Crockett made his first stump speech when he was about thirty-four years old. A militia regiment was to be organized, and a Captain Mathews, after promising Crockett the majority of the regiment if he would support him for its colonel, turned against Crockett in favor of his own son. At a great muster prepared by Mathews, he made a stump speech in his own and his son’s favor. Crockett, entirely unabashed, mounted the stump as soon as Mathews finished, and on the captain’s own grounds proceeded to expose his duplicity and argue the total unfitness of both him and his son for the command. The speech was fluent, witty, full of anecdote, and carried the rude audience by storm. It effectually beat both father and son. The fame of this maiden effort traveled fast in a community where oratory was the great, if not the only engine of popular control, and the result was that a committee soon waited on Crockett and asked him to stand for the legislature then about to be elected (1821). Some of his first electioneering adventures illustrate the frankness and tact so queerly combined in him, and also show how he got his education in politics. Hickman county wanted to change its county seat. He says: “Here they told me that they wanted to move their town nearer to the center of the county, and I must come out in favor of it. I did not know what this meant, or how the town was to be moved, and so I kept dark, going on the same identical plan that I now find is called _non-committal_.” On one occasion the candidates for governor of the State, Congress, and several for legislature, some of them able stump-speakers, were announced. As he listened, a sense of inferiority for the first time, probably, penetrated him; he drank in all they said, and remembered it. He says: “The thought of having to make a speech made my knees feel mighty weak, and set my heart to fluttering almost as bad as my first love scrape with the Quaker’s niece. But as luck would have it, these big candidates spoke nearly all day, and when they quit the people were worn out with fatigue, which afforded me a good apology for not discussing the government. But I listened mighty close to them, and was learning pretty fast about political matters. When they were all done I got up and told some laughable story and quit.” He was elected, and in the legislature proved a good story-teller, a formidable antagonist in repartee, and above all a good listener. He says the first thing that he took pains to learn was the meaning of the words “judiciary” and “government,” as up to that time he had “never heard that there was any such thing in all nature as a judiciary.” The halls of the Tennessee legislature were again brightened in 1823-24 by the wit and good sense of “the gentleman from the cane” as an opponent derisively dubbed him, very much to his subsequent regret.