John Tyler

Source

• Born: 29 March 1790
• Birthplace: Greenway, Virginia
• Died: 18 January 1862
• Best Known As: President of the United States, 1841-1845

John Tyler had been a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, governor of Virginia and a member of the Senate before being tapped by the Whigs to be William Henry Harrison's running mate in 1840. The Whigs had chosen Tyler not for his policies, but to draw support from the south. A month into his term, Harrison died and Tyler was president. By the end of his term, neither the Whigs nor the Democrats supported him, and he chose not to run for re-election. He was succeeded by Democrat James K. Polk. At the time of his death, Tyler was a member of the Confederate Congress, in revolt against the United States.

First Lady Letitia Christian Tyler died in the White House in 1842. Two years later, at the age of 54, John Tyler married 24 year-old Julia Gardiner... Tyler had 15 children, the most fathered by any U.S. president... Tyler featured in Harrison's famous campaign slogan, "Tippecanoe and Tyler too!"

(b. Charles City County, Va., 29 Mar. 1790; d. Richmond, Va., 18 Jan. 1862), statesman and president of the United States, 1841–1845. After assuming the nation's highest office upon the death of President William Henry Harrison in 1841, John Tyler found himself locked in a political struggle with his own Whig party. Tyler's unexpected ascension to the presidency horrified Senate Whigs led by Kentucky's Henry Clay, who fundamentally opposed the Virginian's states' rights political philosophy (see State Sovereignty and States' Rights). As a result of this party split, Tyler was the least successful of all presidents in securing confirmation of his nominees to the Supreme Court.

When Justice Smith Thompson died in December 1843, Tyler nominated his secretary of the treasury, John C. Spencer, a lawyer from New York. A political enemy of Clay, Spencer failed to gain Senate confirmation; subsequently, Tyler nominated another capable New York attorney, Reuben H. Walworth. Before the Senate could act, however, Justice Henry Baldwin died in April 1844, creating a second vacancy on the Court. To this seat, Tyler hoped to appoint Pennsylvania's James Buchanan, but, in keeping with the president's luck, Buchanan declined the position. Tyler then nominated Philadelphia lawyer Edward King, Senate Whigs, however, sensing a victory in the fall presidential election, postponed in June the nominations of both Walworth and King.

Although the Whig Party failed to capture the presidency, Tyler's political position continued to wane in the final months of his term. He withdrew both of his nominations in January 1845 and instead proposed Samuel Nelson, chief justice of New York. After the Senate speedily confirmed this choice, Tyler attempted to fill the second vacancy with Philadelphia lawyer John Meredith Read. Political success, however, did not come easy to Tyler. Dealing the president a final defeat, the Senate adjourned without acting on the nomination, leaving the seat to the choice of Tyler's successor, James K. Polk.

See also Nominees, Rejection of.

— Timothy S. Huebner

Tyler, John (1790-1862)10th president of the United States (1841-1845). Born in Greenway, Virginia, in 1790, Tyler practiced law before entering politics. He served in the U.S. House of Representatives (1817-1821), as governor of Virginia (1825-1827), and in the U.S. Senate (1827-1836). In 1840, Tyler was elected Vice President on the Whig ticket. When President William Henry Harrison died in office on April 4, 1841, Tyler became President. He clashed with Senator Henry Clay, oversaw settlement of the boundary disputes with Great Britain, and ended the Second Seminole War in 1842. In December 1845, shortly before leaving office, Tyler engineered a joint resolution of Congress annexing Texas. He subsequently presided over the 1861 Virginia Peace Convention but eventually went with the secessionists. He was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives but died in 1862 before taking his seat.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

John Tyler (1790-1862), tenth president of the United States, was the first vice president to succeed to the presidency. His administration was marked by great conflict over the Texas question.

John Tyler was born on March 29, 1790, at Greenway Plantation in Charles City County, Va. His father, John Tyler, was governor of Virginia and a judge of the U.S. District Court. Young Tyler attended several preparatory schools and graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1807. He then studied law and was licensed to practice at the age of 19.

At 21 Tyler was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates; he served from 1811 to 1815. He subsequently was elected to the Virginia Council of State, to the U.S. House of Representatives, to the governorship of Virginia, and to the U.S. Senate (1827-1834). During these years Tyler emerged as one of the chief proponents of the states'-rights doctrine. He opposed internal improvements at Federal expense, a tariff to protect native industries, and a national banking system.

Like most politics of his day, Tyler's political activities were molded by the confused party situation existing during the 1820s and 1830s, as the long-dominant Jeffersonian Republican party dissolved. In the election of 1828 Tyler supported Andrew Jackson but found himself in opposition to Jackson soon after the inauguration. Tyler was against the President's threat to use force against South Carolina in order to enforce the tariff nullified in 1832. Tyler also attacked Jackson for what he considered to be his high-handed way of withdrawing governmental deposits from the Bank of the United States. Oddly, by alienating himself from the administration, Tyler found himself aligned with Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and the other Northern nationalists who had created the Whig party.

In 1839 the Whigs, whose presidential candidate was William Henry Harrison of Ohio, sought to balance the ticket with Tyler as their vice-presidential candidate. Because his views bore little relationship to those of the rest of his party, Tyler skillfully sidestepped the major issues during the campaign. Despite his presence on the ticket, the Whigs lost Virginia; however, they won nationally.

Harrison's death a month after his inauguration created a minor constitutional crisis and a major political one. Tyler was the first vice president to succeed to the presidency, and the question was raised as to whether he was actually president or just the vice president acting as president. Tyler established the precedent that the vice president succeeded to the powers and honors of the office as if he had been elected in his own right.

Although Tyler inherited governmental powers, he lost control of his party. As a misplaced Democrat within the Whig party, he had great difficulty with the congressional leaders of his party, especially Henry Clay. The split was most evident on three issues: the Bank of the United States, the tariff, and a proposal to distribute among the states the revenue secured from the sale of public lands. Tyler twice vetoed the charter passed by Congress for the creation of a Third Bank of the United States. He made several positive suggestions, however, for a substitute - including creation of a Bank of the District of Columbia with less power than that of the Second Bank of the United States. Tyler also vetoed a tariff and distribution bill that he contended violated the principles of the compromise tariff of 1833 (which had ended South Carolina's nullification threat).

Tyler's increasing isolation from the Whig party was hastened by the resignation on Sept. 11, 1841, of all the members of the Cabinet appointed by Harrison, except Secretary of State Daniel Webster. Webster remained until May 1843 in order to complete negotiations with England over a long-standing boundary dispute. Tyler's final Cabinet was composed mainly of Southerners, including John C. Calhoun as secretary of state.

The latter part of Tyler's tenure was dominated by the Texas question. After Texas won its independence from Mexico, the Jackson and Martin Van Buren administrations refrained from annexation because of the position of the North, which opposed incorporating more slave territory into the United States. Rejecting this opposition, Calhoun negotiated a treaty of annexation. This was turned down by the Senate in 1844. The question played a part in the election of 1844, after which the administration pushed a joint resolution through Congress providing for the incorporation of Texas. It was passed on the last day of Tyler's administration.

As Tyler had had little hope of renomination by the Whigs in 1844, he had sought to build a third party composed of dissident Democrats and Whigs but soon abandoned his efforts. Tyler remained active in national politics. He supported the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. After South Carolina seceded in 1860, Tyler participated in the Washington Peace Convention that met early in 1861. When Virginia seceded, he supported his state. He was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives, but he died on Jan. 18, 1862, a month before that body held its first session.

Further Reading

Several good works deal with Tyler's life: Oliver Perry Chitwood, John Tyler: Champion of the Old South (1939), is a sympathetic portrait by a major historian, and Robert Seager, And Tyler Too: A Biography of John and Julia Gardiner Tyler (1963), is a warm portrait, which also includes much social history of the period. A good account of the politics of Tyler's administration is in Robert J. Morgan, A Whig Embattled: The Presidency under John Tyler (1954). The campaign of 1840 is detailed in Robert G. Gunderson, The Log-cabin Campaign (1957), and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., History of American Presidential Elections, vol. 1 (1971). For biographies of persons who were important in the Tyler administration see Glyndon G. Van Deusen, The Life of Henry Clay (1937); Charles M. Wiltse, John C. Calhoun (3 vols., 1944-1951); and Richard N. Current, Daniel Webster and the Rise of National Conservatism (1955).

For more information on John Tyler, visit Britannica.com.

• Born: Mar. 29, 1790, Charles City County, Va.
• Political party: Democrat, elected on Whig ticket
• Education: College of William and Mary, B.A., 1807
• Military service: Virginia militia, 1813
• Previous government service: Virginia House of Delegates, 1811–16, 1823–25, 1838–40; U.S. House of Representatives, 1817–21; governor of Virginia, 1825–27; U.S. Senate, 1827–36; Vice President, 1841
• Succeeded to Presidency, 1841; served, 1841–45
• Died: Jan. 18, 1862, Richmond, Va. John Tyler was the first Vice President to succeed to the Presidency. He established the precedent that the successor becomes President and is not the Vice President “acting as President.” He also demonstrated that the constitutional prerogatives of the office can check and balance Congress, even when it is dominated by a party such as the Whigs, who insisted on their right to set national policy.

Tyler came from a family of wealthy Virginia plantation owners. He studied law under his father, practiced briefly, and went into politics. He served in the Virginia legislature and became governor in 1825, then U.S. senator in 1827. Tyler voted against the high tariffs of 1828 and 1832. He supported President Andrew Jackson's veto of internal improvements. But he broke with Jackson over South Carolina's nullification of, or decision not to enforce, federal tariffs, casting the only vote in the Senate against the Force Bill of 1833, which gave Jackson the power to use federal force to ensure compliance with the tariff. Tyler was instrumental in forging the compromise tariff of 1833, which ended the crisis. He voted against the re-chartering of the Second Bank of the United States and voted to uphold Jackson's veto of the bill, but he joined in the Senate censure of Jackson over the removal of federal deposits from the Bank. In 1836 he resigned his seat rather than adhere to the instructions of his state legislature to vote to expunge the resolution of censure, and he broke his connections with the Democratic party.

In 1836 Tyler ran for Vice President as a regional Whig candidate but lost to the Democratic ticket. In 1840 he was nominated for the Vice Presidency on the Whig ticket, along with General William Henry Harrison for President. Although opposed to the Bank, the Whigs were attracted to Tyler because they believed correctly that he could help carry Southern states.

President Harrison died of pneumonia within a month of taking the oath. John Tyler was in an awkward position. It was not clear from the wording of the Constitution whether the Vice President succeeded to the office of President or only exercised the “powers and duties” of the office, serving merely as acting President. Tyler took the Presidential oath and issued a statement to the American people couched in the form of an inaugural address. The House promptly passed a resolution referring to him as President, while the Senate defeated a resolution referring to him as Vice President. But much of the nation referred to Tyler as “His Accidency” and did not recognize him as President.

The Whig cabinet moved to take control from the President. At the first cabinet meeting, Secretary of State Daniel Webster told Tyler that his predecessor had settled questions by majority vote of the cabinet. Tyler responded that he alone would be responsible for his administration, and he called for the resignation of anyone who did not accept his view.

Tyler faced a dilemma: Should he allow the Whigs, led by Senator Henry Clay, to pass their economic program? Or should he pursue his own domestic program, which came much closer to the ideas of the Democrats? Tyler did not command a majority in Congress, and the Whigs proceeded to pass their own banking bill, which he vetoed twice. With the help of Democrats, Tyler's vetoes were sustained. The Whig cabinet resigned, and the Whig party issued a statement disassociating it-self from the Tyler administration. Whigs demanded that he resign and be succeeded by the president pro tempore of the Senate–a Whig who would hold office until a special election could be held. Tyler refused and made recess appointments of Democrats to his cabinet. Eventually, the Whigs passed a resolution of censure against Tyler, claiming that his use of the veto on policy grounds was unconstitutional.

Tyler was effective even though he was a President without a party. He resolved Dorr's Rebellion, a civil war between two political factions in Rhode Island. He reorganized the navy. A few days before he left office, Tyler won his most important victory: Congress admitted Texas to the Union.

Tyler was a political failure. He did not win the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1844. Historians generally rate him ineffective because of the deadlock in domestic policies. But he showed that a President without a shred of popular or congressional support could still exercise the power to stalemate congressional majorities.

After leaving the Presidency, Tyler returned to the Democratic party. He supported the Compromise of 1850 and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, both of which were designed to defuse slavery tensions and save the Union. In 1860 he spoke out against secession, believing a new compromise could be reached, and early in 1861 he sponsored the Richmond Convention, a last-ditch attempt to avert war between the regions. After the collapse of that effort, he urged Virginia to secede from the Union. He died on January 18, 1862, shortly after being elected to the Confederate House of Representatives.

See also Harrison, William Henry; Succession to the Presidency

Sources

• Robert J. Morgan, A Whig Embattled: The Presidency under John Tyler (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1954).
• Norma Lois Peterson, The Presidencies of William Henry Harrison and John Tyler (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1989)

(1790-1862), tenth president of the United States. Tyler was the first to ascend from the vice presidency through the accident of a chief executive's death. "His Accidency" was also only the second politician to switch parties before attaining the White House and the first to be driven from his party before departing Pennsylvania Avenue. Yet this partisan without a party and chief executive with almost no followers scored a presidential triumph so portentous as to make him one of the most important American presidents.

Tyler believed that these paradoxes stemmed from his devout adherence to states' rights. Born and bred to be a Virginia gentleman of the old school, he was educated at William and Mary, studied law, and swiftly ascended in state politics. He served successively in the Virginia House of Delegates, the U.S. House of Representatives, and the governorship of Virginia before being elected to the U.S. Senate in 1827.

Tyler's senatorial tenure coincided with Andrew Jackson's presidency. Tyler, seeking a less imperial president and a stronger states' rights policy, joined a small group of Jacksonians who deserted the fold and eventually became known as southern states' rights Whigs. In 1836, the Jacksonian-controlled Virginia legislature demanded and secured the recreant's senatorial resignation.

Tyler soon received compensation for his losses. In 1840, the Whig party, seeking a southern states' righter to balance William Henry Harrison's more nationalistic views, nominated Tyler as Harrison's running mate. Tyler, swept into subordinate office in the famous "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" campaign, became president when Harrison died a month after the inaugural.

His Accidency's greatest problem was that Whig nationalists, in command of the party, would take no commands from a states' righter like Tyler. Twice Henry Clay drove nationalistic bank bills through Congress. Twice Tyler vetoed them. The second time, the Whig congressional caucus drummed the president out of the party. Almost the entire cabinet then resigned.

But the seemingly powerless president still remained potent enough to take advantage of the emergence of the Texas annexation issue. In the early 1840s, both major parties' leaders opposed adding the Lone Star Republic as a slave state to the nation, fearing a possible war with Mexico and an escalation of North-South tension. But Tyler was afraid that Texas, if not annexed, would ally with England to secure protection against Mexico and would be forced to emancipate its relatively few slaves in order to seal the English bargain. Tyler, determined to protect the South and states' rights, secured an annexation treaty and demanded that southern states' righters come to his aid.

Southern Jacksonians answered the call. They forced the nomination of an annexationist, James K. Polk, at the Democratic convention and won the election of 1844. Although still lacking a two-thirds majority to ratify Tyler's treaty in the Senate, the Democrats admitted Texas to the Union by resolution (which required only simple majorities in House and Senate) in late February 1845. A few days later, Tyler retired to his Virginia plantation.

The ex-president could only watch as consequences of his Texas prize escalated: war with Mexico, the crisis of 1850, a decade of sectional controversy. Tyler would not serve his people or his creed again until 1861, when he was chairman of the failed peace convention during the secession crisis. He subsequently voted for disunion in the Virginia secession convention and was elected to the Confederate House of Representatives. But the old states' righter was not destined to fulfill this last responsibility. John Tyler, the accident who not-at-all-accidentally helped precipitate the near-destruction of a nation, died in 1862 before taking the oath to serve the Southern nation he had come to prefer.

Bibliography:

Oliver Perry Chitwood, John Tyler, Champion of the Old South (1939); Frederick Merk, Fruits of Propaganda in the Tyler Administration (1971).

Author:

William W. Freehling

See also Elections: 1840; Texas Revolution and Annexation; Whig Party.

Early Career

Educated at the College of William and Mary, he studied law under his father, John Tyler (1747–1813), governor of Virginia from 1808 to 1811, and was admitted (1809) to the bar. A state legislator (1811–16, 1823–25) and U.S. Representative (1817–21), Tyler was an unswerving states' rights Democrat. He joined the condemnation of Andrew Jackson's actions in Florida and voted against the Missouri Compromise.

Governor of Virginia (1825–27) and a U.S. Senator (1827–36), Tyler reluctantly supported Jackson as the least objectionable of the presidential candidates in 1828 and 1832. Although he did not approve South Carolina's nullification act, he violently opposed Jackson's measures against it (see force bill). The President's fiscal policies further alienated him, so that he was eventually drawn to the new Whig party, joining its states' rights Southern wing, which differed with many of the nationalistic policies associated with the Clay leadership. He resigned from the Senate rather than abide by the instructions of the Virginia legislature to vote for the motion to expunge Henry Clay's censure of Jackson from the records.

Presidency

In 1840, Tyler was chosen running mate to the Whig presidential candidate, William Henry Harrison, and they waged their victorious “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” campaign. One month after his inauguration Harrison died, and on Apr. 4, 1841, Tyler became the first Vice President to succeed to the presidency. His antipathy toward many Whig policies soon became apparent (he had never concealed it), and a rift developed between him and Henry Clay, the party leader.

After his second veto of a measure creating a national bank with branches in the states (on the grounds that it violated the constitutional rights of the states), his cabinet, except for Daniel Webster, resigned (Sept., 1841). Webster stayed on as Secretary of State until the negotiations for the Webster-Ashburton Treaty with the British were completed (May, 1843). Bitterly denounced by the Whigs and with few friends among the Democrats, Tyler became a President without a party.

Nevertheless he accomplished much toward the annexation of Texas. Abel P. Upshur, Webster's successor, was killed when a gun on the U.S.S. Princeton blew up, and John C. Calhoun continued Upshur's negotiations for a treaty with Texas. The treaty was rejected by the Senate. Tyler then supported a plan for a joint resolution to annex Texas and had the satisfaction of seeing it accepted by Texas just before he left office in 1845. The completion of annexation was brought about under James K. Polk, Tyler's Democratic successor.

Later Career

Tyler, nominated by a small Democratic faction, had withdrawn from the 1844 election. In Feb., 1861, he presided over the unsuccessful conference at Washington that attempted to find some last-minute solution to avert the Civil War. Later, he served in the provisional Confederate Congress and was elected to the permanent Confederate Congress, but he died before he could take his seat.

Bibliography

See L. G. Tyler (his son), Letters and Times of the Tylers (3 vol., 1884–96, repr. 1970); biography by O. P. Chitwood (1939, repr. 1964); studies by R. J. Morgan (1954) and N. L. Peterson (1989).

John Tyler served as the tenth president of the United States from 1841 to 1845. A political maverick and a proponent of states' rights, Tyler was the first vicepresident to succeed to the office because of the death of a president. Rejecting the concept of an acting president, Tyler established the right of the vice president to assume the powers and duties of president.

Tyler was born into a politically active family on March 29, 1790, in Greenway, Virginia. He graduated from the College of William and Mary in 1807 and was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1809. He began his political career in 1811 when he was elected as a member of the Democratic party to the Virginia legislature. In 1817 he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he remained until 1821. During his years in the House, he was a consistent supporter of states' rights, believing that the role of the federal government should be limited. Tyler, who owned slaves, objected to the Missouri Compromise of 1820, which placed restrictions on the expansion of slavery to new states.

In 1823 Tyler returned to the Virginia legislature, where he served two years. In 1825 he was elected governor of Virginia, and in 1827 he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

During his nine years in the Senate, Tyler opposed several of President AndrewJackson's policies though he and Jackson were both Democrats. In 1832 South Carolina issued its nullification policy, declaring its right as a state to reject federal tariff regulations. Jackson, in retaliation, initiated the Force Act of 1833 (4 Stat. 633), which permitted the president to use the military, if necessary, to collect tariff revenues. Tyler did not agree with South Carolina's actions, but he vehemently opposed Jackson's use of federal power to bring the state to heel.

Tyler lost the support of Virginia Democrats when he refused to reverse his 1834 vote of censure against Jackson for removing deposits from the Bank of the United States. In 1836, when the Virginia legislature gave him a direct order to change his vote, Tyler resigned from the Senate rather than obey. He returned to Virginia, where he was elected again to the Virginia legislature in 1838.

In the presidential election of 1840, the Whig party sought to broaden its northern political base by selecting a vice presidential candidate who could attract southern voters. Accordingly, Tyler was chosen to be the vice presidential candidate to run with William Henry Harrison, known as "Tippecanoe" from the battle where he had defeated Chief Tecumseh of the Shawnee tribe. In a campaign devoid of political ideas, the political slogan "Tippecanoe and Tyler too" popularized the two Whig candidates, who won the election.

The elderly Harrison died thirty-one days after becoming president, and Tyler assumed the presidency on April 4, 1841. As the first vice president to become president because of the death of the chief executive, Tyler rejected the idea that he serve as acting president. Though the U.S. Constitution was silent on the matter of succession, Tyler announced that he would assume the full powers and duties of the office, setting a precedent that would be followed by other vice presidents. (Procedures for presidential succession were added to the Constitution by the Twenty-fifth Amendment in 1967.)

Tyler's maverick streak, which had once stung the Democrats, soon offended the Whigs. Still a staunch supporter of states' rights, Tyler twice vetoed a Whig-sponsored act establishing a national bank. As a result, his entire cabinet resigned, with the exception of the secretary of state, Daniel Webster. For the remainder of his term, Tyler was a chief executive without a political party. Consequently, his accomplishments were few. He did approve the annexation of Texas and he signed the Preemption Act of 1841 (5 Stat. 453), which gave squatters on government land the right to buy 160 acres of land at the minimum auction price without competitive bidding.

After leaving office in 1845, Tyler continued to defend states' rights. In 1861, before the outbreak of the Civil War, Tyler directed the Washington conference, which was convened in a final attempt to avert war. When that meeting failed, Tyler favored secession and was elected as a member of the Confederate Congress. He died on January 18, 1862, in Richmond, Virginia, however, before he could take his seat in the secessionist Congress. U