It is to be regretted that there was no reporter present to transmit to us that speech.  It must have been a peculiar performance.  It certainly added much to Crockett’s reputation as an able man and an orator.  When the election came, both father and son were badly beaten.  Soon after, a committee waited upon Crockett, soliciting him to stand as candidate for the State Legislature, to represent the two counties of Lawrence and Hickman.

Crockett was beginning to be ambitious.  He consented.  But he had already engaged to take a drove of horses from Central Tennessee to the lower part of North Carolina.  This was a long journey, and going and coming would take three months.  He set out early in March, 1821.  Upon his return in June, he commenced with all zeal his electioneering campaign.  Characteristically he says: 

“It was a bran-fire new business to me.  It now became necessary that I should tell the people something about the Government, and an eternal sight of other things that I know’d nothing more about than I did about Latin, and law, and such things as that.  I have said before, that in those days none of us called General Jackson the Government.  But I know’d so little about it that if any one had told me that he was the Government, I should have believed it; for I had never read even a newspaper in my life, or anything else on the subject.”

Lawrence County bounded Giles County on the west.  Just north of Lawrence came Hickman County.  Crockett first directed his steps to Hickman County, to engage in his “bran-fire” new work of electioneering for himself as a candidate for the Legislature.  What ensued cannot be more graphically told than in Crockett’s own language: 

“Here they told me that they wanted to move their town nearer to the centre of the county, and I must come out in favor of it.  There’s no devil if I know’d what this meant, or how the town was to be moved.  And so I kept dark, going on the identical same plan that I now find is called non-committal.

“About this time there was a great squirrel-hunt, on Duck River, which was among my people.  They were to hunt two days; then to meet and count the scalps, and have a big barbecue, and what might be called a tip-top country frolic.  The dinners and a general treat was all to be paid for by the party having taken the fewest scalps.  I joined one side, and got a gun ready for the hunt.  I killed a great many squirrels, and when we counted scalps my party was victorious.

“The company had everything to eat and drink that could be furnished in a new country; and much fun and good humor prevailed.  But before the regular frolic commenced, I was called on to make a speech as a candidate, which was a business I was as ignorant of as an outlandish negro.

“A public document I had never seen.  How to begin I couldn’t tell.  I made many apologies, and tried to get off, for I know’d I had a man to run against who could speak prime.  And I know’d, too that I wasn’t able to cut and thrust with him.  He was there, and knowing my ignorance as well as I did myself, he urged me to make a speech.  The truth is, he thought my being a candidate was a mere matter of sport, and didn’t think for a moment that he was in any danger from an ignorant back woods bear-hunter.