The Shakedown: Davy Crockett Owed my Ancestor Money

Future-president James K. Polk got a lot of letters.

As his extant correspondence shows, he regularly heard from a number of citizens about a number of issues throughout the course of his public life. As a lawyer, he no doubt became used to the role of negotiator. And as a representative in Tennessee's General Assembly, he cut his teeth on the art of politics.

But as a member of Congress in 1828, Polk must have been surprised, indeed, when one concerned citizen asked him to become a debt collector and shake down a fellow congressman for an overdue debt.

On February 20, 1828, William Henry of Lawrence County, Tennessee mailed Polk a long-overdue promissory note from none other than the King of the Wild Frontier, himself, David Crockett. The letter that Henry sent with the note said the following:

Lawrenceburg Tennessee Feby 20th 1828

Sir I take the liberty of encloseing a note of hand on Colo

Crocket that I want you to colect for me as you are the Only 

member that I am acquainted with. You will please Direct your

letter to Lawrenceburg Tennessee.

WM. HENRY

William Henry's 1828 letter to James K. Polk
Library of Congress.

To which Polk added the following endorsement:

"The note above alluded to is for $12.75 dated l0th Oct. 1822, due one day after date,

payable to Moses Pennington. This day enclosed the said note to Wm. Henry,

Lawrence County Tennessee. March l0th 1828. J.K.P."

There is a lot to unpack here, so let's dive right in.

Moses Pennington was my 5x-great-uncle, a brother of my 5x-great-grandfather Isaac Pennington. We know a considerable amount about the Pennington family of Lawrence County, thanks to their early arrival in the area, their numerous children, their massive landholdings, their civic engagement, and the great sheaves of documentation generated by the disposal of their large estates.

According to Goodspeed's History of Tennessee--and supported by relevant documentation--the Penningtons were among Lawrence County's first white settlers shortly after the U.S. government paid the Chickasaw Indians around two cents an acre for the region in 1816. The four Pennington brothers, along with their father Jacob, owned thousands of acres of territory along the Buffalo River near the modern community of Henryville. Moses built the county's first watermill and distillery. 

Lawrence County's court records also indicate that Moses was no stranger to trouble with the law. In 1818, Isaac and Moses plead guilty to the charge of selling liquor without a license (the Dukes of Henryville?). No doubt these spirits were made at Moses's distillery. Moses was brought to court on another charge of bootlegging a year later, but contested it, and was found not guilty.

The record of Isaac and Moses Pennington's indictment for bootlegging.
Lawrence County, Tennessee Archives

The Penningtons were mostly literate, comparatively wealthy, and industrious, their harsh frontier environment notwithstanding.

When Isaac died many years later, his estate included promissory notes from dozens of local people. These notes were a normal part of everyday life for the period. With no banks in close proximity, notes supplied an easy way to keep track of indebtedness. Unfortunately, we have no such inventory for Moses Pennington's estate, but it would not have been out of character for a man of his means to hold several such notes. And so it is not surprising that, in the autumn of 1822, Moses loaned $12.75 to Lawrence County's most famous founding father, the one and only David Crockett.

David Crockett

It's also not surprising that Crockett was in need of funds at the time. In that season of his life, Crockett was habitually short on cash. A disastrous flood of Shoal Creek in September 1821 had destroyed Crockett's mill and distillery, and Crockett's operation had been built almost completely with borrowed money. With his industry destroyed and his prospects for commercial success dashed, Crockett's creditors had no choice but to take him to court to demand payment.

Facing dissolution, Crockett liquidated his landholdings in Lawrence County and moved west. And apparently--if Henry's letter to Polk is to be believed--he borrowed $12.75 from my 5x-great-uncle, Moses Pennington not long after.

Moses, himself, was dead by 1826. His estate was sold and the assets distributed by the fall of that year. If the debt was legitimate, the most likely scenario of how William Henry came to own Crockett's debt to Moses was that he bought it from Moses's estate. Apparently knowing no other way to exact payment for the debt, Henry sent the long-overdue note to Crockett's fellow-Congressman from Tennessee, James K. Polk.

The date of the note raises several questions.

Indeed, the date of the note is the only detail that casts its authenticity in a dubious light.

Was Crockett in Lawrence County in late October 1822, or perhaps was Moses for some reason in Carroll County? We know from extant court records that Crockett was physically present in his new Carroll County home by September 9, and that he was again physically present in Carroll County in early December of that year. Crockett was prone to go on long-range hunting trips in the fall, after his corn had been harvested, but it is doubtful that he would go back to Lawrence County for such a trip, when  by his own admission, "game was plenty of almost every kind" in his new West Tennessee home.

While the circumstances surrounding the date of the note do somewhat muddy the waters of this fascinating story, there is little doubt that Crockett and Pennington knew each other—court records indicate that Crockett was present as a Justice of the Peace during some of Moses’s court appearances—and there is little doubt that Moses could have loaned money during a period when Crockett desperately needed it.

It is interesting to note that Crockett’s autobiography names a "young man named Abram Henry" as one of his companions on his initial scouting trip to his new West Tennessee home.  Local lore also says that Henryville, the community where the Pennington family initially settled, was so-named because the first postmaster of the village was a man named Henry. No doubt there is something to all of these connections that adds a further thread of legitimacy to the 1828 letter.

Whether Polk exacted payment from Crockett or not is a mystery. But if you are a descendant of Crockett and would like to settle up (with 200 years of interest, of course), I accept PayPal.

Some Gave All: Reflections at the Grave of Private Throgmorton

I have one ancestor who died wearing the uniform. John C. Throgmorton was my 4x-great-grandfather. Although born and raised in Tennessee, he joined the Union army in 1863.

His son-in-law William Riley (my 3x-great-grandfather) had been serving in the Confederate army for two years when John enlisted, as had many of his friends and neighbors from northern Wayne County. There was a very real risk that the two could have faced each other on the battlefield. It makes you wonder what John’s daughter Rebecca—William’s wife of less than three years—thought of it all.

In the autumn of 1864, Throgmorton was captured by Confederate cavalrymen of Biffle’s regiment near Hampshire, Tennessee. In a twist of fate, another 3x-great-grandfather, Milas Glenn Alley, was serving with Biffle’s Regiment at the time of Throgmorton’s capture. Milas could have been present or even participated in the capture, and although the connection would have meant nothing to either man at the time, Milas’s yet-unborn son would marry Throgmorton’s similarly yet-unborn granddaughter some thirty years later.

Throgmorton spent the remainder of the war in the prison camp on the Cahaba River, near Selma, Alabama, where he contracted dysentery. When the war ended, he was sent first to Vicksburg, then on to Nashville, and was probably aboard one of the steam ships just ahead of the ill-fated ‘Sultana.’

Indeed, many years later, a rumor persisted among his descendants that he had perished aboard the ‘Sultana’ when that ship exploded on the Mississippi River, killing many of Throgmorton’s comrades.

He died of acute dysentery at Cumberland General Hospital Nashville in July 1865 and is buried in the Nashville National Military Cemetery.

John C. Throgmorton was 45 years old when he died. He left behind a widow and twelve children, seven of whom were under the age of 14. The youngest was barely 2 years old at the time of his death.

Visiting his grave a few years ago was an emotional moment. I don’t understand why he chose to wear the blue coat instead of the gray. But to know how his life ended, to see those hundreds of rows of clean white stones, and to know that the very DNA I carry in my body was absorbed from his blood and bone into the dirt beneath my feet more than a century before I was born left me feeling greatly humbled.

I respect the great sacrifice that my ancestor made when he took up arms, and I always think of him on Memorial Day, and the other boys who never came marching home.

The cost of the freedoms we cherish is chiseled in millions of stones like this one, spanning 244 years and dotting the globe. How can we begin to thank them? How do you thank someone for paying a debt that you can never repay?

The Old Road

It was at about this time 154 years ago that one-third of the Army of Tennessee passed silently through these woods, on their way to Franklin and then Nashville.

If I have estimated correctly, the original route of Hood Road was here. Nathan Bedford Forrest, himself, lead an advance guard of cavalry through here consisting of men from Biffle’s regiment of Tennessee Cavalry. We know this because Biffle’s regiment engaged the enemy on November 22 on the Turnpike, and this was the route they most likely took to get there.

Among those men was likely a large contingent of men from Lawrence County leading the way through familiar territory, and among those local men very likely could have been my own 3x-great-grandfather, Milas Alley, who grew up just a few miles north of this place, near Henryville, and who fought in Biffle’s regiment from 1862 until its surrender in 1865.

If Milas was at this place, he could have never guessed that one day, in a much more peaceful time, his grandson Charlie Alley would buy this land, and that it would pass down to his descendants to this day, when his 4x-great-granddaughters would play and laugh in the leaves there while cattle grazed languidly nearby.

That day in 1864, my ancestor was a 23-year-old soldier fighting for a nation that had not long existed and that had but six months left to exist at all. He was riding through the frigid drifts of a freak November blizzard, no doubt wondering if that day would be the last of his short life, or if he would ever come this near his home again.

He did survive that day, and he went on to survive the war and six more decades beyond that. In fact, that day in 1864, he had not yet seen a third of the days he would see before death.

We have no clue what he thought when he passed through these woods, and we don’t know if he would have appreciated the serendipity that generations of his descendants yet unborn would come to live on and love this land that he passed through so briefly with his comrades that cold day.

I like to think that he would have grinned if he had known it—cold and hungry and scared though he may have been; and that he would grin still today if he could see my girls playing in the leaves there.