Far from being an overly independent congressman who defied the president routinely to curry favor with opposition figures, Crockett proved to be an enthusiastic Jacksonian. He took up some of the more controversial and unorthodox Jacksonian causes. Crockett proposed abolishing the United States Military Academy at West Point, which he accused of being an institution that did little more than babysit the sons of wealthy Americans. He disliked giving pensions to prominent military officers’ families, which he believed Congress could not lawfully do. Insofar as the Jacksonians were undermining a debased elite, Crockett saw them as agents of constitutional government.
Yet these years of relative support for Jackson, were not enough to keep Crockett in the good graces of Jacksonian voters or even the president himself. No position of Crockett’s enraged Jackson, and Jacksonians broadly, more than his vote against the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Jackson had been pushing the bill as a signature piece of legislation that he hoped would, in his words, save Indian nations by getting them out of the way of white settlement. Crockett loathed the act and campaigned against it, even as he ensured his constituents he bore no ill will towards the president. Crockett maintained that the law was simply unjust, and it was his duty to oppose it. His constituents punished him by electing his opponent in the 1830 midterms, although they sent him back to Washington as their congressman two years later.
By 1833, Crockett—despite remaining a committed political Jacksonian—openly defied Jackson, particularly because of what he believed was the president’s unconstitutional veto of the Bank of the United States. Crockett never embraced the bank, and was not a “bank man,” but he was convinced that the Bank’s charter was constitutional and that Jackson acted outside of his authority when he vetoed its recharter in 1832. Jackson’s veto convinced Crockett “that Old Hickory had become a tyrant, abetted now by having Van Buren as vice-president, obviously the hand-chosen successor.” During the 1834 congressional canvas, “Crockett spoke out strongly for rechartering the bank and holding onto its deposits,” and accused Jackson “of seeking to close the bank in order to take control of the deposits himself to use for the purpose of ensuring Van Buren’s succession.” The United States, he declared, could “be a nation of laws or have a despot.” Crockett, still actively supporting the bulk of the Jacksonian political program, nonetheless answered Jacksonian newspapermen who questioned his intelligence by mocking Jackson. “It is objected to me that I want learning. Look to your President. Look to your President I say. What does he know?”