John Tyler

John Tyler (March 29, 1790 – January 18, 1862) was the tenth president of the United States, serving from 1841 to 1845, after briefly holding office as the tenth vice president in 1841. He was elected vice president on the 1840 Whig ticket with William Henry Harrison, succeeding to the presidency following Harrison's death 31 days after assuming office as president. Tyler was a stalwart supporter and advocate of states' rights, including regarding slavery, and he adopted nationalistic policies as president only when they did not infringe on the states' powers. His unexpected rise to the presidency posed a threat to the presidential ambitions of Senator Henry Clay and other Whig politicians and left Tyler estranged from both major political parties at the time: the Whigs and the Democrats. Tyler was born into a prominent slaveholding Virginia family. He became a national figure at a time of political upheaval. In the 1820s, the Democratic-Republican Party, at the time the nation's only political party, split into multiple factions. Initially a Jacksonian Democrat, Tyler opposed President Andrew Jackson during the nullification crisis as he saw Jackson's actions as infringing on states' rights and criticized Jackson's expansion of executive power during Jackson's veto on banks. This led Tyler to ally with the southern faction of the Whig Party. He served as a Virginia state legislator and governor, U.S. representative, and U.S. senator. Tyler was a regional Whig vice-presidential nominee in the 1836 presidential election, which Democrat Martin Van Buren won. He was the sole nominee on the 1840 Whig presidential ticket as William Henry Harrison's running mate. Under the campaign slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too", the Harrison–Tyler ticket defeated Van Buren. President Harrison died just one month after taking office, and Tyler became the first vice president to succeed to the presidency. Amid uncertainty as to whether a vice president succeeded a deceased president, or merely took on his duties, Tyler immediately took the presidential oath of office, setting the Tyler Precedent. He signed into law some of the Whig-controlled Congress's bills, but he was a strict constructionist and vetoed the party's bills to create a national bank and raise tariff rates. He believed that the president, rather than Congress, should set policy, and sought to bypass the Whig establishment led by Henry Clay. Almost all of Tyler's cabinet resigned shortly into his term, and the Whigs expelled him from the party and dubbed him "His Accidency". Tyler was the first president to have his veto of legislation overridden by Congress. He faced a stalemate on domestic policy, though had some foreign-policy achievements, including the Webster–Ashburton Treaty with Britain and the Treaty of Wanghia with China. Tyler believed in manifest destiny and saw the annexation of Texas as economically and internationally advantageous to the United States, signing a bill to offer Texas statehood just before leaving office. He initially ran for re-election under the banner of the Tyler Party in 1844 before withdrawing and endorsing Democrat James K. Polk, who also supported annexing Texas and defeated Clay in the election. When the American Civil War began in 1861, Tyler at first supported the Peace Conference. After it failed, he sided with the Confederacy. He presided over the opening of the Virginia Secession Convention and served as a member of the Provisional Congress of the Confederate States. Tyler subsequently won election to the Confederate House of Representatives but died before it assembled. Some scholars have praised his political influence, but historians have generally put him in or very near to the bottom quartile when ranking U.S. presidents. Tyler is praised for helping in the creation of the Webster–Ashburton Treaty, which peacefully settled the border between Maine and Canada. He also helped in stopping African slave trafficking, which was made illegal under the administration of Thomas Jefferson. In the 21st century, Tyler is seldom remembered when in comparison to other presidents and maintains only a limited presence in American cultural memory. ### Early life John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790, to a prominent slave-owning Virginia family. Tyler hailed from Charles City County, Virginia, and was descended from the First Families of Virginia. The Tyler family traced its lineage to English settlers and 17th-century colonial Williamsburg. His father, John Tyler Sr., commonly known as Judge Tyler, was a personal and political friend and college roommate of Thomas Jefferson and served in the Virginia House of Delegates alongside Benjamin Harrison V, father of William Henry Harrison. The elder Tyler served four years as Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates before becoming a state court judge and later governor of Virginia and a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia at Richmond. His wife, Mary Marot (Armistead), was the daughter of prominent New Kent County plantation owner and one-term delegate, Robert Booth Armistead. She died of a stroke in 1797 when her son John was seven years old. With his two brothers and five sisters, Tyler was reared on Greenway Plantation, a 1,200-acre (5 km2) estate with a six-room manor house his father had built. Enslaved labor tended various crops, including wheat, corn and tobacco. Judge Tyler paid high wages for tutors who challenged his children academically. Tyler was of frail health, thin and prone to diarrhea. At age 12, he continued a Tyler family tradition and entered the preparatory branch of the College of William and Mary. Tyler graduated from the school's collegiate branch in 1807, at age 17. Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations helped form his economic views, and he acquired a lifelong love of William Shakespeare. Bishop James Madison, the college's president, served as a second father and mentor to Tyler. After graduation, Tyler read the law with his father, then a state judge, and later with Edmund Randolph, former United States Attorney General. ### Presidency Harrison's death in office was an unprecedented event that caused considerable uncertainty about presidential succession. Article II, Section 1, Clause 6 of the United States Constitution, which governed intra-term presidential succession at the time (now superseded by the Twenty-fifth Amendment), states: In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President .... Interpreting this Constitutional prescription led to the question of whether the actual office of president devolved upon Tyler, or merely its powers and duties. The Cabinet met within an hour of Harrison's death and, according to a later account, determined that Tyler would be "vice-president acting president". However, Tyler firmly and decisively asserted that the Constitution gave him the full and unqualified powers of the office. Accordingly, he had himself sworn in immediately as president, moved into the White House and assumed full presidential powers. This set the Tyler Precedent for an orderly transfer of power following a president's death, though it was not codified until the passage of the 25th Amendment in 1967. Judge William Cranch administered the presidential oath in Tyler's hotel room. Tyler considered the oath redundant to his oath as vice president, but wished to quell any doubt over his accession. When he took office, Tyler, at 51, became the youngest president to that point. His record was in turn surpassed by his immediate successor James K. Polk, who took office at age 49. "Fearing that he would alienate Harrison's supporters, Tyler decided to keep Harrison's entire cabinet even though several members were openly hostile to him and resented his assumption of the office." At his first cabinet meeting, Webster informed him of Harrison's practice of making policy by a majority vote. (This was a dubious assertion, since Harrison had held few cabinet meetings and had boldly asserted his authority over the cabinet in at least one.) The Cabinet fully expected the new president to continue this practice. Tyler was astounded and immediately corrected them: I beg your pardon, gentlemen; I am very glad to have in my Cabinet such able statesmen as you have proved yourselves to be. And I shall be pleased to avail myself of your counsel and advice. But I can never consent to being dictated to as to what I shall or shall not do. I, as president, shall be responsible for my administration. I hope to have your hearty co-operation in carrying out its measures. So long as you see fit to do this, I shall be glad to have you with me. When you think otherwise, your resignations will be accepted. Tyler delivered an informal written inaugural address to the Congress on April 9, in which he reasserted his belief in fundamental tenets of Jeffersonian democracy and limited federal power. Tyler's claim to be president was not immediately accepted by opposition members of Congress such as John Quincy Adams, who felt that Tyler should be a caretaker under the title of "acting president", or remain vice president in name. Among those who questioned Tyler's authority was Clay, who had planned to be…