John Tyler
John Tyler 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 and education
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, 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 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.
Planter and lawyer
Tyler was admitted to the Virginia bar at the age of 19. By this time, his father was governor of Virginia, and Tyler started a legal practice in Richmond, the state capital. According to the 1810 federal census, one "John Tyler" owned eight slaves in Richmond, and possibly five slaves in adjoining Henrico County, and possibly 26 slaves in Charles City County.In 1813, the year of his father's death, the younger Tyler purchased Woodburn plantation, where he lived until 1821. As of 1820, Tyler owned 24 enslaved persons at Woodburn, after having inherited 13 enslaved persons from his father, although only eight were listed as engaged in agriculture in that census.
Political rise
Start in Virginia politics
In 1811, at age 21, Tyler was elected to represent Charles City County in the House of Delegates. He served five successive one-year terms. As a state legislator, Tyler sat on the Courts and Justice Committee. His defining positions were on display by the end of his first term in 1811—strong, staunch support of states' rights and opposition to a national bank. He joined fellow legislator Benjamin W. Leigh in supporting the censure of U.S. senators William Branch Giles and Richard Brent of Virginia who had, against the Virginia legislature's instructions, voted for the recharter of the First Bank of the United States.War of 1812
Like most Southern Americans of his day, Tyler was anti-British, and at the onset of the War of 1812, he urged support for military action in a speech to the House of Delegates. After the British capture of Hampton, Virginia, in the summer of 1813, Tyler eagerly organized a militia company, the Charles City Rifles, to defend Richmond, which he commanded with the rank of captain. No attack came, and he dissolved the company two months later. For his military service, Tyler received a land grant near what later became Sioux City, Iowa.When his father died in 1813, Tyler inherited 13 slaves along with his father's plantation. In 1816, he resigned his legislative seat to serve on the Governor's Council of State, a group of eight advisers elected by the General Assembly.
U.S. House of Representatives
The death of U.S. Representative John Clopton in September 1816 created a vacancy in Virginia's 23rd congressional district. Tyler sought the seat, as did his friend and political ally Andrew Stevenson. Since the two men were politically alike, the race was, for the most part, a popularity contest. Tyler's political connections and campaigning skills narrowly won him the election. He was sworn into the Fourteenth Congress on December 17, 1816, to serve as a Democratic-Republican, the major political party in the Era of Good Feelings.While the Democratic-Republicans had supported states' rights, many members urged a stronger central government in the wake of the War of 1812. A majority in Congress wanted to see the federal government help to fund internal improvements such as ports and roadways. Tyler held fast to his strict constructionist beliefs, rejecting such proposals on constitutional and personal grounds. He believed each state should construct necessary projects within its borders using locally generated funds. Virginia was not "in so poor a condition as to require a charitable donation from Congress", he contended. He was chosen to participate in an audit of the Second Bank of the United States in 1818 as part of a five-man committee, and was appalled by the corruption which he perceived within the bank. He argued for the revocation of the bank charter, although Congress rejected any such proposal. His first clash with General Andrew Jackson followed Jackson's 1818 invasion of Florida during the First Seminole War. While praising Jackson's character, Tyler condemned him as overzealous for the execution of two British subjects. Tyler was elected for a full term without opposition in early 1819.
The major issue of the Sixteenth Congress was whether Missouri should be admitted to the Union and whether slavery would be permitted in the new state. Acknowledging the ills of slavery, he hoped that by letting it expand, there would be fewer slaves in the East as slaves and masters journeyed west, making it feasible to consider abolishing the institution in Virginia. Thus, slavery would be abolished through the action of individual states as the practice became rare, as had been done in some Northern states. Tyler believed that Congress did not have the power to regulate slavery and that admitting states based on whether they were slave or free was a recipe for sectional conflict. The Missouri Compromise was thus enacted without his support. It admitted Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free one, and it also forbade slavery in states formed from the northern part of the territories. Throughout his time in Congress, he voted against bills that would restrict slavery in the territories.
Tyler declined to seek renomination in late 1820 due to frequently ill health. He privately acknowledged his dissatisfaction with the position, as his opposing votes were largely symbolic and did little to change the political culture in Washington. Tyler also observed that funding his children's education would be difficult on a congressman's low salary. He left office on March 3, 1821, endorsing his former opponent Stevenson for the seat, and returned to private law practice full-time.