1A Restless ManFew members of the local gentry in early nineteenth-century Kentucky would have denied that the Crittendens of Woodford County were one of the most distinguished and reputable families in the Bluegrass State. The family patriarch—John Crittenden, a major under George Washington during the American Revolution—had first come to Kentucky on a surveying expedition led by George Rogers Clark. Liking what he saw, he returned after the war to settle and start a family near Versailles, on a 2,814-acre land grant awarded him for his faithful service in the Continental Army. True, some skeptics might have questioned the Crittenden clan’s extravagant genealogical claims tracing the family’s roots back to William the Conqueror, Edward I of England, and a handful of Scottish kings. But certainly the more recent exemplars of the lineage were accomplished enough, the most prominent being John Sr.’s eldest son, John Jordon Crittenden, a lawyer who would go on to become governor of Kentucky, U.S. attorney general, and to serve terms in both houses of Congress. He would even be talked about as a potential candidate for president of the United States.
And yet there was something reckless about the Crittendens, something spendthrift and extravagant, at least about the Lexington-based branch into which Alexander Parker Crittenden was born on January 4, 1816. His father, Thomas T. Crittenden (younger brother of the more famous John J.), was a notable lawyer and politician in his own right, ultimately attaining the position of Kentucky’s secretary of state. But he had a weakness for financial speculation, and when he died in 1832, at the age of forty-four, he left his widow and five surviving children with liabilities totaling some $30,000 to $40,000 (a breathtaking sum at the time). Young Parker, as the eldest son was called then, thus grew up in a state of genteel poverty, the family’s pretensions to high living supported mainly by precarious amounts of debt. It was a condition that A. P. Crittenden would find himself in for much of the rest of his life.
As a boy, Parker led a rather nomadic life, cobbling together an education at various boarding schools in Ohio, Alabama, and Pennsylvania. He also carried on the family tradition of politics, though he showed early signs of a brash independence. Despite coming from a long line of Whigs, he campaigned in 1828 for Andrew Jackson, the quintessential Southern Democrat, who returned the favor by securing the precocious red-headed teenager a place at West Point a few years later. But even at the military academy, Crittenden showed more spirit than was good for him. Caught up in some rebellious undergraduate prank, he and several of his cohort were arrested and expelled. When even his well-connected uncle John J.—a U.S. senator at the time—couldn’t get him reinstated, Parker took matters into his own hands. He went to see the president he had helped elect and pled his case. According to family lore, President Jackson listened to him politely and decided, “You are the kind of material we want in the army. You go back to West Point . . . There will be an order there to readmit you.”
Crittenden managed to complete his military training without further incident, but army life proved to be incompatible with his independent nature. He resigned his commission as a second lieutenant less than three months after graduation in 1836, then worked briefly as an assistant railroad engineer before deciding to pursue the law. Now in his early twenties, he also decided that it was time to start looking for a wife. One of his close friends from West Point, Marlborough Churchill, wrote to him in January 1837 about a young niece of his named Clara Jones, Kentucky-born but now living with her parents and nine siblings in Charleston, Virginia. “I have spoken of you to her, [and] have sounded your praises so effectually . . . that she is dying of anxiety to see you, your red head . . . notwithstanding.” Crittenden lost no time in traveling from Lexington to Charleston for a visit, and was instantly taken with the handsome, intelligent, and exuberantly talkative sixteen-year-old. By March he was sending her unabashed love letters. “Imagine all the affection you have ever felt for Father, Mother & relatives concentrated into one absorbing passion,” he wrote, “and you would have some faint conception of the fervor of my attachment . . . You have so completely taken possession of my mind and feelings as to exclude all other objects.”
Very soon he was pushing for an engagement, though Clara was hesitant at first. She claimed to be unsure whether she really loved him, or if her feelings might simply be esteem and respect. According to her uncle Marlborough, she also had misgivings about her suitor’s rather unprepossessing looks (apparently Parker’s red hair was an issue after all). But Crittenden was persistent. In his frequent letters to her, he spoke about his boredom with the social life of Kentucky and his intention to one day find someplace else where he could put down roots and become a rich and prominent man. Her “poor lovesick swain” also tried to amuse her with frequent jokes (“Knowing you are fond of mint juleps, I drank several for us”). And in an attempt to make her jealous, he would even drop hints that he was flirting with a certain attractive cousin of his—though he’d then hastily reassure her that “he never has and never will worship any but his own sweet Clara.” Eventually the target of all of this playful wooing allowed herself to be won over. And so, despite the fact that Crittenden was still hopelessly far from paying off his late father’s debts, the two got married in Virginia on April 24, 1838.
Not long after the wedding, Crittenden took leave of his new wife to scope out prospects in the newly independent republic of Texas. Having broken away from Mexico just two years earlier, this still-remote place was actively trying to attract population by offering land grants to all comers, and it was therefore being flooded by eager immigrants from all over the United States and Europe (especially Germany). For someone like Crittenden, Texas seemed to offer an ideal opportunity to get his career on track and start paying off his debts. “I want to become a great statesman, a great Financier,” he confessed to a friend at this time. And so he decided to study law with his eldest sister’s husband, Tod Robinson, who had moved to the Galveston area sometime before. By late 1839, Crittenden had already passed the Texas bar and was ready to summon his wife and brand-new daughter to join him there. Clara’s mother vehemently opposed the young family’s removal to such a rough and unformed place—“where there is neither law nor gospel”—and Clara herself likely had some trepidation, given the daily possibility of havoc from displaced Mexicans who still regarded the territory as theirs. But she dutifully followed her new husband south. The Crittendens settled in the town of Brazoria, just south of Houston, where A.P., as he was now known, attempted to establish himself as a lawyer. Meanwhile, Clara took on the task of making a home for what would eventually be fourteen children (though only eight would survive to adulthood).
It was not an easy life. Practicing law in the rugged new republic proved anything but lucrative, even for someone as well connected as John J. Crittenden’s nephew. Despite getting help from some old family friends like Kentucky ex-congressman James Love, who tried to procure for him a diplomatic post in Austin, Crittenden struggled to support his rapidly growing family. “Money, you may recollect, was rather scarce when you left [here],” he wrote in late 1840 to his friend Albert Sidney Johnston (later an important Confederate Army general) after the latter had moved away from Texas. “It is now more so. Business has not recommenced, nor will it for a year or two.” Even so, the young lawyer tried to remain optimistic, playing chess by mail with Johnston and sending him amusing accounts of the vagaries of Texas politics.
The Crittendens went on in this manner for almost ten years. A.P. and Clara had their share of marital difficulties—by his own admission, he could be surly and impatient with her, while she was not above complaining ceaselessly about the discomforts of their frugal and spartan life on the prairie. Even so, the discord doesn’t seem to have harmed their ability to produce offspring.
But then, early in 1849, news of the California gold strike finally reached Texas (by now a part of the United States). This was a time when many Americans were already on the move, emigrating west into the vast new territories just recently annexed to the United States after the Mexican War and the signing of the Oregon Treaty with England. The discovery of gold in the Sierra Nevada foothills, however, quickly turned that steady stream into a surging tidal wave, luring characters of all kinds to California with the promise of adventure and easy riches in the goldfields. These opportunists quickly became known as “forty-niners,” after the year in which so many of them headed west.
Copyright © 2025 by Gary Krist. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
