“I know nothing, by experience, of party discipline. I would rather be a raccoon-dog, and belong to a Negro in the forest, than to belong to any party, further than to do justice to all, and to promote the interests of my country. The time will and must come, when honesty will receive its reward, and when the people of this nation will be brought to a sense of their duty, and will pause and reflect how much it cost us to redeem ourselves from the government of one man.”
David Crockett, after his electoral defeat in 1830, as quoted in David Crockett: His Life and Adventures (1875), by John Stevens Cabot Abbott, p. 294.