“I know nothing, by experience, of party discipline. I would rather be a raccoon-dog, and belong to a Negro in the forest, than to belong to any party, further than to do justice to all, and to promote the interests of my country. The time will and must come, when honesty will receive its reward, and when the people of this nation will be brought to a sense of their duty, and will pause and reflect how much it cost us to redeem ourselves from the government of one man. It cost the lives and fortunes of thousands of the best patriots that ever lived. Yes, gentlemen, hundreds of them fell in sight of your own city. “Gentlemen, if it is for opposing those high-handed measures that you compliment me, I say I have done so, and will do so, now and forever. I will be no man’s man, and no party’s man, other than to be the people’s faithful representative: and I am delighted to see the noble spirit of liberty retained so boldly here, where the first spark was kindled; and I hope to see it shine and spread over our whole country.” He took his seat in Congress, a central object in the political field. His position was anomalous. Party ties were closely drawn, and party rancor bitter as it can be only when nothing but plunder is at stake between parties. The Democrats could not claim Crockett so long as he antagonized their god, Jackson; and the alliance of the Whigs he most distinctly repudiated. He was an independent, an “unattached statesman;” the prototype of an element which has now become formidable in our politics, but a character for whom there was no place in those times. He was, like all eccentrics, ahead or apart from his age, and was at first feared, then shunned, and then called crazy by the great body of public men, whose standard of sanity was to sacrifice manhood to party, to betray the Republic for spoils. It was during this Congress that he created a sensation by antagonizing benevolence of representatives at government expense. A bill had been reported and was about to pass, appropriating a gratuity to a naval officer’s widow. Crockett made an unanswerable argument on the unconstitutionality of this and other such appropriations, and closed by offering, with other friends of the widow, to give her a week of his salary as congressman. Not a member dared to answer or to vote for the bill, and not one followed Crockett’s example of charity at his own expense.