by the natives: where to refuse grog before breakfast would degrade you below the brute creation; and where a good dinner is looked upon as an angel’s visit, and voted a miracle: where the evergreen and majestic magnolia tree, with its superb flower, unknown to the northern climes, and its fragrance unsurpassed, calls forth the admiration of every beholder; and the dark moss hangs in festoons from the forest trees like the drapery of a funeral pall: where bears the size of young jackasses are fondled in lieu of pet dogs; and knives, the length of a barber’s pole, usurp the place of toothpicks: where the filth of the town is carried off by buzzards, and the inhabitants are carried off by fevers: where the nigger women are knocked down by the auctioneer, and knocked up by the purchaser: where the poorest slave has plenty of yellow boys, but not of Benton’s mintage; and indeed the shades of

colour are so varied and mixed, that a nigger is frequently seen black and blue at the same time." (Exploits, pp. 97–98)

Later, at the Alamo, the same Thimblerig, though a professed Temperance man, gets "tight as the eyelet-hole in a lady’s corset," pulls his hat off with a bootjack, lays his coat out on the bed, and hangs himself over the back of a chair!

But Thimblerig is not the only acquaintance who accompanies Crockett to San Antonio, and the character of Crockett’s other companion, "the young Bee hunter," represents an element of genteel sentimentality in the Exploits that is sharply at odds with the frontier humor impulse. Throughout American literature, the presence of the Old World honey-bee on the frontier is emblematic of white civilization’s westward advance upon the wilderness, and the figure of the wild-honey gatherer, like Paul Hover in Cooper’s The Prairie (1827), serves as a harbinger of the settlements. In Cooper’s novel, the bee hunter renounces his life of wandering in favor of marriage and respectability, significantly enough at the prompting of Natty Bumppo, who fears that the young man will repeat the mistakes that he had made.⁸ His counterpart in Col. Crockett’s Exploits, however, reverses this sequence somewhat: a gentleman by birth, he bids farewell to his village fiancée and sets out for the Alamo with Crockett, only to prove the girl’s fears that she will never see him again predictably prophetic. We hear the bee hunter even before we see him, as he sings a romantic song by the dawn’s early light, and when we do get a glimpse of him, it is clear that he is less a trail-blazer than a dandy in buckskin, a dandy who, incidentally, enjoys the unqualified admiration of the author, Richard Penn Smith himself. The young man’s hunting shirt is uncommonly neat, and its fringe is "ornamented tastily." His shirt collar is "clean," and his boots are "polished, without a soil upon them" (Exploits, p. 112). The bee hunter is obviously several cuts above the average border ruffian. Indeed, he possesses gifts for verbal badinage better suited to the Philadelphia stage than to the streets of Natchitoches, as we learn when he coolly fends off the abuse of an attacker (the same unfortunate Jacksonite who was left high and dry by the mother of the mulatto child):

    ". . . I say, you’re an infernal scoundrel, and I’ll prove it."

    "I beg you will not; I shouldn’t like to be proved a scoundrel," replied the other, smiling with most provokiiig indifference.

    "No, I dare say you wouldn’t. But answer me directly—did you, or did you not say, in presence of certain ladies of my

71

acquaintance, that I was a mere—"

    "Calf?—O no, sir; the truth is not to be spoken at all times."

    "The truth! Do you presume to call me a calf, sir?"

    "O, no, sir; I call you—nothing," replied the stranger, just as cool and as pleasant as a morning in spring.

    "It’s well you do; for if you had presumed to call me—"

    "A man, I should have been grossly mistaken." (Exploits, p. 114)

In short, this bee hunter is a figure out of popular melodrama, transported incongruously to the wild west, and in comparison with which Cooper’s Paul Hover is a model of rigorous verisimilitude. In this young worthy’s propensity for spontaneous song, it is tempting to see a foreshadowing of Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, and like the antiseptic cowboy of the matinee western, the bee hunter is not much of a drinking man. Says Crockett, ". . . he will seldom drink more than just enough to prevent his being called a total abstinence man. But then he is the most jovial fellow for a water drinker I ever did see" (Exploits, p. 183). The bee hunter may be the best rifle shot in the Alamo (not excluding Crockett, whose talents in that direction were already legend), but he is also suitably pious. When his Bible, a gift from his fiancée, "little Kate of Nacogdoches," stops a ball aimed at his heart, he remarks, "I am not the first sinner whose life has been saved by this book" (Exploits, p. 194). An unfailing source of inspiration to his fellows, the bee hunter embodies the gamut of bourgeois virtues, and Richard Penn Smith recounts his death with melodramatic pathos:

He lay, without complaint or manifesting pain, until about midnight, when he spoke, and I asked him if he wanted anything. "Nothing," he replied, but drew a sigh that seemed to rend his heart, as he added, "Poor Kate of Nacogdoches!" His eyes were filled with tears, as he continued, "Her words were prophetic, Colonel," and then he sang, in a low voice that resembled the sweet notes of his own devoted Kate,

"But toom cam’ the saddle, all bluidy to see,
And hame cam’ the steed, but hame never cam’ he."

He spoke no more, and, a few minutes after, died. Poor Kate, who will tell this to thee! (Exploits, pp. 201–202)

The bee hunter is Richard Penn Smith’s kind of man, but so too is the David Crockett who emerges from the pages of the Exploits. The author has taken pains to recast him in the mold of Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, whose names are evoked like a litany from time to time. While a measure of the rough-and-ready trickster is retained throughout the narrative, in the last analysis Crockett is little more

than a proper Whig gentleman in homespun, no ringtailed roarer, but a rather fastidious natural aristocrat who views the licentious and uncouth life of the frontier with what at times is a disturbing and condescending priggishness. True, Crockett is fond of his liquor, but this would hardly be judged as a negative trait by a Philadelphia lawyer and man-of-letters-about town like Richard Penn Smith, and while Crockett does cheat a little at a shooting match in Little Rock, this latter moral lapse no doubt represents an oversight on the author’s part, a mark of the haste with which the Exploits was written, for if Crockett is anything in this book he is regrettably honest. He even feels compelled to reimburse the Yankee shyster Snelling for the rum he conned him out of with the infamous coonskin, and he systematically and sanctimoniously sets about to reform the misdirected life of Thimblerig:

   "It is never too late to become honest," said I. "But even admit what you say to be true—that you cannot live like an honest man, you have at least the next best thing in your power, and no one can say nay to it.’’

    "And what is that?"

    "Die like a brave one. And I know not whether, in the eyes of the world, a brilliant death is not preferred to an obscure life of rectitude. Most men are remembered as they died, and not as they lived. We gaze with admiration upon the glories of the setting sun, yet scarcely bestow a passing glance upon its noonday splendor."

    "You are right; but how is this to be done?"

    "Accompany me to Texas. Cut aloof from your degrading habits and associates here, and in fighting for their freedom, regain your own." (Exploits, pp. 106–107)

The inflated sententiousness of this passage is itself an indication of the author’s own intention to reshape Crockett’s image in the eyes of his readership. Like the bee hunter, this Crockett is pious, defending early the benign work of the itinerant preacher against the hypothetical scorn of more worldly and jaded folk, and he is given to frequent flights of overt moralizing, as when he ruefully describes the suffering of overloaded mules in a caravan bound for Santa Fe: "What a world of misery man inflicts upon the rest of creation in his brief passage through life!" (Exploits, p. 184). Smith’s Crockett is a man who can readily be moved to tears, and he displays a vaguely Wordsworthian sense of kinship with nature and with nature’s God. Touched by the fiddling parson’s spontaneous hymn of thanks for the plenitude of grace abounding in the nature world, Crockett waxes philosophical:

"We were alone in the wilderness, but as he proceeded it seemed to me as if the tall trees bent their tops to listen; that the mountain stream laughed out joyfully as it bounded on like some living thing; that the fading flowers of autumn smiled, and sent forth fresher fragrance, as if conscious that they would revive in spring; and even the sterile rocks seemed to be endued with some mysterious influence. We were alone in the wilderness, but all things told me that God was there. . . . I was now conscious that there was . . . one watchful Eye over me; no matter whether I dwelt in the populous cities, or threaded the pathless forest alone; no matter whether I stood in the high places among men, or made my solitary lair in the untrodden wild, that Eye was still upon me. My very soul leaped joyfully at the thought; I never felt so grateful in all my life; I never loved my God so sincerely in all my life. I felt that I still had a friend." (Exploits, pp. 69–70)

Whether or not the historical Crockett ever experienced such emotions is, of course, purely a matter of speculation, but we can rest assured that he would hardly have expressed them in such a bookish manner. This passage is simply one more instance of Richard Penn Smith’s efforts to domesticate his subject, to introduce the rude and unlettered backwoodsman into the nineteenth-century American parlor as a respectable guest. Crockett, the author would have us infer, is a pearl among swine, a native genius whose woeful lack of opportunities alone has retarded his full realization of greatness. The hero of the Exploits is, beneath his inconsistent facade of rusticity, a conventional man of feeling, a spokesman for the cult of sentiment, as well as an exponent of the approved Whig party line. Indeed, he is himself a poet (loosely speaking), and the text includes a maudlin set of "Crockett" verses beginning "Farewell to the mountains . . ." (see Exploits, pp. 31–32). Moreover, Smith’s Crockett is first and last a committed freedom-fighter.

From a reading of Shackford’s biography, it seems clear that the presence of the historical Crockett in Texas was prompted largely by the same desire for land and a fresh start that lay behind his frequent moves westward across Tennessee,⁹ but in Smith’s Exploits the protagonist’s purpose is strictly altruistic. His sole motive is patriotic and springs from his deep love of freedom and hatred of tyranny. In his determination to paint the defenders of the Alamo in a heroic light, Smith seems to forget that he had earlier described Texas as little more than a haven for outlaws and fugitives, for now, in Crockett’s words, ". . . one spirit appears to animate the little band of patriots—and that is liberty, or death. To worship God according to the dictates of their own conscience, and govern themselves

as freemen should be governed" (Exploits, p. 170). When it becomes evident that the situation of the tiny Alamo garrison is in all likelihood hopeless, it is, of course, the dauntless Crockett who voices their common determination to "sell our lives at a high price" (Exploits, p. 193).

While Col. Crockett’s Exploits does contain elements of adventure for its own sake, brief accounts of a buffalo stampede, a mustang chase, and an encounter with Comanches, for example, the author’s treatment of the Texians’ bravery at the Alamo is hardly gratuitous. Rather, it is intimately related to the work’s final propagandistic thrust, a call for American support for the notion of Texas independence (with an obvious eye toward eventual annexation by the United States). With this end in mind, Smith repeatedly denounces both Santa Anna and the specter of Mexican Catholicism, as he chronicles the massacre at Goliad and other examples of Latin brutality and duplicity. It is important to note that the narrative concludes not with the report of Houston’s victory at San Jacinto, but with the details surrounding the death of Colonel James W. Fannin (misspelled "Fanning") at the hands of his treacherous Mexican captors. This is immediately followed by a final, ringing paragraph:

    Such are the monsters that freemen have had to contend with, to maintain their freedom; true, the struggle is not yet over, but nothing can impede the onward march, and Texas must take her stand among independent nations. (Exploits, p. 21)

Thus, the reader is implicitly enjoined to remember Goliad and the Alamo, and in particular the intrepid Crockett, defiant to the last. Not until the death of George Armstrong Custer forty years later would Americans have a more arresting image of martial glory emerging from defeat.

Richard Penn Smith’s Col. Crockett’s Exploits and Adventures in Texas is a text that yields itself to rewarding study from a number of directions. It can be read as a prototype of today’s westerns, as an interesting source of indigenous humor, as a useful weapon in the Whigs’ assault on Jackson and Van Buren, as a tool for solidifying public opinion in favor of United States expansionism in the Southwest. Most significant, however, is its function as an exercise in national hagiography. Here we encounter for the first time a wholly "reputable" Crockett (as opposed to the "subversive" Crockett of the posthumous Almanacks), a transfiguration of the "half-horse,

half-alligator" of the Tennessee canebrakes into the martyred incarnation of nativist virtue.¹⁰

TEXAS A&M UNIVERSITY

NOTES

    ¹How Did Davy Die? (College Station: Texas A&M Univ. Press, 1978). For three insightful examinations of the fictive Crockett, see Walter Blair, "Six Davy Crocketts," Southwest Review, 25(1940), 443–462; Daniel G. Hoffman, "The Deaths and Three Resurrections of Davy Crockett," Antioch Review, 21(1961), 5–13; and John Seelye, "A Well-Wrought Crockett: or, How the Fakelorists Passed Through the Credibility Gap and Discovered Kentucky," in Toward a New American Literary History: Essays in Honor of Arlin Turner, ed. Louis J. Budd and others (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 91–110.
   ²David Crockett: The Man and the Legend (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1956), pp. 273–281.
   ³See Arthur Hobson Quinn, A History of the American Drama: From the Beginning to the Civil War (New York: F. S. Crofts, 1944), pp. 205–219.
   ⁴The first edition bears the Philadelphia imprint of T. K. & P. G. Collins, though Shackford is no doubt right in seeing this as a front for the firm of Carey & Hart (Crockett, p. 274). Despite the frequency with which the Exploits was reprinted in the first half of the nineteenth century, copies are now relatively scarce. My discussion is based on a printing found in the Eugene C. Barker Texas History Center at the University of Texas, Austin. This 1845 edition has a dual imprint (New York: Nafis & Cornish; Philadelphia: John B. Perry). Subsequent citations will appear parenthetically in the text.
   ⁵Crockett, p. 281. It is difficult to understand how the unusually thorough Shackford overlooked the important political thrust of the Exploits.
   ⁶For a good discussion of how the Whigs found Crockett a useful foil against Jackson, see John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 79–91. It now seems evident that certain students of Richard Penn Smith have been too hasty in implying his admiration for Jackson. See for example Quinn’s reference to Smith’s play The Eighth of January in History of the American Drama, pp. 207–208. Quinn himself observes that Jackson behaves in a rather strange manner in what is ostensibly a tribute to his victory at the Battle of New Orleans during the War of 1812. Furthermore, the vaguely Falstaffian Hickory Oldboy in Smith’s William Penn (1829) is an unmistakable burlesque of Old Hickory, and the protagonist of Smith’s ambitious historical tragedy Caius Marius (first performed in 1831) is a character who parallels the Whig conception of Jackson as a man of common origins who is ultimately corrupted by political power. Long thought lost, Caius Marius: A Tragedy is now available in its entirety, edited by Neda McFadden Westlake (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1968).
   ⁷The Longstreet sketch in question is "Georgia Theatrics," conveniently reprinted in Walter Blair, Native American Humor (1937; rpt. New York: Chandler, 1960), pp. 287–289.
   ⁸Cooper’s bee hunter eventually enters politics, thus paralleling in fiction the career of David Crockett. Judging from his adaptations of Cooper’s works for the stage, Smith felt a special affinity for the creator of Leatherstocking. See Westlake’s Introduction to Smith’s Caius Marius, p. 6.
   ⁹Crockett, pp. 212–240.
   ¹⁰With a slight modification, I have adopted the terms "reputable" and "subversive" as they are used by Walter Blair and Hamlin Hill in America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1978), especially pp. 172–212.