“The hostile Creeks have taken refuge in Florida.  They are there fed, clothed, and protected.  The British have armed a large force with munitions of war, and are fortifying and stirring up the savages.  If you will permit me to raise a few hundred militia, which can easily be done, I will unite them with such a force of regulars as can easily be collected, and will make a descent on Pensacola, and will reduce it.  I promise you I will bring the war in the South to a speedy termination; and English influence with the savages, in this quarter, shall be forever destroyed.”

The President was not prepared thus to provoke war with Spain, by the invasion of Florida.  Andrew Jackson assumed the responsibility.  The British had recently made an attack upon Mobile, and being repulsed, had retired with their squadron to the harbor of Pensacola.  Jackson called for volunteers to march upon Pensacola.  Crockett roused himself at the summons, like the war-horse who snuffs the battle from afar.  “I wanted,” he wrote, “a small taste of British fighting, and I supposed they would be there.”

His wife again entered her tearful remonstrance.  She pointed to her little children, in their lonely hut far away in the wilderness, remote from all neighborhood, and entreated the husband and the father not again to abandon them.  Rather unfeelingly he writes, “The entreaties of my wife were thrown in the way of my going, but all in vain; for I always had a way of just going ahead at whatever I had a mind to.”

Many who have perused this sketch thus far, may inquire, with some surprise, “What is it which has given this man such fame as is even national?  He certainly does not develop a very attractive character; and there is but little of the romance of chivalry thrown around his exploits.  The secret is probably to be found in the following considerations, the truth of which the continuation of this narrative will be continually unfolding.”

Without education, without refinement, without wealth or social position, or any special claims to personal beauty, he was entirely self-possessed and at home under all circumstances.  He never manifested the slightest embarrassment.  The idea seemed never to have entered his mind that there could be any person superior to David Crockett, or any one so humble that Crockett was entitled to look down upon him with condescension.  He was a genuine democrat.  All were in his view equal.  And this was not the result of thought, of any political or moral principle.  It was a part of his nature, which belonged to him without any volition, like his stature or complexion.  This is one of the rarest qualities to be found in any man.  We do not here condemn it, or applaud it.  We simply state the fact.