John Tyler

John Tyler: The Precedent Nobody Wanted

William Henry Harrison died of pneumonia on 4 April 1841, a few weeks into his term, and the Constitution said nothing clear about what came next. Two days later his vice president took the oath and declared himself President of the United States — not acting president, not caretaker. Congress argued. Tyler won. Every subsequent succession in American history runs through that decision, made by a fifty-one-year-old Virginian whose opponents immediately christened him "His Accidency."

The Judge's Son

Tyler was born in 1790 into a Virginia family whose lineage in the colony ran back to the 1650s. His father, Judge John Tyler, was a close friend of Thomas Jefferson and a governor of Virginia. At twelve the boy entered the preparatory branch of the College of William and Mary, moved up to the collegiate programme three years later, and graduated at seventeen in 1807.

He read law under his father, was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1809, and joined an elite firm headed by Edmund Randolph, the first attorney general of the United States. After two years of practice he entered the Virginia House of Delegates at twenty-one, where he made his name leading the opposition to the Bank of the United States — a position he would still hold, immovably, thirty years later in the White House. He married Letitia Christian, and on his father's death inherited substantial property and enslaved people.

The Man Who Voted Alone

He went to the United States House after the War of 1812, was elected governor of Virginia by the state legislature in 1825, and moved on to the Senate. There he made himself the most conspicuous constitutional purist in Washington. In 1833 he cast the only vote in the Senate against Andrew Jackson's Force Act. In 1835, instructed by his legislature to vote for expunging the Senate's censure of Jackson, he resigned his seat rather than comply.

That kind of rigidity made him attractive to the anti-Jackson coalition. He was put forward for vice president on regional tickets in 1836 and took the Whig vice-presidential nomination in 1840 — a states'-rights Virginian added to a national ticket for balance, on the reliable assumption that vice presidents do not matter.

The Cabinet Walks Out

They discovered their error within months. Tyler's states'-rights convictions were entirely incompatible with the Whig programme, and when the party sent him bills to re-establish a national bank he vetoed them. In September 1841 every member of the cabinet except Secretary of State Daniel Webster resigned in protest — a manoeuvre engineered by Henry Clay to force Tyler out of office altogether. Tyler did not resign. He appointed a new cabinet and carried on.

By August 1842 congressional Whigs were openly discussing impeachment. Instead they did something without precedent: they drummed their own president out of the party. For the remainder of his term Tyler governed without a party at all, and on his final day in office Congress delivered the first override of a presidential veto in American history.

Texas

Abroad, where Clay's Whigs could not reach him, he did better. Webster negotiated the Webster-Ashburton Treaty of August 1842, which settled the long-running boundary disputes with Britain. And in February 1845 Congress passed the joint resolution annexing Texas; Tyler signed it before leaving office on 4 March. It was the single largest act of his presidency, and it enlarged the territory over which the argument about slavery would be fought.

Julia

His first wife, Letitia, had suffered a disabling stroke before he became president and died in 1842. On 26 June 1844 Tyler married Julia Gardiner, a twenty-three-year-old New Yorker less than half his age, with whom he had seven children — an extraordinary second family for a man already in his fifties.

A Confederate Death

He was not finished with public life. When the Union began breaking apart, Tyler presided over the Peace Conference that convened in Washington on 4 February 1861 — and then opposed its own final resolutions, judging that they failed to protect slaveholders' rights in the territories. The proposals died in the Senate.

He then sat as a delegate to Virginia's secession convention. On 4 April 1861 he voted against secession. After the bombardment of Fort Sumter he voted for it, on 17 April, and signed the Ordinance of Secession on 14 June. He was elected to the Provisional Confederate Congress and, in November 1861, to the Confederate House of Representatives. He died at the Ballard House hotel in Richmond on 18 January 1862, before he could take the seat, and was buried in Hollywood Cemetery — a former President of the United States who ended as a legislator of a government at war with it.

Why John Is Called a Genius

The case rests on a single act of constitutional reading, and it is stronger than it first appears. In April 1841 the succession clause was genuinely ambiguous, and much of Congress believed a vice president inherited the *powers* of the office without becoming president. Tyler concluded otherwise, acted before anyone could stop him, took the oath, occupied the house, and refused to answer to any other title. William Freehling, emeritus professor of humanities at the University of Kentucky, judges this his greatest contribution: Tyler established that a vice president assumes "a fully functioning and empowered presidency," and Freehling calls it "a hugely important precedent." Every president who has since reached the office over a coffin has done so on Tyler's reading. The quality involved is not scholarship but constitutional nerve — the ability to see, under enormous pressure and in a matter of hours, that an ambiguity will be settled by whoever acts first.

There is a second, accidental contribution. Tyler's isolation produced the first congressional override of a presidential veto, on his last day in office, which Freehling regards as "instrumental in establishing the critical system of inter-branch checks and balances." Tyler taught the American system both halves of the lesson: what a president can seize, and what Congress can take back.

The counter-case is decisive on the question of governing. Freehling's summary is the sharpest thing written about him: Tyler was "much better at taking over the presidency than at actually being President." He "refused to politically compromise his positions with Congress," and the result was a president abandoned by his cabinet, expelled from his party, threatened with impeachment and overridden by legislators. Freehling locates the deeper problem in ideology: by 1841 Tyler was a "states' rights championing, slave-owning plantation aristocrat" in a country moving steadily towards nationalism. The end of his life confirms the diagnosis. He died a Confederate congressman. Historians do not rank him a success, and the honest verdict is that his genius lasted about forty-eight hours and shaped the office for two centuries.

Legacy

Tyler's name attaches to two permanent things: the Texas annexation resolution, which enlarged the country and sharpened the crisis that destroyed it, and the succession precedent, which every American government since has quietly relied on. Both were the work of a man with no party, no majority and no allies — which is either the definition of principle or the definition of futility, depending on which of his decisions you are looking at.

Achievements

• President of the United States (1841–1845)
• United States representative (1816–1821)
• Vice President of the United States (1841–1841)
• Governor of Virginia (1825–1827)
• Educated at College of William & Mary